Studio711.com – Ben Martens

New National Wilderness In Idaho

sawtoothnationalrecreationYou may have seen the news about Obama recently creating a new wilderness area in Idaho. Since I’m not a rancher in the area who would rather use the land for something else, I’m happy to see more land set aside. Coming from the eastern half of the US, it still amazes me how much of the Pacific Northwest is federal (or state) protected land. It sure creates a nice recreational area!

I try to avoid getting too political, but as we run up to a new presidential election, I think this is a good time to point out one silly point of this story. You’ve heard all the stories and read all the headlines. Who is responsible for making this area a protected wilderness? Most people would probably say Obama. And sure, he was the final guy to sign the bill, but what about all of the senators and representatives that voted for this. What about Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho who spent the last 15 years trying to get this to happen? And what about the nameless people down at the city and county level who have been fighting for this too. As I’ve said before, our president’s name gets attached to lots of stuff (both good and bad), but they are rarely to credit or blame for any of it. When you vote in November, you’re voting for the head of our public relations team. So don’t get too excited or too bent out of shape about who wins or loses. Focus that energy around your local city government which really has an impact on your life.

benmartens August 25, 2015 Commentary

Meat Week – Chicken Breasts

meatweekchickenWhen I think of chicken breasts on the grill, I think of dried out meat. After reading a couple articles this summer, our chicken breasts are tasting delicious of the grill. Here are a couple things that are part of my grilling plan:

  • Thin out the chicken breasts. Put them in a bag and pound them to a constant thickness. This makes it possible to grill the whole piece evenly.
  • Marinate! Give it a full 24 hours. If you’re using skinless chicken, don’t put any lemon in the marinade because it will “cook” the outer part of the chicken. You can find plenty of marinade recipes online but I usually just throw stuff in a bag and it’s a little different every time. I usually do something like olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano and minced garlic.
  • Get the grill hot! I put it on the grill at about 500-550 degrees. If you flip it over and it sticks to the grill, you needed to let it wait longer before you flipped it. Your goal is to cook the chicken as quickly as possible (within reason) so that it doesn’t dry out.
benmartens August 24, 2015 Food

Meat Week – Ribs

meatweekribsI’ve only made ribs once in my life and it was one of those prepackaged deals from Safeway. We cooked it in the oven. This time I picked up loin back ribs from the butcher and did them on the grill. Doing them on a gas grill is pretty much the same as doing them in the oven but it worked ok. This meal was probably the dud from the meat week menu. The ribs weren’t terrible but I cooked them too long and they weren’t super awesome. Here’s the recipe/instructions that I used: http://www.food.com/recipe/foolproof-baby-back-ribs-88204

benmartens August 21, 2015 Food

Edge Browser Extensions

microsoft-edge-browserI use Internet Explorer for most of my work and play but sometimes I also fire up Chrome. I love Chrome’s extension model for expanding the capabilities of the browser. I was very excited to hear that Edge (the new Windows 10 browser) is going to be supporting Chrome extensions! I haven’t flipped over to Edge yet because it doesn’t have any extensibility so I can’t run AdBlock or LastPass, but once they enable these extensions, I’ll be able to upgrade to Edge. It’s a great (and ambitious) idea. I hope they can pull it off cleanly.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-wants-google-chrome-extensions-to-work-on-edge-with-zero-work-to-do-488282.shtml

benmartens August 20, 2015 Geek

Meat Week – Steak

It’s no surprise that steak ended up on our grill as part of meat week. It’s a staple of grills around the country. One of our favorite steaks to grill is the boneless ribeye from Golden Steer. You may remember that this was the winning cut from our Meat Day.

Grilling these is pretty simple: I get the grill pretty warm (500-550), cook for 2 minutes, rotation 90 degrees and cook for another 2 minutes. Then I flip and after 2 minutes I rotate 90 degrees. That gives me those beautiful crosshatch grill marks on both sides. At that point, the steaks are pretty close to done but I’ll finish them off with a couple more minutes as needed to bring them up to ~130 internally.

The trick with steak (and most meat) is to let it sit out on your counter for 30-60 minutes before you grill it. You want to get it closer to room temperature so that you don’t have to raise the temperature as much when you are grilling. And then when you take the steak off the grill, let it rest for 5-10 minutes before you grill. This will result in a juicier steak (here’s why.)

meatweeksteak

benmartens August 19, 2015 Food

Kangaroo Farm

Tyla has wanted to visit the Outback Kangaroo Farm in Arlington for quite a while, so her birthday seemed like a good excuse to go. You pay $10/person an get a one hour tour around their facility. Imagine if someone you knew bought a kangaroo. And then another. And then 10 more. And then they bought some alpacas, lamas, donkeys, goats, tortoises, lemurs, peacocks, mini horses, ostriches and emus to go with them. You’d have the Outback Kangaroo Farm.

On the tour you get to feed and pet a lot of the animals. Tyla loved it and Elijah had fun too, though you can imagine that those animals look a lot bigger to him so he was a bit nervous at times.

It was a fun experience but probably not one that we need to repeat on a regular basis. It’s a great place to see some animals that you don’t normally see in the Pacific Northwest. And oh yeah, feeding the alpaca is done by putting a piece of food in your mouth and letting them kiss you…

kangaroofarm1kangaroofarm2kangaroofarm3kangaroofarm4kangaroofarm5

benmartens August 18, 2015 Family, Travel

Meat Week – Sausages

sausagesTyla and Elijah went to a birthday party one night so I was on my own for dinner. I had been to the butcher earlier that day and picked up a couple sausages: Italian and Hot. I wrote about grilling brats before and these are pretty much exactly the same, but that didn’t make them any less delicious.

