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	WEEKEND COOKING RECAP AND OTHER MUSINGS Holy moses! It feels like I was cooking through the entire weekend. I was on my feet most of Saturday with groceries or food prep. Then again in the evening and Sunday morning, finishing up recipes and making more meals to eat in the days ahead. My fingers smell of garlic and the fridge is bursting. My tummy makes happy growls. It was a nice weekend for me to get back to the domestic chores I adore and enjoy alone. (Well, not totally alone! I had nice, brief interactions with shopkeeps, chats with the other inmates on IRC, and a small IRL experience with a friend.) Food aside, I also found time to faff around with some programming projects, print more lines for my notebook, read comics, and watch television. Below I've captured some more detail about some of these activities: first the cookery and then the nerdery. Ferments and other food ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I bought a box of tomatoes for five dollars. I'm not sure the weight, but it must have contained like thirty beautiful, juicy red orbs. Five whole doll hairs! Can you imagine? I also bought two pounds of garlic, a bag of cucumbers, melon, some onions, and parsley. It is good to have vegetables around! Why? They're good for me! And also: FERMENTS! I made four ferments this weekend (five if you count the sourdough that needed feedin'): - Kombuncha, with ginger and lemon - Tomato, as salsa and plain - Cauliflower, with parsley - Garlic, with garlic The garlic bears mentioning first because it was a long time in the making. The two pounds of garlic had to be separated clove from head, then peeled, then minced, then packed into a jar with 2% salt (and topped with 2% salt brine--this being possibly a mistake). The separating took about 10 minutes. The peeling took about 90 minutes, if memory serves. The mincing about an hour. The yield is a quarter of a gallon. Not much, but it's potent stuff, so totally worth the time. After six hours the garlic was already bubbly and frothy and beautiful!. After 24 hours (I'm writing this on a Monday) it has turned entirely blue! Rad! I am told this is the allicin forming in the garlic. It looks like a blue raspberry freezie! Or maybe some ancient blue mineral desposit!

	The salsa is entirely an experiment, and was very much a spontaneous decision. (FIVE DOLLARS!!!) I've never fermented tomatoes before, and I don't know what to expect in terms of time and/or difficulties. Anyways, with the tomatoes the jar contains green onion, long hot peppers, small green hot peppers, garlic (minced and ferrmented), red and sweet onion, and 3% salt. I used about half of the box of tomatoes, yielding three quarters of a gallon. Shit! What a haul! (There's also some leftover salty tomato brine that wouldn't fit anywhere. I expect I'll tip that into a tomato-based recipe like chili or harira.)

	I don't have pictures of the other ferments, but I did snag a picture of other food things for which I am proud to have cooked. The foccacia was made Saturday. I followed the Perfect Loaf foccacia recipe, except used 10 grams of instant yeast instead of the sourdough starter. It was topped with tomatoes, long hot peppers, sliced garlic, garden herbs (some of theme were bitter, lmao), and onion. No surprises, really. It's an easy bake (though a bit sticky to handly during the intermittent folds).

	Sunday's meal was jap chae! So yummy! The recipe is dead simple: make sweet potato noodles, set aside. Thiny slice vegetables of choice and briefly saute in a pan with garlic, oil. Make dressing of soy sauce, mirin/sugar, and white pepper. Combine noodles, vegetables, and sauce in a large bowl, or briefly in a pan. Eat hot or cold. Top with an egg if you like! Or bibimbap sauce! Whatever!

	Smart meters and usage data ---------------------------------------------------------------------- My energy utility company has gone and given everyone smart meters. What a stupid idea! Now I need to worry about another part of my life sucked away into some data centre god-knows-where, commodified into consumer research and marketing insights for god-knows-what, exfiltrated and sold in some back alley for god-knows-how much monopoly money... And I still need to pay the damn bills! Really, is this all necessary? Well, at least I'm going to have my fun with it. There is an online dashboard that shows me usage stats up to the last 48 hours (why it is not real time I don't know). I have figured out roughly how to automate my access from a shell to this website and its associated APIs. The process wasn't as straight forward as using cURL's `--user' option, but it wasn't that difficult either. There were a few gotchas that my hem got stuck on, but the path was easy to enough follow without a map. (The juicy details I'm witholding for another writing). So now I have an easy way to login and download my usage stats in JSON format. Next will be extracting and presenting the details in a more interesting (and possibly low-energy?) interface, just for the hell of it. ESP8266 and why do I even ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I ploughed about six hours into an attempt at a wake timer feature for my ESP8266 powered mailbox sensor. Basically, the device should periodically ping the server to say it's alive. This would be in addition to the messages triggered by hardware interrupts when the mailbox opens and closes. Unfortunately for me, this task was way out of my depth. First of all, I don't know the C language. Second, I don't know the Arduino platform. (Shit, what do I know?) So, surprise: the wake timer and hardware interrupts did not play nice together. Fuuuuuuck it! Well, it was not a total loss. I learned about the exception decoder for the ESP8266. But I could have mastered that tool in 30 minutes, and forgone the six hours of chasing my own tail. So I am left feeling a bit sour about this project and wondering why I even bother with C and Arduino. Yet, I know I'll hop over to another embedded project (I have many ideas) as soon as I have time. It would probably behoove me to soon abandon the ESP8266 for greener pastures. There's a Pico around here somewhere that I'm sure would yield a far more satisfactory experience for the likes of me, a programmer hack. The end until next weekend ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Well that's about all I have to write. Now I must regroup my limbs under the covers and sleep up for another week of work, work, work ahead. I'll be looking forward to completing some kinetic tasks like sewing and paper folding in my evenings. Saddly, I go tend to get sick of computer stuff during the week. So sewing is always a nice way to keep my brain buzzing. Anyways... thanks for reading!