What to have with this bread?

I made a loaf with my wild dough starter.

What should I make to go with it?  How about a terrine.

Pork liver and trimmings cut up.

Time to grind it up.

 Need some veggies to fold in.

After grinding, time for blending the meat into one mass using the food processor.

 Fold in above veggies and then put into pan.

How about some brussel sprouts to go with that?

 Look at the crumb on that bread!

Progress on projects

Time for a PoP report!

I posted a little something on Magic Wash.  Here is the final product.

With the Egyptians and Hittites finally finished, I turn my attention to the Romans and Carthaginians.

I finally got my M7 priest painted to complete my U.S. 1944 armored division.

Almost done with the Hellcats, coming up soon...

Reckless Abandon

It's a song, it's a book, it's the title of a blog post on the Hellyer Half Marathon.

Hell yes.

I very badly want to break the 1 hour 45 minute time mark for a half.  It's a milestone.  Not only is it an even 5 minute marker, like 2 hour, 1 hour 55, 1 hour 50, etcetera.  But it is a quarter of an hour faster than I ever thought I could be.  And, perhaps more importantly, it would mean I could run faster than an 8 minute mile for 13 miles.  It also represents a pace that I might be able to turn into a Boston Qualifying time.

Of course that means running 26.2 miles - hmmmm.

I picked Hellyer because my wife wanted to go to a family reunion for spring break.  I looked at the two weeks I would need for recovery after Monterey, and the time I would need to adequately train, and the time for the reunion.  Hellyer was close to my location, the perfect date, I could eat at Maurizio's the night before, and I found two blogs from runners who had PR'd on this course.

Training started out fairly typical.  I'm still struggling to find a place for hill sprints in the weekly routine.  Mostly I tend to fit them in on Monday during my weight lifting.  Treating them like they are type of resistance training and not a variation on running seems to help.  I even got a few hill sprints in on Wednesday after doing intervals.  That ended once the longer "Strength" runs began.  But I continued to work them in on Monday.

Following the training paces strictly for the Monterey half did not net me a PR or the pace I was supposedly training for. Thinking upon this, I realized that I typically hold a "Strength" pace on race day whatever that may be.  So if I'm running 8:05s for my strength runs, then it is an 8:05 I can expect to hold for my race.  With this in mind, I was determined to keep strength training under 8 minute miles.

This wasn't easy.  In the past I create little mantras or mentalities to get me to a knew pace.  Most recently this has been "Breathe hard and don't stop running."  The idea being if I am breathing hard then I'm running as hard as I can.  Unfortunately that wasn't netting me better than an 8:10.  So one day while feeling frustrated that I couldn't hold a sub-8, I had the phrase "Reckless Abandon" pop into my brain.  My eyes half close, my right hand goes limp like Deadpool's after he struck Colossus with his bare fist, and as I peek down through my squinty eyes I see I am running a 7:40 pace.

For interval training I was determined to hold a 7:30 or better and managed this:

I also set new records in my 5k and 10k times, finally breaking the 50 minute barrier in the 10k.
  
Strength training came along and I was mostly successful at holding a sub-8 pace.  It was the "mostly" part that was most worrisome.  

When I ran Merced, I knew I was going to PR.  It was just a matter of by how much.  For this run I was much less sure.  There is some sort of psychological block in my mind to anything faster than an 8 minute per mile pace.

As I began my taper, my doubt grew.  The day before I started carb loading, never done that consciously before.  I had potatoes and eggs for breakfast.  Normally I'm on an intermittent fasting routine, and breakfast is a no-no.  I had ramen for lunch, and pasta for dinner.  Maurizio's had spaghetti and meatballs as a specialty - Ragu de Bologna no less.  I had two glasses of Pinot Grigio.

I also took a nap on Saturday, and went to bed early the night before the race.  We stayed at the Wyndham Garden in south San Jose.  I told my wife I was pretty sure that it wasn't going to happen, but I would run the race at a comfortable pace and get their cool race medal. 



The first few mile weren't bad at all - as usual.  I ran without my running watch.  Perhaps this is a mistake and I would run smarter if I had it with me to keep me from starting too fast.

I broke through the crowd and found myself pacing and being paced by an elderly gentleman.  I'm pretty sure he was older than me.  He got tired of my too leisurely pace and went to hang with the group I was following and would follow for most of the race.

