Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Cream Cheese Chicken

Always in search of new crock pot recipes, we decided to try out one called “cream cheese chicken.” You can click that link for the original or view my slightly modified version below. When we ate it, we each ate half a breast per meal. The sauce worked out about right for that but if you think each person will eat a whole breast, you might want less sauce (or more chicken.) The sauce is completely fantastic though. It really makes the meal!

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs chicken pieces
  • 1 (2/3 ounce) package Italian salad dressing mix
  • 4 tablespoons melted butter (divided)
  • 1 small onion, chopped
  • 1 garlic clove, chopped
  • 1 (10 1/2 ounce) can cream of chicken soup
  • 8 ounces cream cheese
  • 1/2 cup white wine
  • 1 package of frozen carrots and peas
  • 1 package of chopped mushrooms
  • 1 package of fettuccine noodles

Directions

  • Place chicken pieces in crock pot and sprinkle Italian seasoning over chicken. Sprinkle with 2 tablespoons melted butter.
  • Cook on low for 3-4 hours.
  • Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a sauce pan and sauté onion, mushrooms and garlic. Add Cream of Chicken Soup, cream cheese, wine, and veggies. Stir until smooth.
  • Add this mixture to crock pot and cook on low for an additional hour.
  • Serve with cooked fettuccine noodles
benmartens November 4, 2013 Food

Ender’s Game

The Ender’s Game movie launched this weekend. I’m excited to see it (probably at home after it comes out on disc) so I can’t tell you if the movie is any good or not. But the book? The book is fantastic. This is probably my favorite book of all time. There’s always the debate about whether you should read the book or watch the movie first. Both have their merits and I’ve done both. There’s no argument for this one though. You really need to read the book first. Why? Well I can’t tell you for the same reason you shouldn’t watch the movie first. I guess the only case where you should ever watch the movie first is if you have absolutely zero intention of ever reading the book.

If you enjoy the book, the next three books in the series form a trilogy and are good. I think there are 9 or 10 total books in the series and I feel like they kind of dwindle as you go. But if you’re reading by book 7 or 8, you’re probably so engrossed in Ender’s universe that you don’t care too much.

benmartens November 1, 2013 Books

NSA Gold Mine

So the NSA has all our data. All our web traffic, all our email, and even our encrypted traffic that they can unencrypt. That’s scary enough, but here’s something for you to chew on: what happens when this massive NSA storage facility gets hacked? You know that every hacker in the world is now trying to hit this place now that they know it exists. Sure the NSA has probably done a very good job sealing it up, but nothing is perfect. It’s only a matter of time before all that data on everyone gets leaked all over the internet. Then what!?

benmartens October 31, 2013 Commentary

Fantasy Football – Week 8

I only got to watch one game this week, but it was Monday night and what a game! It was a low-scoring, ugly affair, but the ending was terrific. Fourth and goal from the 2 and the Rams have 4 seconds to win the game. Do they run it like they’ve been running over the Seattle defense all night? Nope, they take their backup QB who has looked terrible all night and try to get him to throw against one of the best pass defenses in the league. I was also watching hoping that Tate would have 30 points to give me a win over my Dad. He did manage a season high 24 points (and a ridiculous taunting penalty, but what do you expect from a Notre Dame grad?) So I got the second highest score in the league and still lost. Booo!

Congrats to Andy who now has the top spot all to himself! Dad and I are in second and Logan and Jim are tied for the last spot in the playoffs. We still have a few weeks left before we have to start getting too concerned about that. Everyone still has a chance.

Now on to the weekly awards:

  • Highest Team Score: Dad had 154.62 (Record, Week 4: Tim had 195.50)
  • Lowest Team Score: Tim had 91.02 (Record, Week 6: Jim had had 72.17)
  • Biggest Blowout: Logan beat Tim by 36.92 (Record, Week 3: Dad beat Andy by 63.83)
  • Closest Win: Dad beat me by 5.51 (Record, Week 1: Logan beat Tim by 0.89)
  • Highest Scoring Player: Calvin Johnson had 43.90 for Dad (Record, Week1: Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy.)
  • Mr. Consistency:  Luke is on a five game losing streak.
  • Crystal Ball: Austin, Luke, Logan and I all started perfect rosters.
  • Deadbeats: None!

