Happy Thanksgiving

I am cooking a Thanksgiving feast again this year. Last year, I was in Japan, so I ate toxic fish with the nerve agents cut out by an overworked chef instead of cooking a Turkey. When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was at Grandma’s every year. We would play with the cousins and uncles and aunts, and Mom would help Grandma, and Granddad would tell stories about anything from fishing to the War in the Pacific, and we would eventually eat, and then play games or watch TV until we were too tired to do anything but sleep. After my Uncle died, my Grandparents moved farther away, and it was generally just our nuclear family at home until I finished college and headed off to make my way in the world and get as far from New York as possible. My first Thanksgiving away from family was 20 years ago, at the house of a guy I met in field camp who kindly took me in with a bunch of other recent arrivals to silicon valley. At the time I thought that was strange, but two years later I found myself cooking Lasagna in an apartment in Northeastern Brazil, with a woman who was kind of coming onto me but was the ex-wife of the guy I was working with and the ex-daughter in law of the people who were putting me up. My Portuguese was not really good enough to talk my way out of the trouble I somehow avoided, but a couple years later in Australia I met my wife-to-be at another Thanksgiving dinner hosted by another ex-pat PhD student from Arkansas. And somehow, over a decade and a half later, I have a family, a job I can ride my bike to, a house, and a wife who still miraculously puts up with me, despite my lifelong habit of biting off more that I can chew, not succeeding at anything, but somehow finding a continual series of third doors that miraculously allow me to avoid total failure. Despite my constant feelings of inadequacy and dread that I have wasted my potential and lost my way, I seem to somehow be doing OK. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I hope that you all have the same. Have a wonderful thanksgiving.

Solar energy summary

As I mentioned previously, we recently had a 2 kilowatt photovoltaic solar power system installed on the NW-facing roof of our house. Below is plotted the daily household use and solar generation for the first two weeks or so after we turned it on:



I should point out that we have a family of 4 living in a typical Canberra "ex-govvie" house, which has been extended to a still-modest size of ~145 square meters of single story, basement-free living space.

I would also like to point out that in the southern hemisphere, November is late spring, with lots of daylight- all that sunshine that the NH readers don't have right now.

There are a few interesting points here. Firstly, the increase in usage around day 11 for several days is a result of several days of stormy weather, which led us to use the electric dryer instead of the clothes line. Evidently the clothesline is worth about 2-3 kWh of power- a substantial portion of our usage.

Thanksgiving Dinner stands out like a sore thumb, with double the power usage. I was surprized at this, because I have a gas oven. However, the glowplug that keeps the flames lit obviously consumes a lot of power. I will keep my eyes open for a electricity-efficient gas fired oven when the time for replacement comes.

I also noticed that running high temperature dishwasher loads eats a lot of power as well. Does anyone else have any handy power saving tips? I'll use the most obvious one, and go to bed inst3ead of surfing the web. Good night.

Pie crust phase equilibria: update

Four years ago, I posted the basics on the phase equilibria of pie crust in this blog. A summation of that post, as well as an update, appears below:

With American Thanksgiving and Christmas rapidly approaching, the pie baking season is rapidly approaching. One of the most important, but least quantified, aspects of pie creation is the crustal composition. A simple ternary phase diagram for three-phase pie crust is presented below.

While the “traditional composition” point is plotted to scale, the positions and shapes of the curve are poorly constrained approximations. Lack of accurate thermodynamic data for the system precludes accurate prediction of these fields. It is the shapes and positions of the top two curves that is of paramount importance; anyone who reaches the butter-water two phase field should be banished from the kitchen.

As anyone with baking experience knows, the stability region for pie crust is a relatively small area on the wet side of the two phase flour + dough field. This field is generally approached by adding water to a flour/butter mixture, as is shown below.

Four years ago, I suggested the following approach:

However, if the approximated slopes shown above are correct, then a radical new approach to crustal formation might be advisable. By generating a flour-water mixture, and then adding butter, a wider range of valid crustal compositions should be achievable before exiting the edible portion of this phase diagram. This approach is shown below.

In hindsight, this was silly. There are two reasons. Firstly, accurately ganguing the initial water/flour mixture is difficult, as your starting composition is in the 2 phase flour water field. And secondly, this procedure generates a crust with the minimum possible butter, and butter is yummy. So this year, I will endeavor to explore the left hand side of the diagram. I suspect that the dough / slime boundary curves over a bi farther than is illustrated here.

Jam

Our home among the gum trees,
has lots of plum trees.
So I made jam. Dark is normal plum, orange is blood plum.

It passed the time while waiting for baby to come, and gave me something to do other than blog or write papers. Got a better way to procrastinate?

T-day 1 pm

Inside temperature 25C
Outside temperature 31C

T-day high noon

Inside temperature 24C
Outside temperature 29C

T-day 11 am

Forecast temperature 33C
Indside temperature 23C
Outside temperature ~27C

T-day 10 am

Forecast high: 33C
Inside temperature: 22C
Outside temperature: 24C

T-day 9:00 am

Forecast high: 33C
Inside temperature: 22C
Outside temperature: 22C

T-day 8 am

Forecast high: 33C (90F)
Kitchen temperature: 22C (72F)
Outside temperature 19C (66F)