Turkey Tests

March 16, 2009 – 2:56 pm

In conjunction with the baster, I am designing a site to be the baster’s home. It is going to be a fun, front-endy experience. I have always been too focused on the back end to either worry about or have time to address the front. I’ve decided to use the Scriptaculous JavaScript library as the animation engine, since a) I don’t know Flash and probably never will, and b) I want it to work on an iPhone.

I’ve been running some tests on various Scriptaculous animation functions using some placeholder images.The library is much easier and more fun to use than I anticipated. The tests are being conducted at uberbaster.com. Feel free to check in there to see how it’s coming along.

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Chicken Salad

March 15, 2009 – 10:40 pm

Well I couldn’t help myself. I roasted another bird. This time I made chicken salad. Another win for the baster.

Josh’s Chicken Salad

• 1 Josh’s Roasted Chicken, deboned and chopped
• 2 tbsp highly concentrated pan juice
• 3 small roasted potatoes, quartered
• 1 jar Kalamata olives, drained & sliced
• Pecorino Romano cheese, grated
• 1 28 ounce can diced tomatoes, drained
• Salt, pepper & olive oil
• Juice of 1/2 lemon

Mix ingredients and serve with Italian bread.

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Überbaster Tested and Proved

March 14, 2009 – 2:41 pm

I had a terrible nightmare last night. I was alone on the balcony of a cabin deep in the woods. Two 6-foot tall wild turkeys came to the door. I tried to hide but the next thing I knew the turkeys had jumped onto the balcony. They had blades attached to their wings. I tried to hide in a corner but a third turkey was there hiding, waiting. They drew their wings and began swinging viciously at me. I had only a shampoo bottle to defend myself. When I swung back at them, one bird sliced it in half. Luckily I woke up screaming before I was hacked to death by man-sized game birds.

It was a timely dream. Earlier in the evening turkeys all over the world sensed a strong foreboding; a new device that would threaten their population had come into existence and proven itself in practice. Such a device would send consumers back into supermarkets demanding anything they could baste. The device is the Überbaster, and it works.

The chicken I roasted was basted about 12 times on its journey to 165°. It really could not have been simpler to operate, though I need to work on a better way to attach the tube to the bird in the oven. The skewer worked, but a brace with at least another prong would keep it in place much better. The images indicate that the stock was distributed over the whole bird, though I can’t be entirely sure since the oven I used had no window.

The chicken was perfect. The skin was crispy and delicious. The meat was moist. It is at least as good as any chicken I have ever roasted, and it tasted better than chickens I’ve roasted in recent memory. I believe that keeping the oven door closed contributed greatly to the overall quality of the chicken, and frequent basting clearly helped too. It went very nicely with mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese. I will continue to roast this way while I work to improve the baster. Video, Images

Josh’s Roasted Chicken

• 1 whole chicken
• 1 lemon
• Several sprigs of rosemary
• 6-8 cloves of garlic
• 1 stick of butter
• Salt & pepper
• Olive oil

Preheat the oven to 375°. Wash the chicken inside and out. Let chicken dry. Mince the leaves of a few sprigs of rosemary and a few cloves of garlic. Mix rosemary and garlic with half a stick of softened butter. Put the butter mixture under the skin of the chicken breasts. Rub olive oil and/or remaining butter on the outside of the chicken. Coat the inside and outside of the chicken with salt and pepper. Squeeze the juice of a lemon inside the bird. Stuff the bird with the lemon and remaining garlic and rosemary. Roast the chicken to an internal temperature of about 120°, then crank the heat to 425° to finish. Baste frequently.

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Demystifying the Überbaster: the World’s First Remote Baster

March 11, 2009 – 6:14 pm

The Überbaster is economically and gastronomically the ultimate baster for your kitchen. It will save you money and time while adding flavor and retaining moisture. Anyone capable of bending down and lifting a 15-20 pound piece of meat can operate it with ease. The Überbaster requires one pump of the injector to draw liquid in and another pump to squirt it out. You can baste with almost anything: wine, beer, fruit juice, pickle juice, butter, mustard, stock, any combination thereof, and anything that tastes good.

Here are some facts about the way you currently baste your roasts:

1. You lose 25-50 degrees for each few seconds the oven door is ajar
2. You add several minutes cooking time (figure 5 minutes conservatively every time you open the oven, plus time you spend basting)
3. You waste energy in the form of electricity or gas
4. You lose money
5. Your roast is prone to dryness

Here is what the Überbaster gives you:

1. Better heat retention
2. Faster cooking time
3. Savings in energy and money
4. Beautiful presentation
5. Preservation of moisture while adding flavor

Points 1 and 2 may be the most important advantages of basting from outside the oven. Prolonged cooking time and fluctuations in temperature are the biggest contributors to dry food. The added bonus of the extra flavor basting yields is icing on the cake. You won’t drop any steamy roasts on the floor, and you won’t burn your hands from lifting the roasting pan. If you use the Überbaster and your roast is dry, it was destined to be dry. I guarantee that if you use proper cooking techniques with quality ingredients, your food will be as moist as it possibly can be.