Stats mostly via TMQ:

  • With 329 offensive yards, Calvin Johnson outgained 15 entire teams: Atlanta, Buffalo, Carolina, City of Tampa, Dallas, Jacksonville, Jersey/A, Jersey/B, Miami, Minnesota, New England, Oakland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Seattle. He also outgained all his Detroit teammates.
  • The Buccaneers and Eagles have combined to lose 17 straight at home.
  • NFL teams from Florida are 0-10 in the month of October.
  • Geno Smith of the Jets threw more touchdown passes to Cincinnati defenders (two) than to his teammates (zero).
  • The Broncos are on a pace to score 686 points; the NFL season record is 589 points. Denver has outscored opponents 115-52 in the fourth quarter. Peyton Manning is on a pace to throw 58 touchdown passes; the NFL record is 50. Jacksonville has six PATs; the Broncos have 43.
benmartens October 30, 2013 Fantasy Sports

Cheeseburger Pie

This one is a classic from my childhood. Mom always made it in a pie pan, but I love it so much that I calculated the volume of a pie pan and expanded the recipe to fit perfectly in a 9×13 pan. So it no longer looks like a pie but I’ll still call it that. This isn’t quite how Mom used to make it, but I think she’ll approve of my modifications.

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1/2 diced onion
  • 5 eggs
  • 2 1/4 cups milk
  • 1 1/4 cup Bisquick
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • 4-5 strips of bacon, cooked and chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

Directions

  • Grease or spray a 9/13 pan and preheat the oven to 450.
  • Cook ground beef over medium heat along with the onion.
  • Beat milk, Bisquick, eggs, salt and pepper until smooth
  • Pour the Bisquick mixture into a pan along with the meat, onion, and bacon.
  • Sprinkle with cheddar cheese
  • Bake about 30 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean
  • Serve with ketchup
benmartens October 29, 2013 Food

Custom Storage And Desk: Part 2

Part 1 showed the cabinets going in. Once that was done, I added two sets of quad outlets above what will be the desk surface. Each quad outlet contains two outlets that are built-in surge protectors. This seemed useful for things like printers and scanners which will sit on the desk surface.

The length of the wall wasn’t an even multiple of the cabinet sizes I had available so I couldn’t stretch cabinets all the way to the end of the wall. Instead I wrapped some custom shelves around that corner. This is my least favorite part of the project, but they were cheap and functional. I can replace them later if I come up with something better. I bought some 10” metal supports and a couple melamine boards. I cut the boards to fit, ironed white veneer on the exposed ends and mounted them.

Next it was time for the hardest part of the job: building a desk surface. I went through a ton of different ideas from buying a bunch of boards to make a butcher block style table and using laminate flooring. This kept me up nights. I won’t go into details but there were a bunch of requirements that seemed to conflict. Finally I decided to build it with 3/4” sheets of oak plywood and face it with 1” strips of solid oak.

I had to build the desk in two parts in order to get it up the stairs into the room. One piece was an L-shape with a 45-degree angle where I’ll sit and the other wise was a simple 2’x8’ rectangle with a notch cut out of one corner to accommodate a support structure in the wall. I don’t have a table saw (yet) so all of the big cuts were done on the garage floor using a clamped straight edge to guide my circular saw. It’s not the most glamorous way to make cuts, but it sure works well even with one person. (The blue tarps were set up to cover my shelves and to block off the third bay where I was working in an effort to control dust.)

The building work went pretty quickly once I got started. The L-shape part was two pieces of plywood joined together with biscuits and glue. The facing went all the way around the desk and was also attached with biscuits and glue. There are no nails in the whole thing so the surfaces are pristine. I bought some 48” clamps and got good at using them as I slowly attached each piece of oak to face the plywood.

Once the building part was complete, I nervously set about staining the desk. It’s a huge surface and I’m no expert. A new 5” random orbital sander helped immensely as I got the surfaces prepped. I ran through 120 grit, 150 grit, and 220 grit sand paper.  I figured I needed to do each piece in one pass so that the stain would be put on roughly even. I started by doing the bottoms of both pieces, made my mistakes there and then did the tops. After the stain I applied three coats of polyurethane (the bottom only got one coat.) Given the cool weather, I wanted to let everything dry extra long so I did one coat per day. That stretched the project out a long time, but in the end, I had a desk surface that I was pretty proud of.

