Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Smothered Chicken Queso Casserole

I recently made this recipe for the first time and it instantly went onto our favorites list. Yum! It comes straight from the Betty Crocker website. I just modified the instructions a little because I need the dummy reminder to make the rice. Apparently having “cooked rice” in the ingredients list isn’t enough for me.

Ingredients
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 3 large boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut in half lengthwise
• 1 package (1 oz) Old El Paso™ taco seasoning mix
• 1 jar (15 oz) Tostito’s™ salsa con queso
• 3/4 cups half-and-half
• 1 can (4.5 oz) Old El Paso™ chopped green chiles
• 1 medium red or orange bell pepper, seeded, chopped
• 2 1/2 cups cooked white rice
• 1 cup shredded Mexican cheese blend (4 oz)
• Chopped tomatoes (optional)

• Cilantro (optional)

 

Directions
1. Heat oven to 350°F. Spray 13 x 9-inch baking dish or 2 1/2-quart casserole with cooking spray.
2. Make rice
3. In 12-inch skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Sprinkle chicken with taco seasoning mix. Cook chicken in oil 6 to 8 minutes, turning once, until golden brown on both sides. Depending on thickness of chicken, it may not be cooked all the way through at this point but will finish baking in the oven.
4. In large bowl, stir together salsa con queso, half-and-half and chopped green chiles; stir in bell pepper. Reserve one-fourth of the sauce mixture.
5. Stir rice into remaining sauce mixture.
6. Place rice mixture in casserole; top with chicken. Top with reserved sauce mixture, then shredded cheese. Cover with foil.
7. Bake 20 minutes; uncover and bake 10 to 15 minutes longer or until sauce bubbles and juice of chicken is clear when center of thickest part is cut (at least 165°F).
Cool 10 minutes. Garnish with tomatoes and cilantro.

Recycling Fire

One of the afternoons over my Christmas break, I heard a truck idling in the cul-de-sac for 10 minutes or so. That’s usually some kind of delivery truck so I hollered down to Tyla and Elijah that they might want to check it out since Elijah likes that kind of thing.

Elijah ran to the front bay window and could see part of the truck. “Mommy? Why is that truck smoking?” Huh!? Tyla took him outside and saw a recycling truck parked there. It was indeed smoking and a nervous driver was walking around with a fire extinguisher. Tyla said, “Is everything ok?” “Uh… yeah… yeah… everything’s ok.”

It wasn’t.

A few minutes later, our little street was full of firetrucks. They unrolled the hoses and hooked up to the fire hydrant on our street. (Neighbors claimed it’s the first time that hydrant has been used in the 26 years since it was put in.)

The fire was somewhere in the recycling that the truck had picked up. The firemen quickly determined that they would have a hard time putting it out inside the truck. Also, it was a natural gas truck and they were nervous about some of the piping that runs over the bed of the truck. So how do you solve that problem? “DUMP THE LOAD!”

As the driver was dumping it, you could see flames coming out. The firemen dove in with rakes and the water hoses and had the fire out in a matter of minutes.

That whole process probably didn’t take more than 10 minutes. Then it was cleanup mode. The firemen rolled up all their hoses and handed out hats to the kids that had gathered around. Elijah was nervous but loved seeing all the fire trucks so close by.

After the firemen left, they had to leave the pile in place for the inspector. Tyla chatted with him briefly and learned that the root cause was someone who had thrown hot fireplace ashes in the recycling. Smart.

After the inspector was done, a dumpster got dropped off. Then a cleanup crew showed up with a Bobcat and a backpack blower to load everything into the dumpster. The dumpster got picked up and eventually a street cleaner came for the final pass.

I was really impressed with how Waste Management handled the whole thing. I’m sure this isn’t the first time it has happened, but they did a great job. They had someone on site managing the cleanup until the pile was gone and the contractors they used did a good job of cleaning up the street and our yard (about 5% of the garbage ended up in our planter area and yard.) We still pick up some small pieces of trash in the yard every now and then but overall, I’m amazed at how good it looks and little they damaged our yard.

Best of YouTube

Let’s dive right in. Nachos on the grill? Yes please.

I’ve only recently started digging into the back catalog of the crew at Bad Lip Reading. There are so many fantastic videos on that channel, but here’s one of my favorites from The Hunger Games.

This last one isn’t on YouTube, but it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. I rarely laugh out loud when I’m watching something alone, but while I watched this one I was laughing so hard that I was crying. It’s episode 4 of The Grand Tour. This is the new version of Top Gear with Clarkson, May and Hammond. The whole season has been fantastic but this was my favorite episode so far. If you have Amazon Prime, it’s free to watch.

Chicken Carbonara

My standard cooking schedule for the week is to make something on Sunday that takes a little longer and gives us leftovers for a couple nights. Then on Tuesday or Wednesday, I make something quick in 20-30 minutes. It’s hard finding great recipes that only take that long, but I recently found this one and it quickly got added to our list. Deeeelicious and easy.

