Redoing Paul Prudhomme

n.b. I've been meaning to write this down for a long time. Now is as good as ever.

Paul Prudhomme can reasonably be considered the primary spark in the Cajun renaissance. By this I mean that before Prudhomme, cajun cooking wasn't really in the american cooking consciousness. Emeril can easily be considered a TV powered follow-on.

The problem with Paul Prudhomme is that he uses outrageous quantities of fat. With today's cooking, that is not a reasonable approach. However, I believe that his recipes can be easily recast in a (slightly) lighter fare.

His first cookbook is "Chef Paul Prudhomme's Lousiana Cookbook". Let's examine his veal, oyster and artichoke over pasta. His method here is almost the same as his recipe for veal and oysters in crepes (an awesome recipe BTW): first, a seasoned flour is prepared. The veal is coated and ... "Melt one stick of butter". Say What???. One whole stick of butter? Who is he kidding? He fries the veal and then he adds another half stick of butter (no, I am not making this up) while he adds the artichokes. Then another half stick of butter. Finally, it's time to add the oysters and 3/4 of a cup of heavy cream, just in case you haven't had enough. It's rediculous.

First, let's change his method of dealing with the artichokes. I consider boiling 'chokes a crime. So, I vote for the Italian method here. Remove the outer leaves and steam them separately (and eat them as a side). Take the inner choke and slice it. Then saute it in a little olive oil and butter. Add water and cook gently until tender.

Let's change the first stick of butter to just enough oil (Canola is a good cheap choice) to fry all the veal pieces. You'll know how much by the volume of the veal. When brown remove the veal from the pan and put in the oyster water. Or white wine. This will generate a nice sauce. Add a few tablespoons of creme fraiche and stir. Then put in the oysters and cook. Lastly add the artichokes and the veal.

He serves over pasta but my critics think it would have been better over rice. I use oil instead of butter, trying to avoid saturated fats. A Tb here and there of butter improves the flavor. But two sticks of butter? That's crazy talk!

Ron Surak

I received mail in late February that my friend, Ron Surak, died in late January. Ron was a friend from Rutgers days. We met when somehow he heard that someone over in Engineering was interested in Computer Music. He called me up and he came over to the EE building. I remember our first meeting: He was dressed in a kind of natty way: tweed jacket and he was smoking. He was unapologetic for the cigarette --- but in the end, that's what killed him: he was struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage. What I didn't know is that smokers are much more likely to die of brain aneurysms than non-smokers. I wish he hadn't smoked.

What I liked and appreciated about Ron was his wry sense of humor and also his taste in music. We would agree on the aesthetics of many (but not all) computer music pieces. In my experience, the computer music community is all too eager to accept trashy music as good just because someone used a computer to create it. This may have changed in recent years, but Ron and I often agreed about what was trash and what wasn't.

After Rutgers, Ron retreated to his parents house in Coal County in the very center of Pennsylvania. It wasn't on the freeway path but I visited him twice. It was a small house and was attached to the remnants of his parents' store. He had his grand piano there. It still looked like the store it was many years ago. I can not imagine cleaning that out now.

When Noah was showing signs of musical talent, Ron was my source of valuable advice on how and where to educate him. I made a special trip to visit Ron with Noah so that Noah would have a chance to talk about music with an active composer.

Besides music, Ron liked fly fishing for trout (catch and release mostly). When I visited him last, he offered me a fish from his freezer. I didn't take it.

Ron was 70 years old but I thought he was younger. He had been having issues with macular degeneration but we used to exchange email now and then. He followed Noah's musical education with great interest. In his last email, he promised me a copy of his score for vibraphone and piano as soon as his printer was fixed (so that Noah could see it). Three weeks later, he was dead.

Ron's manuscripts are in the hands of his son and "consort". I believe they will find a good home. They are a lasting legacy of his taste and artistry.

Godzilla vs. the smog monster

If I haven't blogged since December then you know it must have been a dark and depressing winter. However, spring is in the air... So, how is web serving from home? Well, I wish to report that openbsd is a great system. It is still up (actually 147 days and counting). As for those shitehead script kiddies, no, they haven't given up. I watch as they hit the machine with constant root password attacks. What they don't know (as ignorant script kiddies) is that root ssh logins are completely disabled. They might as well bang their head on a wall. They've also attacked every user name in the book. But if you only do it once, you're not likely to succeed. Also under attack is the samba server --- but once again, I was (unusually) detailed and prohibited connections from anywhere outside the local network (that's 192.168.1.*). Same goes for nfs. Losers.