Next up: Installation and finishing touches

benmartens October 28, 2013 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Replace A Storage Spaces Drive

I’ve been happily using the Storage Spaces feature of Windows 8 for a while now. It lets me throw in a bunch of drives, tell Windows to treat them all as one big drive, and then tell it to make sure every file is stored on two physical drives. If one drive fails, I can replace it without losing any data.

Up until recently, I had 2 3TB drives and 2 2TB drives. I wanted to replace the 2TB drives with 4TB drives to give me some extra headroom. But how do you remove perfectly healthy drives? One option would be to just pull the plug on one 2TB drive, replace it with a 4TB and let the system repair itself, but emulating a disaster doesn’t seem like a great option.

There’s nothing I could find in the UI that would let me remove one of these drives so I opted for Power Shell instead. Check out the section of this help doc called “How Do I Replace A Physical Drive?” It implies that the UX should have a Remove option but I never saw one. The Power Shell commands worked great though. Repairing the system took hours to finish as it copied lots of data around, but I expected that. It helps to have a spare SATA and power connection to pull this off but you could also do it with a USB enclosure (preferably USB3.)

Now I’m happily running with 14TB of total space. That’s still mirrored so I have 7TB writeable. Oh and by the way, 4TB drives are getting CHEAP. I found these two for $169 each.

benmartens October 25, 2013 Geek

Kindle Paperwhite 2 Review

I finally pulled the trigger on a Kindle upgrade (wifi with special offers version.) I finally realized that I’ve used a Kindle for at least 30 minutes a day pretty much every day for the last 4 years, so I would probably get some use out of a new one. Going from the second generation Kindle to the second gen Kindle Paperwhite was a massive leap. Some of the changes have been around for a long time, but here’s a list of things that I’ve noticed and enjoyed about the device design:

  • Backlight – The backlight is great, especially since most of my reading happens in bed after Tyla falls asleep. It’s better than a tablet or a computer because the text you’re reading is still physically there but now there is light around it to let you see what you’re reading. The light is completely adjustable, but if it ends up causing eye strain, I can still drop back to the old method of a book light.
  • Contrast ratio – Even without the backlight turned on to make the background whiter, the text is a lot darker and the background is a lot lighter.
  • Speed – Changing screens, opening books, opening menus, and flipping pages is all significantly faster than before.
  • Touch screen – I thought I would hate this but it actually works pretty well because the Kindle is so much quicker. The only downside is that to turn a page your thumb has to cross over onto the screen instead of just staying on the side where you’re holding the book. If I could design my perfect device, I’d probably drop the physical keyboard but keep the physical page turn buttons.
  • Battery life – This one isn’t really fair since the battery on my old Kindle had been through a lot of power cycles, but Amazon claims this new one will go two months between charges even with the backlight on!

The physical device changes are great, but the software changes are incredible! The first devices were about replicating the experience of a paper book, but now they’re taking advantage of their platform and doing things that books could never do.

  • Wikipedia – Not only can I get dictionary definitions for words, but I can also look things up on Wikipedia. And both of those show up in a flyout instead of changing to an entirely different screen.
  • Vocabulary builder – Anytime you look up a word, it goes into the Vocabulary Builder app. You can go back and quick yourself to see if you’re actually learning anything. Words can be removed once you decide you’ve mastered them.
  • XRay – This feature probably would have convinced me to keep reading Game of Thrones. You can highlight a character in the book and then quickly see everywhere in the book that they appear, seeing passages where they are mentioned to remind you who they are.
  • Pages/Locations – Even after four years, I never got the hang of locations. Having 300 locations left to the end of a chapter doesn’t really register, but now I can finally switch to page numbers. The numbers correspond to a printed copy of the book so you might not actually increment the page number when you flip the page on your ebook. But still, if I have 8 pages left, I know roughly what that means.
  • Scan forward/backward – You can quickly bring up an overlay and flip ahead or backwards without actually changing your place in the book. It’s a nice way to navigate to quickly answer something you forgot or to find the next good stopping point.
  • Minutes remaining – I saved my favorite feature for last. Based on how quickly you’ve been reading, it predicts how many minutes you have left until you hit the end of a chapter! This feature alone is almost worth the price of a new device.