Ingredients
• 1 package (7 ounces) spaghetti
• 3/4 pound of bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
• 2 cups cut-up cooked chicken
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup whipping (heavy) cream

 

Directions
1. Cook and drain spaghetti as directed on package.
2. Cook chicken.
3. While spaghetti is cooking, cook bacon in 3-quart saucepan over low heat 8 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until crisp. Remove bacon from saucepan with slotted spoon; drain. Drain fat from saucepan, reserving 1 tablespoon in saucepan.
4. Cook onion and garlic in bacon fat over medium heat about 3 minutes, stirring frequently, until onion is tender.
5. Stir in spaghetti, chicken, cheese and whipping cream.
6. Cook, stirring occasionally, until heated through. Toss with bacon.

Delicious Bookmarks

For the last 11 years, I’ve been storing all of my internet bookmarks on a site called delicious.com. When you save a bookmark, you associate a bunch of words (tags) with it and then you can easily search for bookmarks via the tags again later. For example, if I want to see all the bookmarks that I tagged with “map”, I just go to https://del.icio.us/bwmartens/map.

Unfortunately the site seems to be dying. Yahoo acquired it in 2005 and it was doing very well until Yahoo went down the tubes. Ownership has changed a few times since 2011 and I’m worried that some day soon it’s just going to disappear. They got rid of the delicious.com domain and are now only available under their original domain: del.icio.us. That broke a lot of the apps and extensions that had been built up around the site.

The biggest concern to me was that their export functionality was gone. So the 2600+ bookmarks I had saved there were in a black hole. I need very few of those but I regularly use it to pull up old bookmarks with solutions to various problems, especially for issues I encounter at work. So I set off on a journey to figure out how to get the bookmarks exported by myself. That proved to be tricky because their API is now shut down. I couldn’t even write my own app to export the bookmarks.

I came up with two ideas:

  1. The pages of bookmarks are easily accessible via this URL format: https://del.icio.us/bwmartens?&page=2 so I could download each page and then write a program that would convert the raw HTML of the bookmark list into something readable by another app. I actually did download all the pages since it was pretty simple. curl.exe is a great command line tool for downloading HTML and I quickly wrote a batch file that downloaded all 200+ pages of HTML. At least I had something in case it died the next day.
  2. I eventually found a Chrome browser extension (Delicious Bookmark Bar Sync 1.1) that still worked and would let me export my bookmarks. It ended up saving them into the Chrome bookmark list (each tag becomes a folder) which isn’t ideal, but it is possible to export bookmarks from Chrome so again, at least I have something.

Now that I know I have a fairly easy way to export my bookmarks periodically, I’m still using Chrome. This doesn’t seem to be a very popular product category anymore so I haven’t found a lot of other options. Google Bookmarks is a similar service but they don’t allow you to bulk import bookmarks. That’s such an obvious feature that it makes me wonder if Google is going to kill off that product some day too.

If you have a good bookmark tagging solution, please shoot me a note!

New Media

I probably get 3/4 of my video entertainment from YouTube. There is so much incredible content being produced. Not only is it a great way to learn stuff and be entertained, but it’s fun to be able to interact with the content producers too. When is the last time your favorite TV star replied to your tweet, liked your Instagram photo, thanked you by name in their book or sent you a t-shirt in the mail? All of those things have happened to me in the last couple months from content producers on YouTube.

The latest one is a t-shirt that Bob Claggett from I Like To Make Stuff sent to thank me for my support. Well thank YOU Bob! It’s so much fun to interact with the same people who are providing my evening entertainment, and it feels much more rewarding to support these people than to give money to random Hollywood people.

I’m not saying that everybody should stop watching standard TV/movies and watch YouTube creators, but if you are at all interested in doing some of that, there is a LOT of good stuff to watch. Here are some of my favorites:

If you like a YouTube creator, one of the best things you can do to help them out is clicking that Subscribe button! And most of these people have Patreon accounts too if you want to contribute a buck or two directly to them every month.

2016 Fantasy Stats

I’m a data nerd and I love to dig into the fantasy stats a little deeper. Here are some records and stats from this season:

  • Austin had the most points this season from players that he drafted (1608.14). Tim had the least (1055.46).
  • Tim had the most points from players acquired after the draft (627.62). Luke had the least (76.1).
  • Logan made the most roster moves (37) and ended up first. Luke made the least (2) and ended up last. Hmm… the 37 roster moves by Logan were the most we’ve ever seen in one season. And the 2 moves by Luke were the least we’ve ever seen.

I did a quick calculation to see if the number of roster moves is correlated with your finishing rank. It isn’t correlated, but the average number of roster moves for teams that finish in 1st place (16) is slightly higher than the average (13) over all our previous seasons combined.

Dad asked for a rundown of our average finishes. I went back through 2012 which is when we started having the current group of teams and here’s what I came up with.

