Late last year Nithya and I decided to start looking for a more fun daily driver to replace our Ford Flex Ecoboost which had served us faithfully for ~5 years. Our only requirements were that it be fun, faster than the flex and be able to haul the dogs around as well. My initial thought was to look at AMG Wagons and I even bid on one at Bring a Trailer which I missed out on by just $1k. Since they are relatively rare and hard to find I decided to expand the search and look for other fun wagons and sedans.… Read the rest
All posts by rahulnair
Fast Favourites
Now that I have started my new gig at Apple I no longer have the time to investigate and plan super elaborate meals like the Egg Dinner. However having done a bunch of these in the past we decided to make our March dinner a set of Fast Favourites – dishes that we have tried before and do not take too much time to prepare on the day of the meal. So without further ado, lets dive right into the menu.
We got started with the classic Manresa Farm Egg. It was a huge amount of work and testing when I made it for the egg dinner, but now that I have a reliable method of topping the eggs I no longer had to prepare the yolks in advance and sanitize the shells overnight.… Read the rest
Alinea Kitchen Table Experience
Living in the Bay Area, I had heard of Alinea a few times but since I never had a reason to go to Chicago, I never investigated it as a destination restaurant like the Fat Duck. In fact when I did eventually go to Chicago for the first time we made a special trip to Moto instead since I was a big fan of Homaru Cantu’s Iron Chef episode with Morimoto. All that changed when I saw the Grant Achatz episode of Chefs table and Alinea instantly went to the top of my list based on its presentation alone. It took several months but I was finally able to get a group of 6 California friends willing to fly out to Chicago and do the full Alinea Kitchen Table experience on a cold night in December.… Read the rest
Egg Dinner
One of the dinner themes I have been toying with for a while is “Eggs” and I finally got to try it out over the weekend. It ended up being a 13 course meal over 6 hours where everything included eggs, looked like eggs or looked like something that should have eggs in it. It was fairly successful with only a few minor hiccups along the way despite several of the dishes being first time attempts. The spectacular photos were all taken by Nithya using her DIY lightbox setup. The following is a description of the dishes with any tips and tricks I discovered along the way.… Read the rest
Zenos Factory Tour
During our our trip to the UK as part of the 2016 GGLC UK Lotus Trip, we were able to get a tour of the Zenos factory in Wymondham. If you havent heard of it before, Zenos Cars was founded in 2012 by Ansar Ali and MarkEdwards who had both spent time at Lotus and Caterham. I was lucky enough to attend the US unveiling of the Zenos E10S and was very impressed with what I saw. It struck me as an equivalent of the Lotus 211 and had significantly better fit and finish than the average Caterham I have seen in the US.… Read the rest
Bye Karma
Thank you for sharing the last two years with us, I hope you enjoyed your time with us as much as we loved having you. RIP and keep on chasing all the critters you can find sweetie.
The Fat Duck Experience
TL;DR summary – the Fat Duck is an incredibly theatrical experience that is as much about the “show” as it is the food. Highly recommended if you like complex meals and culinary surprises.
I first heard about Heston Blumenthal when I tried a sous vide recipe for scrambled eggs. The dish is one of my all time favourites and became a go to dish to show the power of sous vide. I then saw a few of his BBC shows and loved the way he does molecular gastronomy with a deep exploration of the science behind each dish. Plus The Fat Duck had 3 Michelin Stars and was consistently mentioned in the same breath as El Bulli and French Laundry in the late aughts.… Read the rest
Spaghetti Carbonara Dessert
One of the concepts I have been toying with is creating a dessert that looks like a savory course but is actually sweet in taste. Since my next fancy meal is going to have “Eggs” as its theme, I decided to try making a new version of Spaghetti Carbonara as that is probably my favourite egg based pasta. The end result is what you see below, Spaghetti Carbonara Dessert with white chocolate spaghetti, candied bacon, crystalline honey, black pepper and lava salt.
The first step was to make white chocolate spaghetti using the recipe from the Molecule R kit (175ml water, 2g agar agar, 85g white chocolate, boil, extrude).… Read the rest
Summer 2016 Hackathon Report
Summer at Delphix is a time for many fun activities including the annual Delphix Summer Hackathon. Originally started in 2015, it has become one of the events that both employees and summer interns look forward to the most. This years hackathon included a wide variety of projects including a Raspberry Pi coffee pot tracker and a game to entertain users who hit unexpected 404 error pages. The judges spent a long time deliberating and chose the following winners:
Best Product Hack: Andrew Nguyen for Conditional Table Partitioning for a Masking Job
The current process of creating multiple masking jobs that each differently partition a single database table is incredibly tedious and error-prone.… Read the rest
A guide to Frozen Reverse Spherification
After my recent Spheres and Circles dinner adventure I decide to put together a quick post on how to get started with frozen reverse spherification.
Process
The basic recipe for reverse spherification is really quite simple. First create your flavourful liquid that you want to spherify and add 2% calcium lactate to the mix. Next freeze the liquid in a mould to create frozen spheres. While the spheres are freezing, prepare a 0.5% solution of sodium alginate dissolved in distilled water (5g sodium alginate in 1000g of water). Let the alginate sit for at least 2 hours to fully hydrate and also lose any bubbles that were created while mixing.… Read the rest