Pot Purity Experiment and other news

There are a few things that I don't like about East Peoria, namely the lack of shoulder and bike friendly roads, but there are redeeming qualities.  Like the pretty bridges that cross the Illinois River/Peoria Lake!  I suspect I'll be taking more photos of them and drawing them too when I find inspiring places to sit.    

Heading home on the War Memorial/Route 150 Bridge from a job interview.  (Yes, that's right, I'm looking for work.)

Home is where...you have two near-matching Toyota ECHOs?!  Yes, apparently it is. Frank's is pictured on the left and was inherited his from his father; it's a 2003.

I visited the Natural Grocery store today in Peoria.  Hmm.  I don't think I'll be frequenting this place...

...cause if you look closely, you will see that a can of beans is $2.49!! Some food items were up to two dollars more than I would expect them to be!  Crazy!

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As requested and promised, here are some photos of Ms. Mabel, Frank's 10 year old cat who is still not totally down with the uninvited invasion of my two rascal kitties:

Mabel on the top shelf of her cat tree.

And Mabel in profile.  She was growling in this photo as Sig was circling around my feet when I was taking this.

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And now, for the much awaited Pot Purity Experiment!

Frank has two sets of pots and I moved in one.  So the question arose one night, which pot would boil water the fastest?  We decided to do an experiment.

Frank very carefully measured out 1 cup of water per pot, and we used the three large burners on the stove, all on high.  Do you want to guess which order they boiled in and at what times?

The first three pots...and they're off!

At 3m 0sec, this lightweight steel (magnetic) pot (on the front right burner) brought it's water to a boil first:

This stainless steel (non-magnetic) and heavy steel bottom (magnetic) pot (on the back left burner) was quite a distance behind at 4m 30sec:

And the glass pot finished last with 4 m 45sec (front left burner):  

This was the order that Frank had predicted, though they took somewhat longer to boil than he had estimated.

Isn't it interesting how different all their boils look?  Go ahead, look again.  :)

But then we realized that the first pot had an unfair advantage because it had a larger surface area, so we grabbed a different pot of the set.  Shorter this one was, but with an equal surface area.  We brought 1 cup of water to boil, and for this lightweight steel (magnetic) shorter pot, it took it 3m 10sec.  So just a smidge longer (10 sec) than it did for its lightweight steel counterpart.  It also had a very similar looking boil:

Interestingly, after we removed the heat source, the water stopped boiling in the pots in the same order they had reach boil.  The lightweight steel pots lost their boil virtually immediately, but the stainless steel/heavy steel bottom pot held its boil for awhile (we didn't time this part), and the glass pot held the boil for the longest.  The steel and stainless steel pots are conductors of energy whereas the glass is an insulator.  So, if I'm getting this right, the glass pot has the greatest thermal inertia so retains heat the longest. 

Tonight I'm going to try cooking some Red Lentil Dahl from the Sri Lankan cookbook Matt gave me for my birthday awhile back.  I wonder what Frank will think...  :)  I plan on also cooking WHITE rice, which should help it be more Frank-Friendly.  AND, to some extent, halving the spices the recipe calls for.  I'm thinking I may do something with a bag of collard greens as well.  

An Egg Experiment

The Egg Experiment

(Note to people concerned about the welfare of animals:  They are "cagefree" eggs.  I'm looking for a good source of locally produced eggs.)

Frank and I made a pound cake the other day.  Very dense stuff is pound cake.  However, Frank momentarily forgot this at one point and cut off a big honkin' piece.  Halfway through he realized his mistake: that pound cake is not angel food cake.  No, I said, angel food cake has 14 egg whites (according to Joey though a google search suggests 12 egg whites is common) which makes it very fluffy, whereas poundcake has 4 whole eggs.  Frank, ever frugal-minded, wondered, maybe a little concerned, "how much of the egg are you throwing out when just using the egg whites?"  I thought maybe 50%?  We had to see.  

Above are four separated eggs.  Just under 3 ounces of egg yolk, 5 ounces of egg whites.  When you're throwing out the egg yolks, you're throwing out 3/8ths of the egg.  So, if you're making an angel food cake and using 14 2-ounce eggs, you're throwing out 5.25 eggs by volume per cake.  Now, we didn't weigh the egg whites and egg yolks.  If we have a sensitive enough scale, I think we'll have to do this next time.  How much denser is the egg yolk than the egg white?  And/Or, if you beat egg whites versus beating a full egg, how much less dense is the result?  Are the four eggs in pound cake denser than the 12-14 egg whites in angel food cake?  Certainly they would be once you beat them, right?

Not having cooked with eggs for years now, I'm newly intrigued by the properties of these little guys.

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Bodhi kitty cuddling my hip in my sleeping bag

I'm back in Chicago now for a week.  Had a going away "party" with some of my co-workers last night: they are all so sweet and kind and I will miss them.  Sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor in an empty apartment.  No food in the house except some frozen fruit and tator tots.  :)  My cats seemed somewhat stressed out by it all (me being gone for awhile with no furniture in the house, I presume), but after some hardcore cuddling and massaging, they've calmed down a little.  Massage is so great for calming that sympathetic nervous system.  

I guess tator tots are potatoes.  I can have them for breakfast, right?