Cheap Eats

I'm not eating cheap at my new job. I'm actually having a nice sandwich or a fresh rice bowl every day. My theory is that when work is tough it pays to take care of yourself. Eat well enough to keep up your strength.

So the nicest eats I'd ever make at home and bring to work were my fake Brötchen; deli meat and cheese in a sliced whole-wheat roll purchased at Acme Bread. I made them dry so they didn't get soggy before what was often a very late lunch; just a little butter in the roll.

A lot of times my standard when I was mixing sound at the Playhouse -- especially on those two-show days -- was something I picked up ages ago at Berkeley Rep; pita bread and hummus, often with an apple to go with it.

When there's no time to actually eat, the best work-with-one-hand-eat-with-the-other is the Cliff Bar. Unlike most energy bars it isn't all sugar and chocolate; the Cliff is almost as hard as Dwarven "Cram," and fills you up as well, too. They last nearly forever so you should always have one or two at the bottom of your gig bag for emergencies.

I recently found a new roll at the Bowl which is much like the whole wheat raisin roll I used to get at Acme (before they raised the price on it a bit too much for my liking). They are both filling and just sweet enough to be palatable with nothing but a little coffee or cold water. These aren't pastries, mind you; they are also solid, serious hunks of bread in the schwarzbrot mold (though nowhere near the seriousness of the latter, and very far from the tooth-breaking solidity of Dwarven Battle Bread).

Which basically segues to eating cheap abroad. My London trip typified my approach; I was at a four-star with continental breakfast, so I ate heavily in the morning, then got through a full day of walking and museums with nothing else but perhaps a cup of coffee and an apple saved from breakfast. Then evenings I'd quiet my stomach enough to make it to breakfast by making full use of the tea and biscuits room service would have left for me.

When I was staying in Montemarte I started with omelet and potatoes, then picked up Parisian street for for a late lunch/early supper; especially the Paris "gyro," a baguette slathered in red chili mustard then stuffed with sliced meats and frittes, all of it wrapped in paper and served open like an ice cream cone. For a lighter repast, crepes made in front of you at tiny crepe stands. I'd stop by the patisserie and fromagerie on the way back from breakfast to my room, and the evening meal was a light snack of bread and cheese or perhaps a little jam.

Tokyo is of course rather expensive, and I had to make do with the chillingly small "morning service" of one egg one slice of toast and a cup of coffee all for the special price of only 450 yen. The big meal of the day was -- when I remembered -- curry rice from one of those peculiar places that sell the food via vending machine token, food which is eaten standing up. But you get a lot of curry rice for a very good price.

My cheap eat at home right now is a three-day curry rice. Takes curry paste, coconut milk, tofu, canned albacore and baby corn and water chestnut and sometimes bamboo shoots so is close to ten bucks to make, but stretches to three servings, meaning I can make it one night and then just nuke the remainders for as many as two more.

Well, with luck I'll be able to spend a little more on food in the future. My boss says he'll be calling the temp agency as soon as a full month has passed (he'd do it now but is worried that it looks too weird) and upgrade me to full employee.

Fusion Cooking

So I'm officially behind on the Raygun. My target was to start cutting metal this week. Work showed up instead, good work -- did one morning gig hanging lights (actually, spent most of the time driving the scissor lift around) for a clean $100 in cash.

From the money from the most recent grenade order I dropped fifty on a new tool holder from Grizzly. It looks good, all solid (and very oily!) metal, but I've experienced some unusually soft steel before. Such as the bench vise I got from OSH that has disabused me from ever buying a vise from that store again.

But even taking all this into account the CAD is going terribly slow. Part of that is learning the software. The greater part is having to solve so many design issues. Metal is a bit unforgiving. I can make a few adjustments for poor fit-up or other errors, but it is slow work correcting mistakes made in metal. Metal is hard, slow to shape and requiring power tools to do so. And expensive. I really need to anticipate as many issues as possible and solve them before I start cutting metal.



It is engineering. It is a balancing act. Trying to balance aesthetics, strength, and manufacturability. Out of the many things you have to do to engineer something properly is to compensate for various sources of error. You design in steps that will catch and correct (such as my current M40 lathing scheme, which holds 4/1000 in reserve for a finishing pass; this picks up and corrects various places where tools like the knurl or the parting tool deform the grenade, throwing up ridges of excess metal behind them).

A subtler one is how I run a de-burr tool around the edge of the hole before inserting the button; this produces an expansion space for the metal to flow into when I crush the plug in with the press. In previous grenades, this edge was forced into the button pin, pinching it.

