Searching for Sous Vide

Part of my new heightened awareness of cooking is of a french process called "Sous Vide".  It means under vacuum and involves sealing your food in food safe plastic and cooking it in water under very controlled temperatures.  If you are cooking meat at 165 degrees, your meat will never be more than medium rare because the water temperature won't rise higher than that, so the meat temperature won't either.  Once you've finished cooking your meat it just needs a quick sear for carmelization and you'll always have a perfectly cooked, tender steak.  As one food network cook says:   "Yummo!".

But, as with any new process or toy, they always cost more in the beginning, and lack of cash, and lack of space in my tiny apartment kitchen made this far out of my reach.

Sous vide has now been around for quite a few years, and with sophistication of more home cooks, as well as a drop in the cost of manufacturing, sous vide is becoming more and more available for the home cook, and these toys are dropping in prices all the time!

A couple of months ago, I read about one of these toys called "The Codlo".  It's compact, doesn't look like it's about to take off for outer space, and was just getting ready to start looking for investors on Kickstarter.
I started a series of conversations with Grace Lee, one of the inventors on Facebook and Twitter.  Grace is a real foody, who attended cooking school in London, and shares my love of music and food.  I enjoyed our 140 character chats and facebook posts, and when her kickstarter campaign kicked off, I was one of the first inventors!

But, as an early investor, it means waiting months for my Codlo, so my quest for sous vide continues.

Next:  Getting closer to sous vide success!

Starting a new lifestyle

Did you ever get out of bed one day and decide you've been sleepwalking through life in a constant state of exhaustion?  It happened to me.

I've spent over 5 years working the overnight shift in my office -- until recently.  I've turned the calendar, realizing that I can't really put my finger on what I've done from one month to the next.  But I've been pushed out of my overnight shift back to the daylight.

I'm left my vampire life behind and now I am going to try to put my life together again.  It's not easy.

Over 5 years of hitting the vending machine for a snack because it wasn't safe to go out in the middle of the night for healthy food (as if ANYONE can call Denny's healthy!).  A drink in the middle of the night out of the machine is a coke, because that little bit of caffeine can keep you up until your shift ends.  Add the normal changes the passing of the years can take on your body, and I'm a mess!  

But now, my sun has come out!  Not only am I working more normal hours, but my job is now virtual.  My access to the snack machine and the soda machine has been cut off.  What's a woman to do?  It's time for a lifestyle change!

Since I was a teen I've enjoyed cooking.  The one think that passed the time away in those odd hours I was trying to stay awake was often the food network.  So now in my heightened awareness, I realize that I know a lot more about cooking than I used to.  The question is, what to do about it?

I've starting this blog to share some of my new adventures in the next few weeks.  I hope you join me in my story!