Since this is kind of a repeat post, I’ll throw in a little trivia tidbit for you: Golden Steer butcher has a lot of different sausages to choose from. They make all of them on site except for the brats. Those come from Bavarian Meets because Golden Steer sells so many it’s not efficient for them to try and make them all. This explains why the brats are a dollar more per pound than the other sausages.

benmartens August 17, 2015 Food

Meat Week – Huli Huli Chicken

Mom has been telling me about this recipe for quite a while, and I finally got around to making it. It’s made with chicken thighs which we don’t usually have around the house so that was my excuse. The end result was really delicious though and this is very easy to throw together.
hulihuli

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/3 cup ketchup
  • 1/3 soy sauce
  • 3 Tblsp. red wine or chicken broth
  • 1/4 tsp. ginger
  • 3/4 tsp. minced garlic
  • 12 boneless skinless chicken thighs

Directions

  • In a small bowl, mix the first six ingredients. Place chicken thighs in a large resealable bag; pour the marinade on top of chicken. Seal the bag and turn to coat.
  • Refrigerate for 8 hours or overnight.
  • Drain and discard marinade from chicken. Moisten a paper towel with cooking oil; using long handled tongs lightly coat the grill rack.
  • Grill chicken, covered, over medium heat for 6-8 minutes on each side or until no longer pink.
benmartens August 14, 2015 Food

Windows 10 Thoughts

windows-10Windows 10 is a big deal, and I have lots of thoughts about it. Instead of splitting them up into a bunch of posts, I’ll try to list them all here and you can pick and choose what might be interesting to you.

Should you upgrade?
If you’re an early adopter, you’ve probably already upgraded to Windows 10. Good! I’ve done it on most of my machines, but if you’re not in a hurry then it’s fine to wait. I’m waiting for a month or two to upgrade Tyla’s computers and I won’t upgrade the computers at church until January or February. However, you should definitely upgrade before about June next year. Microsoft is giving free upgrades for one year. Don’t miss out!

If you do upgrade now, the one change that I recommend is to not use the new Microsoft Edge browser as your default. At least that’s what I’m doing on my machine. I really like the new browser and it is super fast, but it also doesn’t support any plugins yet and that’s a deal breaker for me. I like to run AdBlock and LastPass and I can’t do that in Edge yet. Support for plugins is coming later this fall and it’s going to be awesome because Edge will support Chrome plugins! To change your default browser, open the start menu and search for “default web browser”.

What does it mean that “Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows”?
You hear this a lot in the media and even from Microsoft. What it probably means is that there won’t be a Windows 11. We’ll just see incremental changes to Windows 10. This is similar to how Apple has been handling updates to their operating system for the last few years. You’ll get feature updates on a more regular basis, but I’m sure there will still be plenty of marketing and fanfare around some of the releases.

Will I like it better than Windows 7 or Windows 8.1?
I’m the wrong one to ask about this. In fact, the question makes me a bit cranky because people love to talk about how much Windows 8 stinks. I find that most people dislike it because of a couple tiny UI things like the start screen and the charms bar. If that’s enough for you to hate it, fine. Everyone gets their opinion. Personally I almost never see those UI things and it doesn’t bother me at all. I love the additional OS features that are available in Windows 8 like Storage Spaces, Hyper-V, and more.

In general, I think people will be more receptive to Windows 10 than Windows 8 for the simple reason that it has a start menu. So many people get stuck on that one tiny fragment of the operating system, and there, now you have it. You also have ~5 years of awesome new features that have been developed while you were still on Windows 7. Welcome to the future!

Why is Microsoft offering it for free?
There are lots of articles about how Microsoft is dramatically changing their business model by offering Windows 10 for free. This statement oversimplifies the situation. First of all, they are only offering free upgrades to home users who already have a legal license for Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. The vast majority of Windows income comes from enterprise sales and sales of new PCs. Neither of these money makers is included in this free offer. Sure, it’s a big deal and I’m happy about this offer, but it’s not like half of the company’s money is disappearing.

People who state this also fail to comprehend where Microsoft makes their money. Lots of media people only think about the consumer facing stuff: Windows, Office, Xbox, Phone. They forget that there is a third pillar that as big as Windows and Office (and is growing much faster): Cloud and Enterprise. This team has a whole bunch of new billion dollar business and the growth rate of some of these products is incredible. For example, Azure had triple digit year over year growth in both revenue!

How did they make the picture for the Windows 10 logon page?
Nobody has asked me this question, but it has a cool answer. Check out this video to see behind the scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL8BBOwupcI It’s an actual photo, not something designed on the computer.

benmartens August 13, 2015 Geek

Meat Week – Pizza

Ok, this isn’t just a chunk of meat, so maybe I should have called this “Grill Month” or something. The name needs work. Whatever you call it, we’re still going strong on our streak of only having dinner from the grill.

We like to get pizza from Papa Murphy’s. It’s a “take and bake” place meaning that they make the pizza for you and then you bake it at home. They have grilling instructions and I decided to give it a shot.

The pizza came out really well. I used an aluminum pizza pan with holes in it as the barrier between the grill and the paper tray on the bottom of the Papa Murphy’s pizza. The crust was nice and crispy and there weren’t any burned spots. It tasted pretty much the same as it would from the oven which makes sense because all I did was basically use the gas grill as an oven. We’ve made our own pizzas from scratch and cooked them on the grill before but this worked significantly better.

We aren’t able to cook two pizzas simultaneously in our oven very effectively so maybe this would be a good way to cook the second pizza if we’re trying to get two of them out around the same time.

grilledpizza

benmartens August 12, 2015 Food