Hellyer is an interesting course.  You start outside of the park.  Run down a relatively short driveway to the park trail and then turn left, proceed for several miles to a loop, turn around, run back past the point you entered the trail down to another more complex loop.  Here you turn around again and go back to the driveway and up to the finish line.  They started their 5k and 10k runners after us.  I thought this was a mistake.

Turning back on the first loop we encountered the 5k runners and things got crowded.  I had to pick up pace past the comfort point to go around a runner with a double stroller.  This was a public park and there were pedestrians and bicyclists to work around.  On the second loop we contended with 10k runners.  There were fewer of them and it wasn't much of a problem.

I stopped at all the drink stops, except the last one, and alternated between water and electrolytes.  Somebody pacing me passed me at these points, but I always caught up with them.  Around the 5k runners I passed this pacer while going past the stroller and never saw this runner again until coming back from the second loop.  They never caught me.  The group I was pacing became smaller, until only two remained, including the elderly fellow who had paced me at the beginning.

Things are starting to hurt, and I start thinking, "Reckless Abandon."  I turn to my forefeet for extra speed and goose past some more people.

There were hills, and frankly, too many of them.  I thought, once again, I would never be able to PR this.  I was pretty certain my stride broke down the last 3 or so miles.  I lost the two I had been pacing.  I thought, "Why am I doing this to myself?" And, "This is so not worth it." And, "Never again!"

I'm getting close to the end, past the last loop, and hear from a guy going out to the loop tell his running partner it had been 1 hour 39 minutes.  I think, "Oh crap, maybe I do have a shot!"  So I turn to, "Breathe hard, and never stop running."


As I come in I see 1:43:"seconds ticking away," and I dig deep for whatever I have left, but knowing I'm going to PR. I came in with a smile on my face.

1 hour 43 minutes and 37 seconds.  The top 25% for gender, but strangely only 6th out of 11 in my age group.  There were a lot of fast 50-54 year olds in this race.

Magic Wash

Google "Magic Wash Miniatures," and you open up a can of worms.  What is magic wash?  How do you make it?  What proportions of paint and diluent do you use?  I've tried all types of concoctions with different ingredients.



I even bought food grade propylene glycol - retards drying.  Also not pictured above are the flow aids, and professional drying retardants recommended as ingredients by various people.

Some people swear by magic wash for priming.  You prime in white, magic wash on some black and it highlights all of the details, and puts the crevices into shadow.  Using relatively transparent acrylics it can really enhance the effect of shadows and highlights.

With my aging eyes, I need something like this.  White primer is too bright to see details, and any missed spots practically shout "WHITE" at you in the final miniature.  Black priming is so dark, again making it difficult to see detail, and requiring several layers of acrylics to cover.  It is such a chore.  I even tried black priming with white drybrushing for years.  It is very costly in brushes, and still too time consuming.

I've sprayed with white primer followed with a spray on varnish to improve flow of pigment into the cracks.  I tried changing up the amount of water I used in the mix to avoid the "ring effect."

Finally, I reduced it to just the "Quick Shine" mixed with just enough "Surface Primer."



Good enough.  Time to start painting.

A Cheesy Revolution

I tried making cheese once.  Here is the original article.  I had a book.


This is not the most intuitive book.  The author describes acid as the catalyst in curd formation, which is an understandable mistake.

I thought I would use organic milk, because my family has been trying to buy organic food in order to support a better food standard in the United States.  Turns out they ultra-pasteurize organic milk making it unsuitable for cheese making.  I was stubborn, and ended up with something that was cheese-like.

I used to regularly make sourdough bread and pizza.  You can read about how this started here.  I used to obsess about trying to keep my starter from dying, and finding the perfect hydration for the ultimate pizza dough.  Then one day, over a year ago, I let go.  I put some of the starter in the back top shelf of my refrigerator and left it alone, unattended.  Several times I have thought about throwing it out.  Today I did throw it out.

My wife was cleaning out the fridge and found my old liquid rennet.  She put it where I could see it and I threw it out, then went to work.  At work I kept thinking about cheese making.  I came home and went over some Youtube videos.  I remembered there was a pretty simple cheese using just acid and heat to create the curds.  I found some videos demonstrating how easy that process was. I looked at my lemon tree outside.