I have to say, I was tempted to install a "honeypot" on a new guest account. But better sense prevailed.

I also monitor the access to web pages --- this tells me what people are looking at. Once again, I find that my test equipment pages are popular. So, I took a few hours to update them a little. I also discovered various errors by monitoring the logs. So, I fix them now and then. I got tired of seeing errors when the spiders came along so I put in a robots.txt and also a favicon.ico (the latter is that little icon that shows when you load a page). Since the official webmaster is Fishy, the little icon is of Fishy (of course).

openbsd has proven to be an excellent choice. Robust, secure and it's a fast system even though it's on an obsolete sun system. What I really need now are gigabit switches. Soon...

Web serving from home (Part 2)

As related in the previous post, I installed a clean version of OpenBSD on a Sun Netra T1. With all the daemons running, I decided to put it on the web --- if I could. After all, this means I have to open port 80 (http) and since we had switched to FiOS I didn't know if I could do this.

So, I logged into the router and set the security to nothing. I then realized I could put the new machine (shieldaig, named after a small coastal town in Scotland) in the DMZ. This is a more secure idea than exposing all of our machines to the wild wooly world. But, to do this meant I had to have a static address for shieldaig. That was easy enough to do ... but then I didn't have a local name! Why not? Because... in order to register the machine with the local DNS server at the router, I have to use the DHCP server. But, for once I remembered how I'd solved this problem: aliases. shieldaid has two addresses: one static, one dynamic. The static one doesn't have a name, so that's OK. Back to the router: I put the new static address in the DMZ field. I now checked that port 80 was open. It was!

So, what's the name of this machine? That's the question. Since I'd paid for kahrs.us what I needed was a DNS mapping from this name to it's IP address. I found a free DNS server --- but now the problem was how to make the DNS address point to the IP address. It took me several days of off and on tinkering to realize that the DNS server had to be all on the free DNS server. Once I did that, then the free DNS server was happy and accepted my IP address.

Now, I have to mention that FiOS has Dynamic IP unless you want to pay big bucks. It's just another layer of DHCP above our router after all... So, this means our address could change. But it appears that Verizon has set a huge timeout for the Dynamic DNS, so thus far I haven't had to reset our DNS address. Cool.

One last thing: I was trying to figure out why going to www.kahrs.us didn't work from outside. Well, turns out it gets mapped to shieldaig.kahrs.us and unless that's in the DNS entry as well, it won't work. Simple fix again.

At this point, shieldaig was now on the web. And lo and behold, immediately it was under attack. The samba server was hit constantly but since the addresses weren't local, it just failed. Then there's the constant script kiddy attacks on the sshd daemon. If it weren't so funny, I would love to trap them. I watch the logs that show constant login attempts to root (which is disabled via ssh) and then also watch as they march up the alphabet trying name after name.

I also see what's going on with web access. The machine has been found by both google and yahoo (yahoo was first). I'm wondering when random web accesses will start... thus far it's only been people who we know.

The last conundrum is why accessing www.kahrs.us fails locally but succeeds outside. I've just put this as a DNS question and decided that it doesn't really matter.

My final step was moving the machine down to the basement to live next to the router. Thus far, OpenBSD has been rock solid. And the shitehead script kiddies are deeply unsatisfied. Excellent!

Web serving from home (Part 1)

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was going to lose my long time web home at caip.rutgers.edu --- Since I was long gone from caip, I suppose it was about time. So, what was I going to do for a replacement? I decided maybe now was the time to take it into my own hands...

Sometime earlier I had acquired a Sun Netra T1 as a possible web machine. I had an X1 in mind, but the T1 was certainly cheap enough. It's packaged in a nice 1U box and has a very simple interface to the outside world. Two ethernet ports, a serial port and that's about it. My machine didn't have a disk but included one sled. Good thing. I happened to have a stockpile of 40 GB disks, so I installed it in the machine. Good, what next? Software, that's what. I decided to go for OpenBSD because (a) it's a BSD derivative and I know BSD from my grad skool days (b) The price is right (c) it's said to be very secure. But how do I get it onto my disk? Fortunately for me, I had torn apart a PC and had a CD-ROM available. So, I plugged it into the second IDE slot and powered the machine up. Oh yes, and connected the serial port to my lab PC.