The other major tool in dealing with the inevitable errors in measurement, tool wobble, manufacturing variance, etc., is to not design around perfection in the first place. I really had this demonstrated for me during discussions of the Apollo Program and the absurd suggestion that "the landings" were faked in a film studio. One of the claims the believers in a hoax make is that the necessary positional accuracy of the original launch is impossible to achieve. The slightest fraction of a degree off at launch, they argue, and the spacecraft would be multiple kilometers off target by the time it reaches the Moon.

Which is why the NASA engineers -- like any engineers -- did no such thing. They simply pointed the spacecraft "good enough" to get within the circle of error of the next designed-in correction stage. One equivalent in design for assembly is you use a slot or an over-sized hole on the upper piece, so the bolt will still go in and hold everything properly even if there is some slop in machining or alignment. You don't design so the holes must be perfectly aligned...unless there are other design goals requiring it.

But this has to be of course designed in. Even at the simplest level, design for manufacture means you have to solve endless "duck, wolf, bag of grain" problems, where part C is bolted over the bolt holding part A to part B -- fixing the assembly order and making it impossible to place bolt holes for C on the inside of A.

My raygun nozzle is currently there. The reflector dish is CNC'd out of plate stock, top and bottom pass (which themselves brings up the question of how good my alignment will be). On the final pass I'll machine a hole all the way through, and push a lathed spindle through that. The acrylic nozzle goes inside that spindle and all the way into the gun to reach the Cree that illuminates it, and ends up supporting the front assembly.

After working on it off and on for over a week, and covering several pages of graph paper with mechanical sketches, I've figured out the connections and assembly order. The spindle is one-way (it has a lip) and will have a tapped hole in the side behind the dish which holds a screw pressing into the acrylic. The dish is pushed against the spindle from the other side by the pressure of the 3d-printed insulator rings -- which also are floating freely on the rod -- and the whole Dagwood Sandwich is pinned together by a second screw at the gun end. Which, since the front end of the gun tapers, is on the outside of the shell, and since the insulator rings are there, is accessed for tightening by a hole in the insulator rings that you can fit an allen key through.

There are a lot of alternatives I had to reject, and a lot of secondary considerations. Could machine the spindle as part of the dish but it would look better lathed. And take a lot more metal to machine from a single block of material. The dish can't be lathed (wrong kind of curves) but it can be lathe-polished. Which means the assembly is designed so I can put both parts together and chuck that in the lathe before removing a metal central rod and putting the acrylic in. In addition, any error in the length of any of these parts is adjusted for at the gun end, where the final retainer is.

And, yes, the acrylic is a failure point. But if I added metal -- well, extending the spindle to the gun is possible but the thickness is determined by the aesthetics at the nozzle end, and still creates a potential weak point. Inserting a stainless steel tube strengthens it, but requires the acrylic nozzle have a step to cover the diameter change, and that becomes the point of failure. This way, replacing the nozzle in case of breakage is less onerous, and I'll simply have to put up with the fact that the reflector dish provides a good lever to put stress on it.

(And, yes, I could switch to polycarb, but it is tougher to machine and although stronger, more likely to leave dangerous edges when it fails under stress.)



I've more-or-less solved the front assembly, how the handle fits together, the fin assembly, the trigger guard. But I still have to finish designing the trigger assembly, the access plate/removeable power cell that will allow uncoiling the USB cable to recharge the internal LiPo, how to get the LED wired into the fin...and I haven't even touched the side panels with their switch, indicator lights, and swoosh.

And very few of these assembly details are reflected in the CAD as of yet -- which I fully expect is going to reveal other potential problems in fit-up and assembly, as well as mechanical weaknesses and structures which are un-machinable as they stand. (I'm not about to get into 4-axis CNC at this point, so I basically have to make shapes that can be attacked from two sides at a maximum, plus traditional machining -- milling and drilling -- at off-axis to these. And, yes; every threaded hole I add is a manual operation; hand-tapping.)



Oh and yeah. My cheap eats these days is a three-day curry; 1 "can" Coconut Milk (I like the "school-lunch milk" boxes from Kara; very rich and fatty), red curry paste (May Ploy brand; comes in a tub like miso paste), tofu and veggies to suit (I get locally-made extra-firm tofu sold bulk-style at Berkeley Bowl). Often Dynasty sliced water chestnuts, cut baby corn -- but I've also used carrots, broccoli florets, canned bamboo shoots, and fresh snow peas. Plus a can of Albacore tuna if I can afford it. Makes three servings...I brew up 1-2 cups of jasmine rice in the rice cooker and re-heat the curry for a meal. Goes nice with a rooibos chai (also bought in the bulk produce section).

