Blogging a New Beginning
I have moved my web hosting to dreamhost.com. I made the decision to do so because my previous web host, GoDaddy.com, supported a proposed bill that would fundamentally change the internet, and not in a good way. This bill, called SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act, is an affront to free speech and a free internet. While the name suggests it would be used to stop piracy, it would do much more. There is a lot out there on the interwebs about this bill, so I will not go into it. I just want to officially declare that I do not support it. My domain name, bobonthenet.com, and several other domains that I own are registered through GoDaddy still. Bobonthenet.com is prepaid up until 2019, and it is unlikely that I would receive a refund. Because of this, these domains will remain registered until they expire, then I will use a different registrar. A majority of these domains expire in 2012. Even though I will not be migrating my domains, GoDaddy will not receive another cent from me.
Now that that bit of nastiness is out of the way, I would like to talk about my plans for the next year. The migration of my web hosting has inspired me to do some blogging today, hopefully I can manage to continue with this on a regular basis from now on. I believe it is more important than ever that I am keeping this record of my life, my so called wisdom and sharing my ideas with the world. Why? Because I am about to become a father. The information I am putting on this blog is firstly for my future self. It is a reminder of who I was and what I plan to be, for myself and for my son or daughter. It is also for that future child. This other living, breathing, thinking human being created in love and in the likeness of both my incredible wife and myself. In bringing this child into this world I also take on the responsibility of providing for, teaching, loving and for a while at least, being one half of this child's entire world along with my wife. So, to my future child, whoever you may be, this record is for you too. I hope it may help you somewhere along the way if you should choose to read it. Lastly, this blog is public, it is on the internet, it is for everyone that should happen to stumble upon it. Much of this will likely be meaningless to you. My personal anecdotes, projects, photos and videos of my kid, dog, wife or whatever will hopefully provide you with some humor or other form of entertainment, or perhaps you will learn something from me. That is what I believe the internet is all about after all – sharing of information. Through this medium we will be able to communicate, teaching each other as you comment on and critique my writings. Hopefully we will both be all the better for having done so.
The next year should be full of excitement for both myself and my immediate family. As previously mentioned, my wife and I are expecting, more on that in future blog posts. Secondly, we are also focusing on re-educating ourselves to change the direction of our careers for the better. I have managed to weasel myself into the wonderful world of IT and am now working fiercely towards uplifting myself in that area through furthering my education with another degree and lots of personal study at home. Even as I am between semesters at the moment, I have been studying SQL, which is the primary language I would be using as a developer at my job. I think I'm pretty good with SQL now, but one can always be better. I currently have zero professional experience with coding. Next year I hope to change that. My wife is also following a very similar path. She is not currently working in IT development, but is educating herself to be able to make that transition. This on top of having a child will be extremely stressful. However, doing so will make for a vast improvement in our combined income, job satisfaction and ability to provide for our child.
I also plan to continue with my robotics. It is an expensive hobby but it is important to me, and I can make small incremental upgrades to my robot to spread out the cost. This is something that I hope to get good at and be able to share with my child. My wife and I have also discussed trying to put together an indy game together. Since we will both be programmers, we thought that would be a fun side project to be able to do together. I'm not looking to make money from making games and they probably won't be super popular since it would be just the two of us making them. I think it would be fun, though, and would help us get even better at our day jobs.
So that is it, that is my plan for now, and as always, it will be subject to change. I expect the unexpected to happen often. I hope you enjoy reading about it and sharing the experience with me.
Barkley Playing Fetch at Orion Oaks
I figured my blog needed some content here so I'm linking some videos of my dog Barkley playing fetch at my local dog park. Very soon I will also have some posts about my new robotics project. I've also created a project page for that, http://www.bobonthenet.com/robotics I just need to buy a couple of new parts before I can really get moving on this one. In the meantime here are my dog videos.
Simplified Garduino
I love the Garduino! I really think it is one of the coolest projects that you can make with the Arduino. The full Garduino has some really great features it waters the plants only when needed, turns on supplemental lights based on how much natural sunlight is received, and alerts if the temperature drops below a plant-healthy level. Eventually I'd like to put one of these full garduino systems together and perhaps even add to it. For now though I just have a simple low maintanance desk plant that I just need to remember to water. I took the Garduino concept and simplified it. My super simplified garduino uses the same circuit as the full garduino to measure soil moisture level. When that moisture level drops too low an LED positioned above the plant lights up letting me know it is time to water. Below is a video I made demonstrating this project in action.
