I have had this oven for a couple of months. So far, very good results. But, I’m very careful with the cooking process and cleanup. The included pan doesn’t clean easily and develops scratches.
The included heavy black roasting pan with ribbing works very well as does the basket.
I doubt that I will ever use the rotisserie.
Jeff
I am trying the grill pan with some pork chops as I type this. My previous oven didn’t have a grill plate. I’m hoping to do a better job keeping this one clean as well. It also did a really good job making toast directly on the wire rack.
And same - I rarely cook a whole chicken, usually cut up pieces, but I have found I can roast a small chicken in my taller pyrex dish and it works just as fine without the complication of a rotisserie mechanism and I can put the lid on for most of the cooking time to avoid splatter mess.
The grill does create smoke as an oven broiler function does. My big oven broiler always sets off the smoke alarm no matter how carefully I watch it.
EDIT: 
for the new grill function and first major test of the new oven. The grill really adds something I’ve never gotten from an indoor appliance. The Maillard reaction and the grill marks really add something and the pork chops taste like they came from a restaurant. I’ve tried grilling pans on the stovetop and in other ovens that didn’t work this well. The door indicators point out the grill goes on the very bottom right on top of the lower heating element so it’s probably getting extra hot, creating actual grill smoke. I can see why this causes concern for some people and the grill function definitely needs to be attended unlike longer bakes that have more liquid and less grease exposed to the heat.
I’ve never understood the appeal of chicken. Duck always struck me as the better poultry.
Duck isn’t readily available as packaged meat everyplace in the US in general. Ducks aren’t as widely farmed like chicken and are generally wild. There is a legally-regulated duck-hunting season so unless you are a hunter loading the deep freeze once a year, or can obtain it from a specialty butcher or an international grocery store that has wider stock and can obtain farmed duck, it’s not something you can grab anytime from the supermarket.
Usually if you want duck you order it from a Chinese restaurant and you often have to notify them at least 24 hours in advance to make sure they can get it - you have to reserve an order of Peking Duck or l’orange and it’s pricey. My few times I’ve tried duck were when my dad tagged along on a hunting trip with his buddies and brought it back full-carcass, or when one of the hunters he knew had too much of it to store and were giving it away.
It’s the same with seafood by region - in Florida I could buy fresh shark steak that the butcher wrapped in the back; in the land-locked Midwest we don’t get shark since it’s likely very expensive to ship away from the coastline, and most seafood is usually going to be frozen and vacuum-sealed to get it successfully to a land-locked area. Again, you can get it for special occasions if you want to pay premiums at specialty grocers.
Chickens can be farmed nearly anyplace and that’s why they’re the ubiquitous default meat.
I don’t think I’ve ever had poultry other than chicken or turkey, and honestly, there’s a part of me where anything else parses as too gamey for my sensibilities… which I’ll fully admit is rather irrational, but honestly, all cultures have weird boundaries on what is and isn’t food… e.g. clams and oysters are normal seafood in my neck of the woods, but snails, octopus and squid are weird and exotic despite them all being mollusks… or how shrimp, crab and lobster are normal seafood, but eating insects and most other arthopods is considered gross… though I’ve heard lobster was once considered a junk sea bug culinarily speaking… Also, weirdly, I love shrimp, but can’t bring myself to try crab or lobster… not that I could afford the latter with how its modern marketing panned out… also, the squick factor has kept me from ever trying clams or oysters, yet I’m curious about takoyaki, the fried octopus dumplings I understand are as ubiquitous in Japanese fast food as the chicken nugget is in America, completely inverting the norms of the culture I grew up in in that aspect… I’m also reminded of how poultry is common for Christmas dinner in several countries,but the choice varies by country… In the US, it’s usually Turkey as Christmas Dinner is often a repeat of Thanksgiving, in Japan, its fried chicken thanks to a advertising campaign KFC did back in the 70s, and I understand Goose is traditional across the pond in the British Isles, though I confess to not being sure if that is still the case or if it is something that has fallen out of favor… Traditions are a tricky thing, it can be hard to tell whether the traditions you grew up with were invented in your parents’/grandparents’ lives or if they go back centuries/millenia.
This is true. In the early 20th century lobsters were considered a nuisance when caught in fish-nets as “peasant food” and coastal schoolchildren were made fun of when they were packed lobster sandwiches for lunch.
That’s common - shrimps are prized as a somewhat economical seafood and much less forbidding than an entire Alien-like lobster or crab legs, while freshwater crayfish are basically similar but considered on par with catfish as a “bottom feeder” or potentially dirty, though many people love catfish and crayfish and it’s often considered great southern/soul food.
I personally don’t care for lobster and would not order it. The flavor is good if it’s cut up and prepared in a dish or a sandwich like a lobster roll, but whole lobster meat to me is gristle-y and unpleasant to chew. I’d much rather have crab legs which are tender and delicious, and once you learn the technique, easy to extract from the shell. I don’t think I’ve had crab body-meat, but I assume all edible parts are minced and used in crab rolls, which is a like a seafood submarine-sandwich, as well as crab cakes, which is like a pancake or biscuit with crab (or lobster) meat distributed throughout.
Imitation crab or “crab sticks” are cheaper and actually also good, but are made out of a less-expensive fish formed to have the peel-able “string cheese” strand structure that crab legs have. I actually prefer imitation crab to expensive actual crab or canned crab meat when making crab rangoons or amateur homemade sushi - when making sushi at home I use either imitation crab or smoked salmon to avoid any potential hazards of working with and eating raw fish.
Fried soft shell crabs are great.
