When I look back at my undergraduate days and do a mental inventory of the courses I took, a select few really stand out.
One of them, which was an elective, was a second year mathematics course called "The Mathematics of Finance".
Of all the math courses I suffered through (calculus, linear algebra, statistics), this one was by far the most useful one I've taken. Mortgages, declining balances, amortizations, simple and compound interest, stocks, bonds, coupons, strips, and so on.
Over the years, this course has been worth its textbook's weight in gold (probably literally) in helping me make smart decisions about money. It has saved me literally thousands of dollars on my mortgage (a tale unto itself).
Recently, I've begun working with a professional financial planner. I know about stocks and bonds, and to avoid mutual funds like the plague, but there is simply too much inherent complexity in the system for a retail investor like me to deal with intelligently - at least if I don't want to simplify my life with just investing in an index ETF.
My financial planner calls me about once every two weeks or so and he's been educating me about the markets on the whole. Jim educates me about the markets for two reasons - one so that I feel confident in his recommendations, and two so that if he's feeling bullish on a particular investment idea I have to be able to understand what the idea is. Because as he says, if I don't understand it and he can't explain it to me, then it might not be such a good idea after all.
Thanks to that math of finance course, I can make intelligent decisions with Jim's help. That is an amazingly useful tool.
25 September 2007
22 September 2007
On Making Sausage
Today I made sausage for only the second time ever. The first time was at the tail end of the Dubrulle "serious amateur" 6-day advanced culinary class.
My cousins Anita and Karlheinz from Germany are visiting my parents and so I took the adorable granddaughter to be doted upon and took up Karlheinz's offer of showing me how to make classic German bratwursts (his rendition of them naturally). He'd made a batch before our trip out there last weekend, and they're really awesomely good.
I brought along my KitchenAid stand mixer as it has a stronger motor than my dad's, and after lunch, we set to work.
First is the meat (all pork) - the ratio is 8 parts shoulder to 2 parts belly. If you want slightly moister sausages you can go 7 to 3. You want the meat ground coarsely - I learned that commercial ground meat is actually twice ground, but as a general rule for sausage you just want it run through once.
Then after mixing the secret seasoning recipe (secret = I'm not going to post it) you sprinkle it over the ground meat (we had 6.5kg of it), you knead it. Like bread dough. Aggressive, hard, making sure you mix in all the seasonings well and thoroughly. And you know what - if you want to see how the taste is, to make sure the seasoning is right, you taste it. Raw.
Now, I'm sure lots of people will freak out - but that's because we've been conditioned to avoid raw meat, especially chicken, as if it were radioactive waste. But let me tell you something - it was GOOD. So good in fact, that last week I spread some of the "we ran out of casing" sausage meat straight onto bread. Mmm mmm mmm. It's really no different in any fundamental way from steak tartare.
Once the meat has been worked, it becomes quite firm, very much like bread dough when it's ready. The proteins in meat have the same reaction to the kneading as the glutens in flour.
We let the meat mixture sit for about an hour to let the flavours infuse (that, and we went and had lunch). After lunch, we went down and set up the KitchenAid with all the attachments and got to work.
Slipping sausage casing onto the end of the nozzle where the meat comes out suggests and looks exactly like what you think it might, and no doubt contributes to the notion that those who love the law and sausages should watch neither being made.
Once the casing was ready, you need two people - one to feed the meat into the machine, one to deal with the extrusion of meat into the casing. To process 6.5kg of prepared meat took us about 40-45 minutes. I joked at the start that I would probably get the hang of it about the time we were almost done, and I was right.
It was interesting to me that we did the links only after the casing (about 2m long) was filled. At Dubrulle we made the links as we went along (using artifical collagen casing), but Karlheinz did it after the fact and showed me the easy technique to do it - at least it looked easy, kinda like how an old Italian grandmother makes fresh pasta look easy.
After the sausages were in links, they were hung to dry. The sausages "settle" into the casing, and also change colour. The sausage recipe we made is very flexible. You can cook them as bratwursts of course, but you could also let them dry out in a cool room and in about eight days they'll go from fresh to coated in white (salt) to turning red (cured). You can also cold smoke them (aka Mettwurst) and then cook them or spread it raw on toast (sprinkled with a little bit of onion, mmmm...).
The local JN&Z deli said any time I want sausage casing I can just book ahead, and that if I like they'll make me 50lbs of sausage to whatever recipe I like. I might just take them up on that, especially as I'm not getting a side of pork this fall.
My cousins Anita and Karlheinz from Germany are visiting my parents and so I took the adorable granddaughter to be doted upon and took up Karlheinz's offer of showing me how to make classic German bratwursts (his rendition of them naturally). He'd made a batch before our trip out there last weekend, and they're really awesomely good.
I brought along my KitchenAid stand mixer as it has a stronger motor than my dad's, and after lunch, we set to work.
First is the meat (all pork) - the ratio is 8 parts shoulder to 2 parts belly. If you want slightly moister sausages you can go 7 to 3. You want the meat ground coarsely - I learned that commercial ground meat is actually twice ground, but as a general rule for sausage you just want it run through once.
