Pokemon GO and the American Swedish Historical Museum!

So last Tuesday Beth and I decided to expand our Pokemon GO activities to  FDR Park in south Philadelphia. Quite apart from the opportunity to catch a bunch of Charmanders, the park is also home to the American Swedish Historical Museum. Anyone who knows me will realize that the opportunity to visit a small, specialized museum could not be missed!

FDR Park is in *way* south Philadelphia! In fact it's at the end of the Broad Street Line along with the various sports venues where Philly teams mostly fail to achieve championships. The park itself is pretty nice in a semi run-down sort of way (like a lot of Philly that's not in the tourist center). 

There's a medium size artificial lake with a boat house and a gazebo...
 

You can rent the paddle boats on days when we weren't there...

And a path that runs all the way around where dog owners fail to pick up their puppy's poop... Fishing is allowed and there are tennis courts and playgrounds for the kiddies.

But the real cool place is the museum! How 'bout an actual Viking Sword?

 Iron doesn't hold up too well - you can probably just see the supporting material (sort of light brown) under the blade...

There's some more recent stuff as well, like this:

This is in the John Ericsson room. That's Abe Lincoln signing off on the Monitor and the Naval big-wigs agreeing... He also designed the first "screw" type propeller steamship to cross the Atlantic. Along with a METRIC-FUCK-TON (technically) of other stuff that wasn't recognized - so he wrote an enormous book (displayed at the right under the Monitor) detailing his creations.

Did you know Swedes like to drink? There's a nifty collection of sliver tankards here.

And of course there's plenty of "folk art". These mangle boards were apparently made by young men to impress their girlfriends with the opportunity to iron their shirts...

Beth's Dad was an enthusiastic wood carver, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have worked with her Mom.

This on the other hand...

is a carved stool made from a tree stump or log. It's part of an exhibit of carved funriture  by
Karl von Rydingsvärd (though not by him - it's context).

This desk is:

And yes, there's a room dedicated to Jenny Lind, as well as Fredrika Bremer, and of course Pippi Longstocking has a spot in the kiddie's room. 

This was a great day out! Now that I'm retired I have time to research these things and find cool places Beth and I can visit on her days off.

You Minnesota Folk Know What This Is

El Bulli Fun!: 1671 Apple Mojito Sandwich And 1741 Duck Foie Gras Tartlet

1671 Apple Mojito Sandwich

1741 Duck Foie Gras Tartlet

 It's been a good long while since I've done an  El Bulli recipe! A couple days ago someone came across my old El Bulli At Home blog and asked about a couple recipes. The principal interest was an older item that shows up as "White Chocolate English Bread" but in the catalogs is most likely 2003's 944 "Frozen White Chocolate Air".

The other recipe we talked about was this one: the Apple Mojito Sandwich. The ElBulli version uses liquid nitrogen to freeze the mojito granita, but it can easily be made in a regular ice cream freezer. And then, since I was poking around in the 2010-2011 book I decided to do an old favorite I never managed to write up.

As usual with published recipes, these are not mine to re-publish. If you're interested in trying one feel free to PM me.

Day One: Methylcellulose Base and Apple Mojito Granita

Methylcellulose needs to be dissolved at a relatively high temperature (90° C) so this part is perfect for the Thermomix. Just warm up 200 grams of water, add 6 grams of methylcellulose and mix until dissolved.

That goes into into the fridge overnight to hydrate. Then on to the apple juice for the meringues and the granita.

Juice about a kilo of apples for the meringue bases. If you've used a juicer you know that a good deal of fine particulate matter is mixed up in the foam on top of the juice. To clarify the juice it just goes in the freezer for about half an hour...

And you can scoop the frozen foam right off! That juice goes into the fridge and another batch of apples gets juiced for the granita.

At elBulli the granita was made immediately before serving using liquid nitrogen. Since I don't have easy access to small quantities of liquid nitrogen I decided to give it a shot using my trusty ice cream freezer. Making the mojito granita base is easy:

Mint leaves, Rum, Xanthan Gum & Apple Juice

Everybody into the pool:

It does take a few minutes with the immersion blender to get the texture smooth enough. Then into the ice cream freezer and half an hour later:

I will say this: that is just about the most intense mint flavor you can imagine.

Day Two: Meringue "Baguettes"

Xanthan Gum, Egg White Powder, Wheat Fiber (a.k.a. wheat dextrin, Trisol and in the USA, Benefiber), Apple Juice, and methylcellulose solution ready to go. All but the smaller portion of the xanthan gum gets whizzed together and a small portion of that mixture is reserved. Then the remaining xanthan is added and whizzed again. Both go into the refrigerator for a few hours...

