Sausagefest 2 - Now with Potatoes!

After last weekend's sausage success, we swung back to The Meat Hook for a second round. This week's stars: merguez, red wine rosemary, chorizo, garlic, and boermors. If there's any regret I had with last week's adventure, it was the unused fat that fell to the bottom of the drip-tray after broiling the sausages. To improve on our sausage tasting we hit up the Union Square farmer's market on the way home to pick up some root vegetables. It being the lean time of year for local produce, we snagged a beautiful bag of potatoes.

I decided to do a little trick shown to me by Nick Fauchald, editor of The Tasting Table. If you don't have a wire rack for roasting meats, use some root vegetables instead! As the fat renders out of your protiens, it bathes the starchy veggies in a coating of delicious.. Wanting to keep the integrity of the flavors of each sausage, I made little aluminum foil boats for each link, filling the bottoms with quartered purple and gold potatoes.

Just like the brussels sprouts last week, I didn't salt or pepper the veggies. I let the sausages impart their unique flavors to the potatoes while roasting in a 450 degree oven. Halfway through roasting I flipped the sausages.

We followed a better tasting order this time, starting with the milder links. The red wine rosemary and garlic sausages were nice, but a bit milder than I'd like. (After last week's revelations my bar has gotten quite a bit higher.) Neither of these sausages rendered near as much fat as the merguez or the chorizo. The big surprise this week was the boermors. Imagine a sausage that tastes like a meaty glass of scotch. Seriously, it tasted of pork and beef, with smoke at the start and oak at the finish. Delicious! After the boermors we finished with the chorizo and merguez for dessert. The chorizo was nicely balanced, not too much heat, not too much spice with lots of complex flavor. They imparted a nice flavor to the potatoes they were roasted with, but the winner this week was the merguez. The merguez potatoes were fantastic! All in all, a great sausagefest.

OK Trends continues to kick ass

It looks like the folks at OK Cupid are paying attention to their critics. As I've mentioned before, their analysis is inspired, but their data graphics need some work. Case in point, this post about profile photo myths. The graphs had a lot of rookie mistakes.

For Example... the chart on the right was taken from OK Trends, and there are a number of problems. It's always a good idea to eliminate all unnecessary data pixels. The outlines around the bars of these charts provides some visual distraction that can easily be eliminated. In addition, the legend requires a bit of ocular calisthenics. Your brain only keeps five to nine bits of information in short-term memory. In order to read any chart you need to understand the numbers and the context. The further you remove the context from the numbers, the more your brain has to work to put the pieces together. In this example the numbers in green at the top of the chart can't be understood until you read the title at the top of the chart and the legend at the bottom. In the western world we read from left to right, top to bottom, but this chart forces the viewer to read the top, then the bottom, then side to side. While the green data series is the first you encounter with your eyes, it's the last that's listed in the legend.

My version of the chart is on the right. Notice the legend is on the right of the chart, in the same order as the data series. Your eye reads left to right, the way it naturally wants to. I added an axis showing the sum of all the categories, so you don't need to do the mental math to know that these are parts of a whole population. In addition, the unnecessary outlines around the data series have been removed.

What I find interesting is the use of a stacked column chart. I think sometimes the impulse is to use a stacked column chart to show data that adds to 100%. I tend to use stacked column charts when I'm showing categories on a continuum. At times it may be better to show the information in a clustered bar chart, like the next one shown here. It depends on what you're trying to express with the data graphic. All of these charts contain the same data, but the last chart makes it easier to see the differences between men and women when it comes to profile pictures. It also makes it easier to see relative differences between categories.

I'm really impressed with the improvements that OK Trends employed in their most recent post. They're employing a wider variety of visualizations, and the graphics they're using are much more sophisticated. If you look at the fourth chart I've posted here, the information is presented in a more manageable form. Grid lines have been provided for quick and easy reference, there's a label indicating the sample size, and the labels are all oriented so they can be read left to right. It makes me really happy to see their data graphics rise to the quality of their analysis.

Sausagefest

I am a firm believer that the world needs more well-crafted sausages (and food in general). When I worked as a cook at Concordia Language Villages, I would sometimes encounter kids that were more comfortable eating bologna than eating roast pork loin (they often called themselves 'partial vegetarians'). I like to think that those kids still believed in 'the meat faerie', more comfortable not knowing what they were eating. Then there were the other kids who were totally skeeved out by cold-cuts, not wanting to eat 'lips and assholes'. From where I sit, I'd be more concerned about the fillers that get added to any type of mystery meat. Why try to remove yourself from knowing what you consume? I suppose it's the nature of the distance we seek to create from our collective environment. It's easier to consume without consideration for the effects that our demands have. At the end of the day, an animal died to take center stage on your plate, don't we owe it to ourselves to make as many tasty consumables from that animal as is possible?

That being said, I'm incredibly excited about the charcuterie that's happening over at The Meat Hook. We picked up a sampler pack of all the sausages they carry yesterday and had a little tasting for brunch.

Tom Mylan helpfully listed out the flavors we acquired on the package. I opted to roast the weiners in the oven rather than pan-fry or boil. I wanted each tubesteak to maintain it's identity through the cooking process. I think we did a 350 oven for 10 minutes or so. I wasn't fully awake and often cook by smell and sound.