All in all, I’m thrilled with the new Paperwhite. Other e-readers have come and gone, but Amazon has a winner on their hands.

benmartens October 24, 2013 Books, Gadgets

Fantasy Football – Week 7

Andy continued to stretch his first place lead with another win and scoring the most points in the league. He won the league back in 2011. Maybe this is his year again?

When I looked to see what my perfect roster would have been, it suggested that I should have started Drew Brees… who was on a bye week. Instead, I had picked up Jay Cutler as that matchup seemed really good to me. Unfortunately he got injured after one pass and an interception leaving him with negative points.

Now on to the weekly awards:

  • Highest Team Score: Andy had 145.10 (Record, Week 4: Tim had 195.50)
  • Lowest Team Score: Tim had 78.71 (Record, Week 6: Jim had had 72.17)
  • Biggest Blowout: Andy beat Luke by 34.68 (Record, Week 3: Dad beat Andy by 63.83)
  • Closest Win: Dad beat Austin by 7.02 (Record, Week 1: Logan beat Tim by 0.89)
  • Highest Scoring Player: Andrew Luck had 36.02 for Luke  (Record, Week1: Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy.)
  • Mr. Consistency:  I’m on a four game winning streak, and Luke is on a four game losing streak.
  • Deadbeats: None!

Stats mostly via TMQ:

  • Stretching back to last season, Kansas City has followed a 1-12 streak with a 7-0 streak.
  • The Jets broke a streak of five straight losses to the Patriots; Tom Brady broke a streak of nine touchdown passes against the Jets without an interception.
  • The Bears have more touchdowns on kick and turnover returns (five) than victories (four).
  • Buffalo won on the road for the first time in more than a year. Six of the Bills’ nine remaining contests are on the road.
  • Denver is on a pace to score an all-time-record 681 points and is second in its division.
  • Philadelphia has the league’s No. 2 offense but is averaging just 13 more yards gained than allowed.
  • The Cowboys, who entered with the league’s 30th-ranked defense, held Philadelphia 25 points under its scoring average.
  • Against Oregon, Washington State had 557 yards passing and 2 yards rushing.
benmartens October 23, 2013 Fantasy Sports

Hot Sauce!

I used to work with a guy from the Caribbean who made fantastic hot sauce. I haven’t gotten any hot sauce from him lately, but he did give him his (very vague) recipe. Logan, Andy, Tim and I decided to spend an afternoon trying to make our own hot sauce. Thankfully we were smart enough to do it outside on the side burner of the grill to avoid turning the house into a warzone.

Our first attempt used an equal mixture (by weight) of unseeded habaneros and papaya. It was HOT. Logan named this one “Devil’s Tears.” For our second attempt, we dialed back the peppers into a 3 to 1 mixture and included some mangoes with the papaya. That one is still quite hot, but if you enjoy hot sauces, it’s not too crazy to eat. Logan named that one “Agent Orange.”

We ended up with a lot of hot sauce between the four of us, but I think we’ll convene again at some point to try and make it even better.

The recipe that follows is for Agent Orange. If you want to try Devil’s tears then just adjust the weight of fruit to peppers.

Ingredients

  • 3lb 10oz papaya and mango (2 papayas and 3 mangoes)
  • 15.5 oz unseeded habaneros
  • 6 tsp minced garlic
  • 3 tsp ground cumin
  • 1.5 tsp dried mustard
  • 6 tsp salt
  • Vinegar

Directions

  • Seed the fruit and remove it from the skin.
  • Wear gloves! Chop the habaneros.
  • Combine fruit, peppers and spices.
  • Add vinegar until it almost reaches the top of the mixture.
  • Boil slowly until soft (30-45 minutes). Stir occasionally to prevent sticking.
  • Blend and store

Yield: 18 4oz jars

benmartens October 22, 2013 Food