Also probably worth noting, but I prefer popcorn shrimp to larger varieties and am somewhat put off if they’re served in their shells…
On a more positive note, after several days of it getting over 70F and resisting the temptation to turn on the AC, the temperature outside is down in the 50s today… Still warmer than January has any business being though. Also, I’ve completely cleared my sub-50 minute part of my YouTube backlog.
One of my favorite things about duck is that they don’t have white meat. But I can only ever find duck heads, duck legs, or whole duck. I don’t have the patience or knife skills to debone those. I assume restaurants buy up the breasts as the most appealing cut for a main dish.
Duck heads, duck heads, roly-poly duck heads.
Sorry, it just reminded me of Fish Heads (song) - Wikipedia
Got several pieces of programmatic art to share this evening, and I also took some time to create a general template.cpp for future pieces that put bounds for coordinates and some other stuff at the beginning of the main method so I’m not constantly through the body of the code to change loop boundaries, file numbers, and image resolutions manually…
For all of the pieces, I calculate the radius around each coordinate axis.
For Solo, I set each color channel to one of these radii. This results in one being a static circular gradient while the other to start out as a single bright line that widens into a linear gradient. If I had a way to assemble images into voxel models, it would be three mutually orthogonal cylinders.
For Dualsum, I sum the radii pairwise, and for Sumdiff I take the same pairs, but take the absolute value of their difference.
For TriDiff, I add two of the radii, subtract the third and take the absolute value.
For TriSum, as there’s only one way to sum three values, I did something a bit different… taking the sum, and if its in the range 0-255, I set the red value to it, if in the range 256-510, I max out red and add blue. if between 511 and 765, I max red and blue and add green, resulting in a gradiant that goes from black to red to magenta to white as the sum of the three radii increase.
In all cases, overflow goes black like with a lot of my other pieces.
As there’s 20 animations included in this batch and I’m less happy with the names than usual, I’ll just leave the link to the holder instead of posting the images directly:
Also, I recently learned that there is an extention to portable pixel map that does support transparency… unfortunately, the extention is binary only and I never learned how to write binary files(part of why I use ppm as the format my code generates is that its a dead simple, ascii format).
I’ve been trying to work on my WIP, which has a sort of strange structure but I think it’s turning out not bad. I also got to work on some of my music which isn’t going great but it’s at least going somewhere…
Enjoyed a bowl of Rainbow sherbet a few minutes ago… Also, while trying to find a larger container of rainbow sherbet than 48 oz(I failed, but I swear you use could get rainbow sherbet in gallon tubs), I stumbled upon a rainbow dolphin plushie that I bought on impulse since I had the funds to spare… still waiting on it to ship since it wasn’t available for delivery from store like the actual sherbet and the other mid-month groceries I ordered… Also restocked on shampoo and fabric freshener, and in addition to the cherry blossom scented shampoo I know I like, I bought a bottle of the same brand’s strawberry scent and decided to try a couple of those gel cone air fresheners, nabbing raspberry and apple cinnamon scents. I find a lot of scented products unpleasant, but fruity scents are usually an exception and strawberry is usually a win, so I’m hopeful… Opened the first of the gel fresheners, not sure which it is, but first impression is that its pleasant. Also bought a can of citrus aerosol air freshener, citrus being another scent that’s rarely bad in my experience.
On Monday I saw a doctor about yet another lingering infection, and not only did he immediately have a diagnosis and treatment, he also recognized the cuneiform on my T-shirt, said that his mother had been an archaeologist with the Oriental Institute (now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, the top institution for Ancient Near Eastern studies in the United States), and that he’d always been curious if medical CT scanners could produce accurate 3D replicas of artifacts with their inscriptions intact. This culminated in him offering me the use of the clinic’s equipment if I could get the local museum to lend us some cuneiform tablets for the experiment.
Which is not what I expected when I made a routine appointment for a painful cough, but if the museum is on board, maybe this will be a new chapter for my thesis!
That is so very cool! I really hope the museum thinks so too.
Not counting stories that updated today, I’m caught up on all of the on-going fanfiction and web serials I’m following… and almost caught up on my back log of blog posts, with just two left to be caught up… granted, one of those is practically a book at ~30k words, a ~3-3.5 hour read if I could focus on it for that long without break.
No animation this time around, but here’s an attempt at drawing a Yin-Yang symbol programmatically with some gradient going on.
Today was the first time in 6 months I made a major addition to one of my two WIPs. I added a hint system which is sort of part of the game’s structure as it is also necessary to continue (or almost, at least). Only problem is it only gets introduced like, halfway through the game, amd for good reason. And the puzzle for building it very hard. Hmmm. I’ll find a way around…
But that was very fun. I’m also enjoying literally nearly being done with my album (only drums on a few are needed), plus a collection of 9 other songs I plan to release as an EP or something (they only amount to 25 minutes…)
Recently got a dragon plushie that came partially stuffed(head, arms, legs, and the star at the end of its tail are stuffed, but the torso is empty and aside from the star, the tail is empty except for a bean bag weight halfway along its length… Planning to stuff the body with polyhedral dice and the $25 bag with 25 sets I ordered from Walmart.com arrived yesterday for me to start the stuffing… Need more dice to finish stuffing(I suspect I might need in the neighborhood of 100 sets, so I might have to stuff it over the course of a few months) but I’m already quite enjoying my dice dragon’s dice-filled pot belly and its a tactile and auditory delight to knead. Also, the Rainbow sherbet dolphin plush I mentioned arrived yesterday, is far fluffier than a marine mammal has any business being, and has displaced my rat-tailed unicorn as my bedtime cuddle buddy.