From left to right we have: merguez, parm parsley, rabbit, green chorizo, chicken w/ herb, and lamb w/ rosemary.

Let me preface the review by saying that they were all delicious, some of the best sausages I've ever had, but there were two that I clearly preferred, the merguez and the green chorizo.

We started with the merguez, which in hindsight may have been a bad idea. I'm a sucker for spice, and this sausage did not let me down. It was sweet and salty, and had a nice finish. The parm parsley had a nice depth of flavor. It wasn't as cheesy as I'd expected it to be, which was nice. The rabbit fell a flat for me, especially compared to the others. I probably should've started with the rabbit in order to fully appreciate the mild nuances it brings to the table. The green chorizo was the big winner for me. It was fresh and springy and made me think of an herb salad, truly unexpected. The chicken with herb was easily the best chicken sausage I've ever had. I like to stick with classic pork sausages for the most part, but this chicken was juicy and flavorful. It tasted really, well, chickeney, but it had a great mouthfeel that is often lacking from chicken sausages. The lamb with rosemary was good, but it just didn't have a hope of being as good as the merguez, and as it was later in the tasting, it wasn't as juicy as I would've liked. All in all, I give the collection an enthusiastic thumbs up, and I'll certainly be back for more.

I love meat

Anyone that knows me knows this.

Yesterday Dan and I visited the Meat Hook and I must say I'm smitten. We picked up a lovely dry-aged steak for two, and opted for a sampler of all their house-made sausages (as well as some house-cured kimchi, a favorite of mine).

Dinner last night

The helpful guys behind the counter gave our steak a nice salt and pepper on each side, so we were good to go as soon as we got home.  I opted to pan-sear each side and the finished in a hot oven (450 degrees). The whole operation took maybe twenty-five minutes (five minutes each side, five in the oven, ten to rest). I prefer my steak on the rare side, just heated through, really. It was DELICIOUS! Nice and meaty, with that extra tenderness and sweetness that comes with the dry aging. The fat rendered really nicely. There was a good crust with a creamy, candy-like texture on the inside.

On the side we rocked some serious brussels sprouts and a green salad. For the sprouts I cleaned and quartered enough sprouts to put a single layer in my trusty 8x8 pan. Tom (our butcher) included two smoked sausages, a Kielbasa and an Andouille. I usually use my reserved bacon drippings for roasting vegetables, but as this was a special occasion I decided invite the Andouille to the party. No salt, no pepper, no additional fat, just the sausage and the sprouts.


A quick trip in the 450 degree oven resulted in the sweet-salty ambrosia you see at your right. I don't normally roast veggies so hot, but from now on I will. There was a good bit of caramelization on the sprouts, and the sausage provided ample fat and flavor.

If you get the chance, I highly recommend swinging by the Meat Hook. I know I've found my favorite place for flesh in NYC.

The internet is a beautiful place

I'm not sure if anyone else saw this post over at ReadWriteWeb. If not, you should give it a gander.

It occurs to me that this reveals something that we as designers and developers need to be reminded of from time to time. The internet is big, (like really, really big) and inherently unfamiliar, with a constantly changing map and unreliable landmarks.

I am reminded of a project I worked on, designing a food-related tool for the Japanese market. When creating a tool for a particular market, it's always important to understand both the physical and intellectual environment that the tool will be used in. I designed a collapsible bento box that can be stored in its wrapper, hung up on a wall. Does this product make sense in Agrestic, CA? Not at all, but for a Tokyo apartment, you bet!



The meaningful bit here is that when designing for the web, we sometimes become so focused on designing and developing for ourselves, or for early adopters, that we forget what happens when someone navigates by landmark. It's a shift from the intellectual environment that we expect. Take this map from Ryuch on Wikimedia Commons:

If the terrain of the Zhongshan Scenic area is unfamiliar to you, the landmarks are given helpful visual references. In other words, if you're trying to get to the big blue and white building at the center of the map, and you aren't seeing it, you're clearly not in the right place.

What does this have to do with the frustrated folks at ReadWriteWeb? I really think there are two things at play here. One being the intellectual environment of the user (which we can't control) and one being the information that we give to the user. We can't control the way that people navigate the web, but we can give them better (or at least more consistent) landmarks to go by.

Let's consider the most popular websites to be landmarks for the web: Google, YouTube, Facebook, MSN, Twitter, eBay, Hotmail, CNN, AOL. (I'm not including any porn here, sorry folks). What happens when the facade of these services changes? For those of us who are web savvy, we take a look at the URL, assure ourselves it was just another re-design, grumble about the old light bulb being so much better, and go on our merry way. What about those people that know where they are in downtown Brooklyn by finding the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower? Confusion! Chaos! Frustration! (These, by the way, are the people who are still using IE 6, not because of laziness, but because of comfort.) I think it's easy for us to laugh at these clueless rubes who can't seem to figure out that ReadWriteWeb isn't Facebook, but really, how are they supposed to know the difference? They're navigating still unfamiliar waters, taking the long way around because it's what they know, and the don't particularly care that there's a more efficient way.

The lesson here? Sure, make improvements, but what's wrong with sticking to familiar interfaces? Users don't like change, so make little changes on a regular basis. The older I get the more I admire the design that is taken for granted.