Team Average Finish Worst Finish Best Finish
Logan 2.4 6 1
Ben 3.2 4 1
Austin 3.8 8 1
Andy 4.2 7 2
Jim 5 8 2
Tim 5.2 7 3
Dad 6 8 3
Luke 6.2 8 5

And finally, here are the top players in the league for each position:

Player Position Points Owner
Aaron Rodgers QB 460.02 Ben
Matt Ryan QB 423.46 Ben
Drew Brees QB 406.32 Austin
Antonio Brown WR 258.96 Logan
Jordy Nelson WR 256.2 Andy
Mike Evans WR 256.1 Dad
David Johnson RB 367.8 Andy
Ezekiel Elliott RB 309.4 Ben
Le’Veon Bell RB 279.9 Austin
Travis Kelce TE 180.5 Luke
Kyle Rudolph TE 167.5 Tim
Greg Olsen TE 167.3 Andy
Matt Bryant K 178 Free agent
Justin Tucker K 175 Logan
Caleb Sturgis K 149 Free agent
Kansas City DEF 207.86 Austin
Minnesota DEF 193.89 Free agent
Philadelphia DEF 177.34 Dad

 

Wooden Blocks

Tyla found some big wooden blocks and thought it might be fun for Elijah’s Christmas list. I balked at the $130 price tag and said “That’s ridiculous. I could build that for $30.” I now suspect that I fell right into her trap. Well played.

I found a “unit block” standard size of wood blocks that dates back to the early 1900s. That seemed good enough for me. As that Wikipedia link will tell you, “A unit block is 5.5 inches long, 2.75 inches wide, and 1.375 inches thick.” I used that as my base and made a couple variations on that block size. Figuring out how much wood to buy turned into a bit of a mind bender, but I ended up with the following block dimensions: 4x2x1, 2x2x2, 2x2x1 and 8x2x1 (where 1 = 1.375″).

I wanted to use cheap wood but I decided to get poplar from the wood dealer instead of using pine from Home Depot. The prices are about the same, but the poplar is a lot more stable than the wet/warped pine boards at Home Depot. I bought a lot of 6/4 (1.5″ thick) wood for most of the blocks and then a couple feet of 12/4 (3″ thick) for the cubes.

After doing this project, I actually recommend it if you are just getting started with milling your own lumber. Getting all of the blocks to be exactly the same size is a great challenge.

That part went pretty quickly and then it was a LOT of time at the sander. I already have 80 grit paper for my stationary belt sander, but I also picked up 150 grit. That sped up the process quite a bit.

If I ever do this again, I’ll do a couple things differently:

  • If I was really shooting for those exact final dimensions as specified in the standard, I should have made the blocks SLIGHTLY thicker when I was cutting them to account for the losses during sanding. Poplar is pretty soft wood so it sands easily.
  • I ran everything through a round over bit between cutting the blocks and sanding them. That was a waste of time as the sanding removed most of the roundover. I should have either just done it by hand with the sander or maybe used the roundover bit at the very end (with more touchup sanding on the edges after the router bit was done.)

Because I cut things a little too closely when trying to figure out which boards would give me the least amount of waste, I didn’t end up with as many blocks as I planned, but Elijah couldn’t care less. He loves these and they’ve been getting regular use.

 

RumFriday.com

Take a second and check out rumfriday.com. Ha! That’s right! I finally own it.

What is Rum Friday? It’s pretty complicated. See if you can stay with me here: you drink rum… on Friday. Why? Umm… why not?

I don’t have any big plans for the domain name, but I’m happy to add it to the collection. I should have bought it years ago when I first looked but I delayed and then someone snagged it. They finally let it go and I anxiously waited through the period between their last payment and it being released to the general populace again.

So for now it just points to this blog along with these other domains:

  • benmartens.com
  • benandtyla.com
  • martensfamily.net
  • ctrlaltben.com
  • elijahmartens.com (points to Elijah’s facebook page)
  • tylamartens.com (points to Tyla’s facebook page)

If you’ve never bought a domain name before, it’s incredibly easy. Use a registrar like hover.com or godaddy.com, pay about $10/year and you’re done. You can just have it point to your Facebook page or anywhere you want. And if you pay a little bit more, you can get email forwarding set up so that any email sent to you at that domain name gets redirected to your regular email.

Christmas Music

Christmas is always a special time for music at our church so I try to record as much of it as I can. This year I ended up posting TWELVE videos from the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. It as a lot of editing! This was the first time that I’ve done the AV work for a big holiday service using our new amplifier and speakers. It was awesome to be able to mic up the singers and actually balance them individually so that they could both be clearly heard. I want to find out a way to add some more mics but our setup is pretty simple/limited.

I’ll embed a couple of the videos below, but you can view them all on our YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/calvarylutheranwa I created a few playlists to help organize the content (Sermons, Music, and the school kids.) From Christmas there is 1 sermon video and 11 music videos.