Then after mixing the secret seasoning recipe (secret = I'm not going to post it) you sprinkle it over the ground meat (we had 6.5kg of it), you knead it. Like bread dough. Aggressive, hard, making sure you mix in all the seasonings well and thoroughly. And you know what - if you want to see how the taste is, to make sure the seasoning is right, you taste it. Raw.
Now, I'm sure lots of people will freak out - but that's because we've been conditioned to avoid raw meat, especially chicken, as if it were radioactive waste. But let me tell you something - it was GOOD. So good in fact, that last week I spread some of the "we ran out of casing" sausage meat straight onto bread. Mmm mmm mmm. It's really no different in any fundamental way from steak tartare.
Once the meat has been worked, it becomes quite firm, very much like bread dough when it's ready. The proteins in meat have the same reaction to the kneading as the glutens in flour.
We let the meat mixture sit for about an hour to let the flavours infuse (that, and we went and had lunch). After lunch, we went down and set up the KitchenAid with all the attachments and got to work.
Slipping sausage casing onto the end of the nozzle where the meat comes out suggests and looks exactly like what you think it might, and no doubt contributes to the notion that those who love the law and sausages should watch neither being made.
Once the casing was ready, you need two people - one to feed the meat into the machine, one to deal with the extrusion of meat into the casing. To process 6.5kg of prepared meat took us about 40-45 minutes. I joked at the start that I would probably get the hang of it about the time we were almost done, and I was right.
It was interesting to me that we did the links only after the casing (about 2m long) was filled. At Dubrulle we made the links as we went along (using artifical collagen casing), but Karlheinz did it after the fact and showed me the easy technique to do it - at least it looked easy, kinda like how an old Italian grandmother makes fresh pasta look easy.
After the sausages were in links, they were hung to dry. The sausages "settle" into the casing, and also change colour. The sausage recipe we made is very flexible. You can cook them as bratwursts of course, but you could also let them dry out in a cool room and in about eight days they'll go from fresh to coated in white (salt) to turning red (cured). You can also cold smoke them (aka Mettwurst) and then cook them or spread it raw on toast (sprinkled with a little bit of onion, mmmm...).
The local JN&Z deli said any time I want sausage casing I can just book ahead, and that if I like they'll make me 50lbs of sausage to whatever recipe I like. I might just take them up on that, especially as I'm not getting a side of pork this fall.
11 September 2007
Nostalgia for Sale - SOLD!
In my last year of high school, I became best friends with "the new kid". Mark's step dad was the manager at CKDA, 1200AM, the local rock station. AM radio was still cool in those days, albums vinyl things you had to flip over half way through and came with covers with cool artwork and liner notes. CD's were on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and mp3's and iPod's weren't even a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye - heck, he and Wos were still selling Apple IIe's.
One of the perks of being the manager of the local rock station was free concert tickets. One of the perks of being best friends with the son of said manager was getting to go to the concerts with him (until he got a girlfriend, but then that's how these stories go - I still remember her breaking up with him just before Dire Straits was in town the day "Money For Nothing" hit #1 on the charts, so I got to thank her for that ticket).
It was March of 1985, and Mark said "Hey, my dad got me some tickets for the concert this Saturday, wanna go?"
"I guess so. Who's playing?"
"Al Stewart."
"Who's he?"
"I dunno, never heard of him."
"Ok!"
I need to mention that this was the first "real" concert I'd been to - ever. I loved music, had tons of LP's, but I'd never been to a rock concert.
That Saturday, my musical landscape changed. Al and his band totally blew me away - and Mark too for that matter. I didn't stop listening to the bands that I'd always listened to before, but something had definitely changed - an appreciation for the sense of musical craftsmanship was born. It was a musical epiphany, the like of which I did not experience again until I heard the Comedian Harmonists (through the biopic The Harmonists on New Years Eve 1999).
As Fate had it, I was looking on eBay yesterday and I stumbled across ... the promotional poster for that 1985 concert. It was being sold by one of the guys who was on stage that night, Steve Recker.
I bought it. It was obviously meant to be.
09 September 2007
Book it Danno
We've been planning a trip to Europe for a while and we've finally booked our tickets. We used Aeroplan points to do it - 180,000 points and $849 later, we're all set for next April/May.
$849 might sound like a lot, but the regular fare would have been $3187.78. We can spend some of the over $2K savings on good food and wine while we're over there.
$849 might sound like a lot, but the regular fare would have been $3187.78. We can spend some of the over $2K savings on good food and wine while we're over there.
05 September 2007
Pumping Iron
Well, for the past four weeks I've been working on Lisa's "100 program", and today I did 5 rounds of sets of 20, or 100.
Yay me!
So, because it's nerdy, and annoys people who know that it doesn't work that way, I rowed 4,000 lbs, pressed 3,500lbs, and squatted 23,900lbs.
Yay me!
So, because it's nerdy, and annoys people who know that it doesn't work that way, I rowed 4,000 lbs, pressed 3,500lbs, and squatted 23,900lbs.
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