Sunday Link Dump the 2nd

Here we are on another Sunday morning, and I'm back with more links.

Ridiculous Halloween Costumes I've seen this linked to by a number of people this week, but I think it's worth posting anyway.
Charmin Job For those of you who may be interested in a job, don't say I haven't tried to help you. - Thanks to Julie H. for this link.
Backflip This video I think came to me through Digg, simple yet enjoyable.
How to Disarm a Chimp This article comes from Cracked.com and made me laugh (beware the chimpanzee menace)

That's it for this week, as always if you have links you think are great you can send them to me.

Sunday Link Dump

Good morning.

This is the first post in what I hope to be an ongoing series dedicated to posting links to the stuff I come across during the week. I'm hoping to be able to come up with 5 or so things to put here each week, so if you find things you think are worth putting here, let me know and they might show up.

Invisible weapons I think the name really says all I want to about this one. - thanks to Julie H. for linking me to that one
Money as Art There are a lot of things out there you can put art on, these are some of the best ones that use money.
Space Exploration A really cool composite of Earth's space exploration.
Ultraviolet image of M31 An image of another galaxy taken in the Ultraviolet spectrum.

And that's what I've got for this week, hope you enjoy.

Playing with Biscuits

    Being a fairly busy college student I don't always have time to make everything I'd like to make from scratch when cooking dinner. As a result I was often finding myself buying and making biscuits from a tube, something I was hoping to avoid out of a desire to be more aware of what's in some of the things I eat.
    One solution to the tube problem is frozen ready made biscuits, you just buy a bag, throw as many or as few as you want on a baking sheet and bake them up. This is a great idea. Saves me a lot of time and is closer to what I wanted, but they still came from the store, and biscuits are pretty simple. All you need to make a good biscuit is some fat, some flour, and some liquid; and sometimes those ingredients get merged together to make it even simpler. I decided that I'd duplicate these freeze and bake biscuits so that I could make them at home and have them whenever I wanted a hot homemade biscuit.
    They really ended up being pretty simple after some tinkering with the recipe, and a lot of batches of tasty biscuits that just weren't quite up to snuff.

• 2 1/4 cups "Pancake and Baking mix" - comes in a yellow box, you've probably got it lying around
• 1/2 tsp. Baking Soda - you can leave this out if you really want, but if you do they won't rise well
• 1/3 cup (5 1/3 Tbs.) Butter
• 2/3 cup Milk - I suppose you could use buttermilk or something like that but I find the "mix" above does a pretty good job of that

1. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly
2. Cut in butter
3. Mix in the milk
4. Mix by hand until the dough comes together, you may need to add more "mix" by spoonfuls until it stops sticking to the bowl and your hands
5. Roll out to 1/4-1/2 inch thickness and cut into rounds; you want to try and get as many rounds out of each rolling as the more you roll it the more melted the butter gets and the tougher the biscuits will get
6. Bake any that you want to bake immediately at 450° for 8-10 minutes
7. Any that you don't want to bake immediately, put on a plate and place in the freezer. Leave them in the freezer until they are frozen solid, then put them in a plastic zip-top bag; if you through then into the bag before they freeze completely they will turn into a big lump which is just a mess.

    When you want to bake any of the frozen ones, just take the ones you want out and put them on a baking sheet while you preheat the oven. Once the oven is preheated you can bake as per the normal directions. Hope that someone else out there finds this useful.

The Bacon Explosion

    In June I got bored with just working and going to class all the time and decided that an experiment in food was well called for. Really it wasn't so much "experimental" since I was following a method, not really a recipe, but it was new for me and everyone else involved.

    We decided to make an event of it and had the Heart Attack Dinner. Served would be one whole bacon explosion, a double batch of my grandmother's Sour Cream Biscuit recipe, personal-size macaroni and cheese casseroles, and Chocolate Peanut-Butter Brownies.

    First the simple things: the Mac and Cheese and the Brownies were just like normal recipes for the same thing except I split them into a muffin pan so that all of the dishes for the night would come out around the same size. The brownie recipe was modified by adding peanut-butter chips, like chocolate chips only peanut-butter flavored.

    Next, the Bacon Explosion. The method of making a bacon explosion can be found multiple places around the internet, so I'll be brief here and include pictures as I have them.

1. Take your raw bacon and weave it, like a basket, into a tight lattice around 5 strips in each direction. It's very important that you get a tight weave or you'll run into problems later.
2. Apply to the top of this your sausage in a fairly flat layer, making sure to leave some space around the edges for when you roll it.
3. The first deviation that I had was now. I added a pound of shredded cheese, because cheese is delicious.  I also added some dried minced garlic, a little bit of salt, and some ground black pepper.
4. After that I crumbled some previously cooked bacon on top of it. Shown here with a handy T-Square provided by one of my friends, and dinner attendees, Julie.
5. After that it was a complicated matter of rolling it. When I said earlier to make a tight weave and leave room around the edges, this was why. If you didn't do those things it's gonna be really big, bursting at the seams, and just not very nice looking.
6. After you manage to get it rolled up into a nice log shape, you bake it. Most recipes call for adding BBQ sauce inside before you roll it and brushing it on the outside before smoking it. I didn't have any BBQ sauce, don't really care for the stuff, or a smoker, so I used what I did have: the oven.
7. Once it's finished baking let it cool some to set the grease juices before slicing it into rings and serving. 

In that last picture you can see the Macaroni and Cheese bites on their plate, and the bowl containing the biscuits.

    The results of this dinner were amazingly delicious, if horribly unhealthy. This is not a food for the faint of heart. I may make this again in the future using what I've learned, but probably not for a while.

Some observations from College

I've been pondering over writing this post for a while now, and have only finally gotten the time to actually put it together and put it up here, enjoy.

The longer I've been here at college the more I feel like I haven't learned anything in my classes. I'm here in my fourth year now, and a large fraction of my time in classes is spent thinking things like "I know this already I learned it in," some other class from my first year or two here, or wondering how other people in the class tie their shoes at night, let alone how they have managed to get into an upper level class without grasping things like parsing English sentences.

Recently when I've found myself lamenting that class is a waste of my time I've tried to ask myself what I have been getting out of college. I've found that "the least of learning is done in the classrooms" is really a very applicable statement to my experience here, so thanks go out to Thomas Merton for saying that so I could quote him.

One of the things I've been thinking over in relation to this post was the idea of making a series of posts about "things I learned from college". This may or may not come to pass, only time will tell. I can say with certainty however, that no matter how little I feel like I've actually learned from my classes, I've learned many things from being here at the University that I wouldn't have been able to find so easily had I been somewhere else.