Future additions to this project will include:
1. Replacing the LED with an edge lit "water me" sign.
2. Create LED water level indicator.
3. Make it smaller.
4. More?
The Primal Blueprint
OK so I'm not going to post any silly before and after pictures, but I figured this is something worth talking about. As this blog has become mostly about my creative cooking I thought I should say something about my diet. I've recently started The Primal Blueprint. On this diet I have been losing weight pretty fast and I haven't even been able to make it to the gym as much as normal. It seems that working out alone has not helped much with the weight loss but watching what I eat on the other hand has had a huge impact so far. Anyway, deep fried hot wings are not on the menu for this diet. I could be totally bummed out but instead I am going to channel my culinary creativity into inventing some primal friendly foods. I'll try and update at least a couple times a month with some new recipes and also updates to my weight loss progress. I've restarted my weight loss tracking chart. It should have been restarted sooner when I actually started the diet but I didn't think of it until now. I started at about 185ish.
Orange Hot Wings
This Sunday I created a new sauce recipe using orange juice. I got the idea from something I saw on the food network. I don't believe this recipe is quite complete yet, but it doesn't taste half bad as it is. Despite orange juice being a major component, I actually thought that the flavor came through rather mild. The other problem, in my opinion, is that the sauce was not thick enough and therefore did not really stick to the chicken very well. I'll look at improving that in the future. Here is that recipe.
1 part orange juice
1 part Frank's Red Hot Sauce
2 parts sugar
add minced garlic to taste
Just mix that all together in a sauce pan until the sugar is completely dissolved. I had hoped that heating it for a while would make it thicker, but I lost patience and decided to just try it as it was. I believe this is a great "infant" recipe and I'll be tweaking it a lot in the near future.
World’s Greatest Hot Wings III
Once again, this post is pretty late, but I’ve been working on my house and it has been very distracting. I tried this recipe on Saturday and I have to say, the wings this time were AWESOME!
So, since the beginning of this experiment, my wife has been saying that I need to make boneless wings instead of traditional. Boneless wings are actually made from chicken breast cut into pieces, breaded and then deep fried. So they aren’t really wings, but whatever, they tasted amazing! I’ll probably make more of the traditional style again, but I think for the next several batches at least, I’ll be making these boneless wings.
The wings on Saturday had some real kick to them, and the molasses gave them a nice sweet flavor. I didn’t really think the garlic came through very strong, though, so I’ll definitely need more of that. Perhaps using minced garlic instead of powder. The molasses was actually surprising. I had been looking for something to use other than butter that would add flavor and really stick to the wings. I knew molasses would stick but I wasn’t sure about the flavor, so I had mixed up a small batch of the sauce several days prior. It tasted all right on its own, but as I already have stated, it was really tasty on the wings.
Anyway, I could go on and on talking about how these wings taste, but you won’t really know unless you make them yourself and try them. I think they are pretty great but I'm not sure they are the world's greatest just yet. Make them yourself and tell me what you think. Here is the recipe for the sauce, to make it just mix everything together into a small bowl:
- 1/3 cup Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
- 1/3 Blackstrap Molasses
- 2 tbsp vinegar
- 1 tbsp garlic powder
The wings themselves were made by first cutting up whole boneless skinless chicken breasts into smaller bite sized pieces. Each piece was dipped into a mixture of 1 egg and 1 cup of milk. The egg and milk coated chicken pieces were then rolled in flour until they were completely coated. The chicken pieces were then deep fried for 6 minutes in vegetable oil. After deep frying, the wings were coated in my wing sauce and then baked in the oven for another 20 minutes. Enjoy! Feel free to post any comments and suggestions.
World’s Greatest Hot Wings take 2
This post is a little late, but I just couldn’t find the time up until now. On Sunday, I made some hot wings again. This time around I had a couple friends over for some taste testing. The recipe used was the same as last time, but the preparation was quite a bit different which I think produced some much better wings. While the quality of the wings was much better than last time, I’m still not completely satisfied. I really feel that the skin needs to be a lot crispier. Deep frying really did improve the quality, though. Here is that recipe again, along with the steps to replicate my delicious hot wings.
