OK, Here We Go – Sous Vide Steaks
First impressions – it’s bigger than I was expecting! Not quite as big around as a 12oz soda can, but close. It’s 15 inches long. It is simple to set up, just clamp it onto the side of a suitable pot, plug it in, and scroll the wheel to set the desired temperature.
The cord isn’t very long, so you’ll need to place it fairly close the outlet. (That cord trailing off the counter goes to something else.) Here I have a pair of rib steaks inside generic zip-lock bags. I’m not sure how much heat they can take but they handled the 129 degrees the device was set to. That’s right on the dividing line between rare and medium rare per the table here. I started with hot tap water so it didn’t take much time to come to heat. They spent nearly 3 hours in the water bath. I wanted to give them ample time, they say several hours more wouldn’t have made any difference.
Everything went well enough until it came time to sear the steak to finish it. I didn’t pat them dry with paper towels, and didn’t get the skillet hot enough. Lesson learned! 
Still, I can’t say that I wasted two steaks. They were pretty good, although maybe too fatty.
Gabe and Homer
I’ve been playing with that Prisma app on my Android phone, it isn’t much good on close-ups of food on a plate but when there are a couple of well defined objects in a photo it does some interesting things:
There is a crop function built into the app, but the different filters do all of the heavy lifting. There is a fair selection of them, I like some better than others but that’s a subjective thing. YMMV
I like the mosaic filter a lot.
This one, meh. I don’t know why it’s picking up red in the nose on Gabe.
I like this one pretty well.
Food Pr0n – Loaded Baked Potato
We had a little bit of that smoked pork and I was thinking about another sammich for dinner when I noticed a couple of small potatoes I had set out for a potato salad project. These are not twice baked, I zapped them in the microwave and then peeled the tops and half mashed them and added the sour cream, cheddar, and pork. They were finished in the toaster oven and then garnished.
Critter Cam
A hawk is just sitting there, ignored by a crow. I wish I knew what was going on. I think maybe the hawk tried for a capture of a bird or a squirrel and missed but is in no hurry to leave. I have no idea why the crow seems so nonchalant.