The larger portion is whipped to stiff peaks, the smaller added and whipped again. If anyone can explain the reason for this procedure I'd love to know.

I'm no good at piping

The meringue gets piped onto silicone sheets and into the dehydrator for 24 hours

Day Three: Assembly and Consumption

Nothing much to this, just very carefully lift the meringue "baguettes" from the dehydrator sheets, apply the granita and eat. Mine came out almost hollow so instead of trying to split them, I just used two for each sandwich:

And away we go!

How's It Taste?

This are pretty tasty. The mojito granita is very intense and the meringue has only the slightest hint of the apple flavor.

Duck Foie Gras Tartlet

This one uses a pair of El Bulli favorites: obulato sheets and a simple caramel made with fondant, glucose, and isomalt. Those two items appear in quite a number of recipes from these years - you can find two I've tried on the El Bulli At Home blog here and here.

You start by very gently cooking the foie, just until it's warmed through and lightly colored. Then wrap it tightly in plastic film and foil and pop it into the freezer for a few hours.

Meanwhile I heated the oven to 170° C and prepped the obulato sheets. El Bulli used circular sheets but since I have square ones, that's what I used.

A few chunks of caramel turn into powder quickly in the Thermomix which is then dusted onto the obulato sheets:

Into the oven for a minute and they're done.

You do have to lift them off pretty quickly or the overflow caramel glues them all together. When that happens it just takes a couple seconds back in the oven to remelt everything. I stored the sheets in a little plastic food container separated with sheets of parchment paper.

To finish these little guys I grated the frozen foie gras using a microplane grated and Boom! Foie Gras Tartlet!

How's it Taste?

These are great! The El Bulli caramel is just barely sweet and the crispness of the obulato makes a nice contrast to the smooth foie. This is a marvelous little "amuse" that takes almost no actual work in the kitchen. We'd serve this pretty much anytime.

These were quite a bit of fun to make and neither one required any special skills or kitchen magic.

What A Week! - Part 1

Explanation Later!

This being retired is a lot busier than I expected! Seems that once you have time to do things, "things" magically appear to be done. So last week's "thing" was a quick mini-trip down to Cocoa Beach, FL to watch a test firing of a Trident missile from our son's submarine, SSBN 738 Maryland.

Orlando is about a two and a half hour flight from Philadelphia so it wasn't too bad in cattle class, especially since I had an aisle seat going down and exit row on the way back. Only cost $11.20 since we had loads of miles to use. To make things even cheaper I was able to stay at the "event" hotel at the Navy group rate, saving another couple hundred bucks.

The event itself was a long, long day starting well before dawn with a bus ride out to the port where we boarded the USNS Waters, a converted cold war relic that now supports a variety of submarine research tasks.

After boarding the waiting began. Fortunately they kept us well fed and once his basic duties were complete I was able to spend almost the whole day with our son, meet some of his shipmates and a few of their parents as well.

Since the Waters' top speed is something like 13 knots it took a good long time to reach the launch area. While we sailed the ship's crew kept the food coming - lunch was in the crew's mess and was very good. Will has plenty of experience with the Navy's submarine food (said to be the best in the Navy) and allowed that the civilian operated Waters's fare was much better.

We eventually reached the launch site and sort of tooled around the area while the Maryland got ready to launch. Will and I were waiting just aft of the orange lifeboats you can see in the picture above.

About a minute or so before launch the Maryland sent up a smoke flare and the countdown began. It was pretty cool in a "this is how the end of the world starts" kind of way. For obvious reasons we couldn't take pictures or or record the event but there are plenty of official videos out there:


After the test there was more food as we headed back to port. Will and I hung out in the ship's theater for a while where they were running a full set of Star Wars movies. While were were lounging the Waters' mess crew set up a humongous barbecue on the open aft area of the ship. Steaks, brats burgers, big chunks of (I think) sea bass, and all the the other stuff... And then the rain started thanks to then tropical storm Hermine. The cooks kept at it and produced a terrific steel beach picnic.

By now pretty much everyone was exhausted and we still had a couple hours 'till we made port. Fortunately, Will knew of a compartment with TV and La-Z-Boys (and air conditioning) so we went down there to watch some sports TV (ESPN-U I think - it was all college football).

Well after my bed-time we made it back to port and the buses took us back to the hotel. I'd gotten a "two queens" room and Will got permission to stay over in a comfortable hotel bed and making the next day's connections much more convenient.

The next day we headed out to the Kennedy Space Center, which turned out to be more interesting than we expected, in an unexpected way...