The machine came to life easily enough but proceeded to put my in the Sun Lights Out Monitor (LOM). The LOM is yet another supervisor layer for the machine --- reminds me of the PDP-11/45 used on the PDP-10/L ... So, the problem was as soon as I told it to boot from the cdrom (in the console) then it would complain about the Fast MMU error. I'd seen this before --- a long time before but couldn't remember what it was. Google to the rescue. I found a post that claimed that this error was due to a missing password in the LOM. You've got to be kidding. But what had I to lose? I created a password and tried again. Still failed. Ah! Maybe I should logout and log back in? You guessed it. It worked. So, there I was booting from the CD-ROM and writing to the disk. I couldn't believe it.

I installed OpenBSD and it all worked. But then I changed my mind about the disk allocation. Maybe I should put most of the space for web pages? It was almost trivial to go back and re-install. After that, I had to work on the ethernet interfaces. I wanted to have two ports: one for the router and one for the local machines but decided it really didn't make much difference. So one port it was. OpenBSD comes ready to serve pages: it already has Apache on it. So, I really didn't need to install any packages. In addition, I decided to move the services served by my own machine to this server (such as BOOTP, RARP and friends). I easily moved them over.

Finally, I was looking at a reasonably nice machine. I was impressed at how fast it served pages. It seemed fairly secure. I enabled samba for the local house machines but turned it off for everyone else (this will turn out to be important). Finally, I decided it was time to remove the CD-ROM and put the lid back on. The next and final step would be to place it on the net ...

Marshall Leach

I find obituaries fascinating. There are so many interesting people that we never meet. I think it's only fair that I contribute. In this case, I never met the man. Marshall Leach died at age 70 as a full professor at Ga. Tech. He was certainly not retired and had a full teaching schedule. What's notable about Leach is that from all appearances, he was an idiosyncratic type with a great sense of humor. But what I know of him is his academic legacy. My last paper on SPICE modeling of headphones is a direct descendant of his paper on SPICE modeling in Electroacoustics. It was his paper that led me into all of Olson's papers on electroacoustic modeling and simulation. Unlike many, he published sporadically but his papers were always interesting to read. His paper on low noise electronics in Proc. of the IEEE is a clear exposition of the problems and solutions to low noise design. He received four teaching awards from the students. Clearly, he was perfect in his roles as teaching and advisor. His legacy comprises the papers he published and the many students he taught. And that's a life well lived.

Mise en Place and Garde Manger

This post is stimulated by two items: First, I am reading a commercial book entitled "Modern Garde Manger" by Garlough and Campbell. Written for the aspiring chef, it's full of little historical tidbits such as the origin of the brigade system (dating back to Escouffier). The authors try to instill pride in the student... So different from a university textbook (an interesting topic perhaps for another day). The second inspiration is from a recent Times article concerning a recent cookbook by Sara Mouton. This chef has discovered that home cooks don't do mise en place - shock and amazement. So, now onto my take on this: when is mise en place appropriate?

Let me start with a bit of personal history: I really learned to cook during my junior year in college. I was living in an on campus apartment with four other guys. And, I was the only one who had a clue about how to shop and how to cook. My mother had sent me to Macy*s with the assignment to buy something for the school year. She had hoped I would buy some shirts or something. Instead I came back with "The Joy of Cooking". Far more useful, really. So, I spent most of that junior year shopping and cooking. And one of the most important lessons I learned was how to time the various dishes so they would come out at the same time. This is a critical skill in any cook. For complex meals, I actually work out a diagram that shows dependencies complete with timings. This is so I don't have to worry about losing track of what to do next and as a warning not to get involved with something that's not on the time critical path.

So, back to mise en place. There is no reason to do this for most meals. Frankly, half the fun of cooking is working several stations at once and then having it all come together at the end. I enjoy the multi-tasking that requires. However, for a complex meal at home (say, the French Laundry), then mise en place is essential. I find this particularly appropriate when you need to finish a dish while guests are at the table. There is no time to lose --- everything must be ready. Earlier in my cooking career I was often miss half the meal since I'd be at the stove. Now, I've figured it out. Mise en place must be totally complete --- don't wait until the last minute to chop those herbs, do it before you're out of time. Make half the dessert and then finish it as you need it (this is particularly effective with the molten chocolate cakes). The only downside is that the cleanup at the end is more because all of those little dishes are hanging around at the end.

As for Garde Manger, I am pleased to note that I already knew most of it. The recipe for haggis was new, but for the most part, I was competent although my skill in turning potatoes into rondelles is unknown. I've always fought against such fussiness. But when it comes to dice, I'm there.