To clean it, run a light soapy solution through the baster until free of basting liquid. If any solids remain inside the tube, rub the tube between your fingers to loosen it. Then run some clean water through it to rid the tubes of remaining soap.

The heart of the baster is Masterflex Platinum L/S 16 silicone tubing, shown below. It is heat resistant and oven safe. When the tube is closed into an oven door, the rubber gasket around the door maintains its seal, keeping the heat in.

During the early stages of development, if you would like one please contact me and I will make arrangements to get you one. I am more than happy to supply you with a free baster in exchange for your experience with it.

Additional Reading
Quick Tip: Keep the Oven Door Closed! – thekitchn.com
Basting Questions – howstuffworks.com
Timing the Perfect Turkey – exploratorium.edu

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Detecting Bluetooth Devices and Notifying Them via SMS

March 11, 2009 – 12:27 pm

Say you’re having a party and want to send guests a welcome message when they arrive, or you want to notify your employees as soon as they walk into the office about a last minute meeting. It is quite easy to detect Bluetooth devices in your area and send text messages to them using Processing, Textmarks, PHP and MySQL. The hard part is associating a Bluetooth ID with a phone number and making sure devices have Bluetooth enabled.

The easiest way to do this would be to use OBEX to push the device’s Bluetooth ID to itself in the form of a message and instruct the user to forward that message to 41411 + keyword (of course, the device’s Bluetooth still must be turned on). That way the user has to do no signing up or digging around for their Bluetooth ID. You can parse the ID and store it along with the corresponding phone number. Then the device will receive subsequent messages when it is detected by the app.

Here are a couple files to get you started. The Processing file is modified from the bluetoothDesktop library to include a HTTP request to the script that checks the database for devices and sends messages. You will also need Textmarks class files.

Processing source
PHP source

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m.summermittens.com

March 11, 2009 – 8:08 am

I iPhoned my blog! Visit summermittens.com on your iPhone to see how this site is formatted for the device. I scaled the site down to just recent posts and images, my skills and contact information. I’m working on making the navigation bar nicer, but it’ll do for now. This post is redundant on iPhones. Enjoy!

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The Überbaster: A First Look

March 3, 2009 – 9:28 pm

Remote basting is here.

1. Injector: Suck juices in, squirt juices out.

2. Silicone tubing: Heat resistant and oven safe. One tube hangs over the roast while the other remains fixed in the bottom of the pan or outside the oven to insert external basting fluids

3. One-way check valves: Allow fluid to flow in one direction only. Valves are positioned and attached to the corresponding tube to allow fluid to flow in one direction.

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iPhone as Remote Control for TV/Desktop

February 28, 2009 – 5:54 pm

In forging a stronger relationship between the mobile device, desktop, and TV I thought AJAX might have great potential. With the iPhone’s Safari browser supporting AJAX there is lots of fun to be had. I made this little application that turns the iPhone into a remote control for the desktop or TV. When you visit the page on the iPhone you get a number of images that when clicked display a larger image on the remote screen.  Likewise when you visit the same page on a desktop or TV, you will see only the image that you chose to see using your iPhone. This page is equipped with device detection, so you will automatically be directed to the proper page for your device.

Give it a try! http://summermittens.com/1210/10 (mobile & desktop)

If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still try it using http://summermittens.com/1210/10/iphone.html as the controller.

If you would like to make this yourself and need a script, use this one.

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BarTalk Project Proposal for 1′ 2′ 10′

February 19, 2009 – 12:06 pm

For our final project, Matt Young and I will design and develop BarTalk, our idea for a social network centered around bars. BarTalk will allow bar patrons to interact with each other and the bar as a whole using their mobile device. It allows for patrons and bartenders to interact in new ways.

A user’s mobile phone is automatically detected via Bluetooth when they walk into the bar. Once this happens, the user will be able to interact with the bar and with other BarTalk users in close proximity, resulting in a mobile social network of complete strangers in your immediate surroundings. Development will include a mobile component that will be the primary interface communication, a web service for new users to register with and for bars to run the application on, and a TV to display user-generated media and facilitate participation.

This project expands upon the first iteration of BarTalk.

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First iPhone Application

February 14, 2009 – 9:47 am

Here is my first iPhone application. It defines a simple class with a float value of 5.0. When the user presses the “Set Object’s Float Value” button, the class is instantiated to create a new object and it’s float value is set to 10.0. I this this project on the Your First iPhone Application tutorial on Apple.com. Here is a screenshot and a zip of the code.

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