- 1/3 cup Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
- 1/3 cup butter
- 2 tbsp vinegar
- 1 tbsp garlic powder
This sauce is made by simply heating the butter until it is completely melted, and then mixing all of the ingredients together until it has reached a homogeneous consistency. Deep fry the unfrozen wings for 12 minutes, then thoroughly coat with your sauce. Once all of your wings have been coated, bake until they are completely cooked. This may vary depending on your oven settings. My oven tends to run quite a bit cooler than what I actually set it for, and perhaps that is why I didn’t get the crispy wings that I wanted.
My guests seemed to really enjoy the wings, but I asked them to be as critical about them as possible so that I could improve the recipe for next time. The consensus seemed to be that they would have liked a thicker sauce, and more garlic. I agree. Before trying to make the wings again I think I will experiment with using a base other than butter and of course more garlic, possibly finely minced fresh garlic instead of the powder. Here are the comments that my friends wrote down for me.
Dennay (wife)
“The wings this time around were fantastic! Deep frying them before baking was a great idea. I loved the spiciness, my only suggestion for next time is to add more garlic since the flavor of the Frank’s Red Hot is pretty overpowering. I’d also like you to try boneless wings.”
Andrew
“1) I prefer a thinner skin, some of the skins were a little thick.
2) The sauce is really good. I might also like a thicker sauce, sweeter, with pieces of pepper and onion in it. I like the spice level, very good!
3) The wings were cooked very good, the meat was great. Skins weren’t really crispy though. Skin still too soft.
4) Sauce ideas - sriracha, sweet baby rays??? More garlic, maybe chipotle.”
Eddie
“As someone who is not always a fan of hot foods, the added butter and garlic knocked down the Frank’s Red Hot. I would like to see a more garlic taste. “Sauciness” is an aesthetic option for me and not a requirement.”
To help cool our pallets after eating these spicy wings we drank Bell’s Oberon (probably the last of the season) and Sam Adam’s Octoberfest. After the wings, we ate some watermelon that Eddie had brought. All in all, I’m pretty happy with these wings and I’m proud to share the recipe with the world. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, but these are still not nearly the greatest hot wings. The quest continues! Leave me a comment if you have any suggestions.
How to Deep Fry Research
I've spent the last week doing research on how to deep fry my wings. Here are some great videos I found on how to do so. I actually found the second video earlier this week but I like the first one better which is why I put it on top. I'll be making some wings tonight!
World’s Greatest Hot Wings First Attempt
So, for my first attempt at making the world's greatest hot wings I used a very simple recipe. I wanted to start simple and tweak it gradually over time so that I truly am able to make the world's greatest hot wings. So without further ado, here is that recipe:
- 1/3 cup Frank's Red Hot Sauce
- 1/3 cup butter
- 2 tblsp vinegar
- 1 tblsp garlic powder
This time around I cooked my wings according to the instructions on the package. While that was going, I mixed together the sauce ingredients. I heated up the sauce just enough to melt the butter so I was able to get a nice even constancy with the sauce. Once the wings were done, I took them out, dipped them in the sauce and then put them into a bowl to serve.
The sauce was great! It had some awesome kick to it, not too hot and plenty of flavor. The problem was just dipping the wings into the sauce did not keep nearly enough of it on the wings. Next time I will marinate. Also, I now realize that the quality of the actual wings you are cooking is crucial.
In conclusion, my first attempt at making the world's greatest hot wings turned out pretty awesome. They were no where near the best wings in the world, but better than some restaurants I've been to that claim to have the greatest wings. Next time around I will try the exact same recipe but I'll marinate the wings in the sauce for at least a few hours before cooking. Also, I will try and find some better quality wings.
Today my wife, Dennay, and I were the only two people that participated in the taste testing. The beer served with our wings was Leinenkugel's Oktoberfest. No sides to go with the wings today because I just didn't have that much foresight.
Do you think you know how to make the greatest hot wings in the world? Leave me a comment.
Frankenmuth
So today I went to Frankenmuth to have dinner with some friends. We ate at the Bavarian Inn and all had the family style chicken dinner. Before that we also walked around town bought some cheese, and other novelty items. Oh and we also had beers at the Frankenmuth brewery. Good times today. I think Dennay and I are going to go back to Frankenmuth for our anniversary.