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hot-pot-based cuisine
Saturday, February 15 2020
To combat this morning's anticipated single-digit (Fahrenheit) cold, I'd kept a fire burning all night long, so this morning conditions in the living room were suitable for Saturday morning coffee right from the start. Eventually Gretchen braved the cold to take the dogs for their daily walk, and I went on a foray to the nearby white ash salvage where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile, bringing home one large piece of white ash, a smaller piece of the same, and a long narrow piece of skeletonized oak that I would have to cut in half to make it suitable for burning. I processed this wood in the only patch of snow-free yard, about ten feet north of the mound of pine cones atop the grave of Sally the Dog. I wasn't used to splitting wood here, so you can imagine my surprise when my maul encountered a chunk of bluestone. Happily, splitting mauls don't have to be particularly sharp to do their job.
Given that we'd eaten out last night and would be eating out tomorrow night, I didn't really expect to be eating out tonight, but when Gretchen asked me if I wanted to, I said, sure, let's do it. I thought maybe she had Yum Yum in mind, but no, she wanted to try out Super Bowl Cuisine, a Chinese restaurant we hadn't been to before near the site of the old Radio Shack in the Kingston Plaza (the place with the Ghettoford and Herzog's). From a distance, one wouldn't even know that Super Bowl Cuisine was a Chinese restaurant. The name suggested that it might actually be a sports bar with a big menu. Inside, the place is big and it has an odd vibe that suggested the way restaurants might actually be in contemporary China. There were none of the kitchy China-themed decorations, but there were lots of actual Chinese (or perhaps just east-Asian) customers. The setup was ideal for large groups to gather around large tables or booths for all-you-can-eat hot pot dinners. I don't know quite what that entails, but it seemed to involved lots of rolls of thinly-sliced well-marbled meats, eggs that appeared to still be in their shells, and noodles. But we weren't there for any of that. One of the words on the front window was "vegan," and sure enough they had a vegan section of the menu. I ordered the bok choy with mushrooms, and Gretchen ordered dried tofu mixed vegetables. We also ordered dumplings and a cold sesame noodle dish, all which came to a good bit more than we could eat. They didn't have much of a drink menu, but they did have Sapporo beer, so I ordered one of those. The presence of all the east-Asians, the apparent weirdness of the hot-pot-based meals, and the verbiage claiming authenticity had me convinced that this is how Chinese restaurants actually are, at least in some part of China. The only thing it really needed was the smell of burning plastic pumped in through the ventilation system. I thought my bok choy and mushrooms were excellent, and I ended up eating a fair amount of re-hydrated dried tofu, since Gretchen wasn't all that pleased with her main dish. Unlike DiBellas, though, she said she'd be happy to return.
Back at the house, we watched another Shark Tank, the one featuring the cold-weather underwear that all the sharks thought would be a good look as a stand-alone outfit.
Tonight I pretty much decided that the way to go with my outdoor weather station is to base it on a Raspberry Pi Zero W attached (via both USB and I2C) to an Adafruit Itsy Bitsy. The former has no analog inputs but can work as a stand-alone LAMP server, whereas the latter has lots of analog inputs and can be reconfigured just by changing a .py in its on-board 2 megabyte flash drive (something that can be done from the Raspberry Pi Zero W). The main thing to watch out for is to make sure the temperature sensor is isolated from both solar energy and the microcontrollers so that it doesn't end up measuring the heat given off by those.
Ramona looks on while a Neville-flavored "hygge's boson" is captured by a gretchon.
Demon-spawn Charles enjoys the fire.
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