So I went to the grocery store and bought two gallons of milk, not organic, not ultra-pasteurized.  I went home, started heating a gallon of milk, and collected some lemons from the tree.  I found my butter muslin from the previous effort and set it up in a colander.  I pulled out my tomme and follower (cheese mold).  The process went pretty smoothly.  I got curds, put them in the colander to drain, transferred to the press, and...



Queso fresco con Limon.  This type of cheese is very crumbly and doesn't melt.  I believe the heat may drive off all of the meltable components of cheese (fats, heat sensitive proteins).  It was great with a couple of fried eggs and Tabasco sauce.

So Milk (not ultra-pasteurized), plus acid (lemon), plus catalyst (heat).   For the second attempt: Milk, plus acid (produced by bacterial culture), plus catalyst (RENNET).

So my simple schema, what I believe, and have evidence for, is the foundation of all cheese:
1. Milk
2. Acid - either as a chemical (think vinegar or citric acid), or bacterial fermentation (my preference).
3. Catalyst - heat, and/or Rennet

The original Rennet comes from a cow's stomach and therefore likes an acidic environment.   Raw milk has bacteria that given the time will turn the milk sour with acid. One of the videos on Youtube stressed the importance of this in their cheese making.  The first cheese was probably just some milk being stored in a calf stomach container.

I started thinking about how to optimize the cheese making conditions. My semester in Biochemistry Lab, and the lab on enzyme optimization was put to use.  It turns out pH is also critical in other aspects of cheese making - like mozzarella, where the curds need to be stretchable.

I had bought some vegetarian Rennet tablets.  My daughter is vegetarian, and I want her to be able to try my cheese.  I still had some of the thermophilic culture in the freezer.  My microbiological background told me that a frozen, lyophilized bacterial culture was still going to be useful, even if a year old.

Batch number 2 with thermophilic culture (still working great btw) and Vegetarian Rennet came out well.  Enzymatics and fermentation coming together to make wonder food.  I still don't have a cheese press with precise pounds of pressure, but hey, neither did the earliest cheese makers.  I'm thinking about cave man cheese now.  Here are some photos of process to aging:
 


In the brine



The one on the right is the thermophilic culture.  The one on the left was done using a mesophilic culture in an effort to make Mozzarella.  Mozzarella taught me humility, and the importance of pH in stretching curds.

So what about that sourdough?  I took a spoonful of the old culture and mixed it with 100 grams of organic flour and dechlorinated water.  It started right up.  So I threw the rest of the "old" culture out.

I tried making mozzarella (see above), but the curds didn't stretch.  Still I pressed the curds into a shape and then made pizza dough.  I'm out of practice.  I shouldn't have tried the 70% hydration, or put whey in the mix.  But I have a lot of whey from the flurry of cheese making, and it is really good for you in terms of protein.  It is great as an additive for all types of cooking.  I've used it in Ramen, Risotto, and gravies.  Still, I wasn't used to it in the pizza dough, and it goofed up the processing.  I pressed on.  Pizza Neapolitan:


You can see how my pseudo-mozzarella didn't melt all that great, and it wasn't stretchy at all.
I had a lot of sourdough starter, so I made pancakes:



Those bubbles are completely from wild yeast action, no baking soda or powders.
I put the rest of the starter into the fridge, top shelf.

The End of 2017

It is the last day of 2017.  No new PRs for this year,  but affirmation of my running in the low 8s with my new record at Monterey.  Training for a new Half in San Jose.  Left foot is still bothering me.  Ran 12 miles today at a 9:04 pace.  Goal pace was a 9:06 so that's good.

Made some bresaola.  A nice addition to soups, salads and omelets.

Opened up a 2007 Meritage.  It was super awesome!


Something new for wargaming.  My wargaming roots are in hex and counter boardgames.  I have few from my old 80s collection.  I picked up a new one last year and brought it out for some solo play.  Mark Herman's Empire of the Sun.




On the miniatures front:
I got the last of the Egyptians on their new bases.


These Union infantry will give me enough for the battle of Fort Donelson


And these were just finished.


Got some new ideas for my company level World War 2 rules from "Rommel" by Mustafa and a board game called Operation Dauntless.

So I'm hoping to accomplish the following for 2018:

1. Break the 1 hour 45 minute mark in a half-marathon.
2. Do a Mortain, or near Mortain scenario for the World War 2 collection.
3. Fight Fort Donelson with the Civil War stuff.
4. Rebase my Punic War figures to the new standard.
5. Put on a War of Spanish Succession battle.

Have a great new year!