Bachelor Recipes

I cook fairly often, but I also cook simple.  Often I don't get back from a gig until late, and working 8-10 hour shifts without a meal break means when I do eat, I want to eat something filling.

Thus the lifestyle sets the major constraints; should be simple to cook, should be healthy and hearty, should be cheap, and the materials should keep well (because you never know when your schedule is going to change).  And most of my cooking involves rice cooker or stews, because I do a lot of work at home and it is too easy to get focused on coding and forget you have something on the stove.

So, like most bachelor cooking, most of my meals fall into the category of "bulk grains/starch given flavor and a modicum of variety by something out of a can."  Most of my "recipes" involve slicing some fresh produce in there with the bulk grains.


Japanese Stir-Fry:  I used to make this with thin-sliced meat, but now it is veggie.

- Daikon, peeled and thinly sliced disc-ways
- red bell pepper, long slices
- white onion, curly sliced (like half-onion rings)
- carrot, unpeeled, disc-sliced
- white short-grain rice

Cook the rice in a rice cooker, prep the veggies (other veggies that work well are brown mushrooms, snow peas).  Heat up olive oil in a pan and quick-fry one serving of the veggies with a splash of tamari and a drop of aji-mirin.  Don't overcook, and don't overdo the aji-mirin or the veggies will get soggy.  When they look about right (they should be crisp and just starting to take on color from the olive oil) throw in equal measures of aji-mirin and tamari, quickly slosh around under high heat and pour hot over one serving of rice.  Then rinse the pan pronto.

(The main balance here is the daikon and the red bell; the two flavors play well off each other.  This is a chopstick dish, and everything is made in chopstick sizes.  It is also chosen for aesthetics; there is a good variety of colors and shapes in the final presentation).



Indonesian Hot Rice:

- basmati rice
- large tablespoon shrimp paste
- a smaller spoon of Uncle Chen's hot chili paste
- cumin
- a bare teaspoon of rice vinegar (it is really easy to overdue the rice vinegar)
- soy sauce as necessary to hold the flavors together
- fresh chopped ginger (dried ginger root can substitute)
- fresh-chopped garlic
- olive oil

The above make up the flavor base, and the mix between them is a matter of trial and error of balancing the ingredients.  The shrimp paste needs a little time in the pan under medium heat; it is a bit pungent at first.

- snow peas
- firm tofu, cubed (the bulk tofu at Berkeley Bowl is wonderful for this)
- sliced water chestnut

The above make up the near-necessary ingredients.  After that it is stone soup; I've tried carrot, daikon, bok choy, all sorts of things.

Cook the rice, simmer the sauce base until the garlic is done and the shrimp doesn't stink so, put in the veggies in a time frame that leaves them crisp, and stir in the rice.  Can serve immediately; the flavors gel more as the hot sauce is absorbed into the rice but it tastes good just-made, too.



Quick Noodles:

- Soba (Japanese buckwheat noodles)
- red miso paste
- dashi no moto
- wakame (I have a packet of Mendicino wakame right now that is salty but flavorful)

Boil water and toss one bundle of soba in for about four minutes.  Stop just past al dente (soba never quite gets soft at the core, but it will turn sticky if overcooked).

Heat a second measure of water, roughly one bowl worth, and toss in a fistful of wakame, a half-packet of aji-no-moto, and a heaping tablespoon of miso paste.  Bring it to a rolling boil, hold it there for under a minute, then turn down.

Drain the noodles (traditionalists would rinse them in ice-cold water at this stage), put them in a bowl and add the soup base.



Basic Curry Rice:

- Basmati (again)
- red curry paste
- sugar (I use bulk brown sugar)
- coconut milk (the Thai kitchen brand seems to work well)
- sliced water chestnut
- diced tofu
- canned baby corn
- canned chicken meat (tuna also works well, as does chicken breast.  It works meatless but appears to lack an essential flavor).
(canned bamboo shoots also work but require a stronger curry ratio to play against).

Cook rice in a cooker.
Cook everything else in a sauce pan (use milk to thin, as needed).
Serve rice into a plate and pour the curry sauce over it.



Simple Clam Chowder:

- enough red creamer potatoes to fill a small pot, diced small in their skins.
- white onion, diced
- can of clams

Pour the water from the canned clams into the pot along with the potatoes and onion, and add enough milk and water (in about a 2:1 ratio) to fill.  Add a large pat of unsalted sweet butter.  A tiny dash of tamari sometimes helps as well.

Cook on medium/low until the potatoes are soft and starting to break up.  Add the clams late; give them no more than fifteen minutes in the pot lest they get tough.  Is best, like all chowders, chilis, and stews if you can let it sit for a day but is fine served just-made.