Month: October 2015

Breakfast Sandwich from the Farmers' Market

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My kids and I enjoy eating bacon. We don't eat bacon very often but when we do, we delight in each strip. We've learned what we like and don't like in our bacon. We tried turkey bacon for a while but ultimately decided it was a . It didn't satisfy in the way real bacon does. We normally cook our bacon in the microwave in one of those special microwave bacon trays. It works well for making crispy bacon, but leaves the microwave polluted for a few hours which annoys my vegetarian wife.

During my 30th college re-union this summer, a friend told me about making bacon in the oven. After trying this a few times I don't want to make bacon any other way. Oven bacon is a hit with my kids and cleanup is easy. We cook the bacon in baking pan lined with aluminium foil. Once the bacon is done it's easy to remove and discard the oil and foil. Oil and foil?

Last summer I started buying cheeses from Brick Farm Market, purchased each Saturday at the Montgomery Farmers' Market. The Brick Farm Market creamy cheeses are brought in from the Hopewell area and nearby North Eastern producers. I often eat the cheeses straight while sipping an IPA. I also experimented with melting the cheese to make sandwiches using baguette's I bought at the Terra Momo Bread Company stand. The baguette's are made from a hard-wheat bread flour baked to a characteristically golden color. Its crusty on the outside and airy on the inside. Delicious!

This Saturday, while buying cheese I noticed that ... he also had bacon. We chatted about how much love cooking bacon in the oven and he mentioned he likes to use a bit of the bacon grease in an iron skillet to cook his eggs.

This past Sunday night I suddenly had the idea to combine all these things into a lunch sandwich. I had the bread, the cheese, the bacon and eggs. I cooked everything up but soon realized the egg would not travel well. I decided this would work better as a breakfast sandwich. I originally used organic eggs from ShopRite but wanted to source as much as possible from local businesses. So I added eggs from the Griggstown Farm to my Saturday morning market shopping list.

  • Baguette from Terra Momo
  • Cheese from Brick Farm Market
  • Sliced bacon from Brick Farm Market
  • Eggs from Griggstown Farm

Pre-heat oven to 400ºC and remove the cheese from the fridge. Let it sit out while you cook so it can warm up. This helps bring out the flavour of the cheese.

Line the baking pan with aluminium foil and layout the bacon strips on the foil. Don't crowd the strips. We don't want them to stick together while they cook. Be careful when lining the pan that you don't create a hole in the foil. When the oven has reached the proper temperature, put the baking pan in the center rack of the oven and cook for 18 minutes. I use the oven time so I don't forget and burn my bacon.

Remove the baking pan from the oven when the bacon is cooked. Do not discard the bacon grease. Drain some of the bacon grease into a skillet before discarding the foil. In the skillet, cook one egg over medium heat, on both sides until the yolk is cooked through but soft and the egg white is thoroughly cooked.1

Slice some of the cheese and place on one side of the bread. Toast in toaster oven until the cheese just starts to melt. Remove toasted bread from toaster oven and place bacon on top of the cheese. Then place the cooked egg on top of the bacon. Cover with the remaining slice. Enjoy with a fresh cup of coffee brewed with beans you Benfatto Coffee.

  1. There are many ways to cook an egg. I like my eggs sunny side up (also called runny side up), but most people prefer a fully cooked egg. ↩

How to Create E-mail Signatures in iOS

This blog post is for my mom.  She was an Android OS users for a few years with my brother providing tech support since he bought the device.  After years of using Android OS devices each with a different user interface that confounded my mother,  my brother finally bought her an iPhone and threw me under the bus for tech support.  Apparently my mom called him a lot.  A lot.

After walking her through the initial setup of her iPhone 5, my mom has called me only once with a problem with her phone.  She had accidentally toggled the mute switch.  Easy enough to fix once she found the button.

On a recent email I noticed my mom had used an email signature.  It contained her parting salutation, her home address, and phone numbers.  Of course I could see that she was typing this out and had not yet discovered the email signature feature of iOS.

In iOS you can create a standard email signature that is attached to each message you send.  You can create a one signature for use with all email accounts or create unique ones for each email account.  Here's how you do it.

Launch the Settings app.

  
In the Settings app, tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars.  Gently slide your finger up the screen to scroll down until you see the menu item for Signature.  Tap on the > or the word Signature.

 
Enter the signature text you want to use.  This text will be appended to the bottom of every email you send from your iPhone.

  

Bodie Island Lighthouse Observation Deck

A shot from the observation deck of the Bodie Island Lighthouse taken on the last day of a family vacation to the Outerbanks.

A shot from the observation deck of the Bodie Island Lighthouse taken on the last day of a family vacation to the Outerbanks, NC. The weather was mostly overcast the whole week, and I had capture very of the shots I had planned for the week.

I didn't have a chance to visit the Bodie Island Lighthouse during our vacation to the Outerbanks. The kids didn't think it was interesting and Bhavana didn't think her knees could handle the strain.

To be fair, the lighthouse is about a 30-minute drive from our vacation house. It was a big ask to ask them to endure a one-hour round car ride so that I could spend 30 minutes capturing some images. But on the drive out from town, I convinced them to stop and climb with me.

Of course, the weather was near perfect on the last day of the vacation. My wife was feeling sorry for me, so she didn’t complain when I asked to stop and see the lighthouse.

We arrived just in time. The wind had picked up and was so gusty that the observation deck was closing. We were the last visitors allowed up top.

I wasn't authorised to take my tripod up to the observation deck, but I captured a few images handheld with the Nikon and one with my iPhone 6. I shot this handheld in what felt like 15 mph winds and just after shooting, the lighthouse supervisor told me he was closing the observation deck. I was the last one allowed up that afternoon. The observation deck was closed.

Saturday 5 September, 2015 | Nikon D5100 | 12-24 mm f/4 | f/8.0 | ISO 100

Here's the iPhone version.

Virew from the Bodie Island Lighthouse | Saturday 5 September, 2015 | Apple iPhone 6 | iPhone 6 back camera 4.15mm f/2.2 | f/2.2 | ISO 32