road rage

today I was driving in the car, and turned the radio to sean hannity because I feel like in order for my political views to be valid, I have to give those on the absolute opposite side of the spectrum a fair chance and listen to what they have to say. Within two minutes, I was 15 miles over the speed limit, squeezing the steering wheel, and cutting people off. For the safety of those traveling on the interstate system with me, I decided it was best to turn him off.














I totally suck at blogging. blurg.

Oven Stones and Our New Skillet

Since we're trying to learn more and get better at cooking, we watch a lot of 'Good Eats with Alton Brown'. We also got his books to help us with the basic stuff. In one of them it talks about how ovens lie, and they aren't really good at holding a consistent temperature. We got a thermometer for our oven and found out it'll swing a good 100 degrees while cooking something.

In one of Alton's books he talks about putting unglazed quarry tile in your oven to increase its thermal mass, so it'll hold its temperature better. Most tiles have coatings and chemicals in them, that will melt at high temperature and are not very healthy to eat and breathe, so it was a little tricky to track down the right type. After calling 10 different tile places in town, I found some at Dal-Tile that will work. (after seeing them I realized I had seen them at home depot and lowe's, the just weren't labeled right.)

We put them in our oven and they make a remarkable difference. We used to have two rows of them but that was too much for our oven - it would take about an hour to preheat. They also make for great pizza stone (as you can see by all the grease marks). You can also use them for cooking bread, but we've stuck to our standard loaf pans so far. I'm hoping to soon find a good recipe to make a big loaf of italian bread or something to try cooking right on them.

Back to the pizza part. Most pizza stones we saw online were around $20 for the basic ones and $70 for the nice ones. That seems like a lot just for a rock to cook pizza on. I also heard of a lot of people whose stones would crack because of the repeated thermal expansion from cooking them. These stones seemed like a great solution because they're only 6" square, so they oughta be more resistant to cracking than a 20" stone. We liked the pizza so much we went and got a pizza peel from this restaurant supply place that we started going to a lot.

It might seem excessive to have a pizza peel, but it's actually super hard to scoop up a pizza any bigger than 5" across without one. The stones make for super good pizza, really really really good pizza. We like it a lot.

The stones were about $7 for 14 (we're only using 6 now, I got extras for backup in case they bust) and the pizza peel was about $14. Pretty cheap for yummy pizza.

The other thing that may have totally changed our cooking is our 'new' cast iron skillet.

I say 'new' because it's a Griswold Skillet from the 1930s. Everyone online says that the newer ones just aren't the same. Instead of a rough surface the older skillets were machined down super smooth, you almost wouldn't believe how smooth it is. Anyway, the reason we wanted a cast iron skillet goes along the same lines as the oven stones, the iron holds heat. So when you crack an egg onto it, it sizzles.....and then keeps sizzling. It makes for good eats ;) The first time we used it I cooked Becca some eggs and hashbrowns (with fresh sliced potatoes from our Bosch slicer thing) before she left for school, they tasted super good so I made some more. I made some eggs, which tasted great. Then some pancakes, which tasted great. Then some more pancakes, and on and on until it was noon and I realized I hadn't done anything but eat and cook.

Alton said that if he could only have one pan it'd be his cast iron skillet, I'd say the same thing now.

Renting vs. Owning

We've been looking at our long term plans for our condo and I have read lots of articles (here, here, here, and here) about long term investments, specifically real estate investments.

A lot of the articles show that real estate (when adjusted for inflation) doesn't have a great return, between 1-3% a year. That doesn't seem like a great long term investment plan, especially when you compare it to a generic index fund. For example, Vanguard's "500 Index" has had a 10.38% return since it's inception in 1976, adjusted for inflation that'd only be around 6-7% return. Already a index fund is returning 3-5% better each year, but there's more to the cost of a home than it's selling price and while investing you still need a place to live.

In my mind the best part about buying a house is that you get the dividends from someone elses investment. For the example of a 300k house, even though you've only put in a small down payment (50k) and monthly mortgage payment, you get a 300k investment that's growing. A small return on 300k might be better than a moderated return on a 50k investment.

In order to make a fair comparision I wanted to look at the cost of owning a home (sale price, insurance, taxes, maintenance) compared to renting a home and investing the difference between the total cost of a home minus the rental price. I've seen a lot of sites look at part of the equation, but not take EVERYTHING into account. So I made an excel sheet (here) factoring in everything, letting me adjust inflation, appreciation, investment returns, mortgage amount, mortgage length, down payment.

My conclusion is that buying a home can still be a good decision, but renting/investing can be just as good. It all depends on how the markets act in the future, which is impossible to know. I think we'll come out ahead because our condo is near city creek, which will hopefully make us an outlier with higher appreciation. Oh well, we'll see.

Download the excel and play around with it, it's pretty neat to see. The column on the far right shows the difference in net value between renting/owning. Black numbers mean renting is better, red numbers mean owning is better. You should be able to download it here. (I don't know how to upload files to blogger, so i had to make a google site to host it)

Pot Rack

As you know, we're kind of crappy bloggers. BUT, check it out! we made a pot rack!







total cost: about 11 bucks. we're so crafty :)

Yikes!

The past two weeks I've been so bogged down with homework/being sick/slacking off that it pretty much sneaked up on me and i realized this morning that I HAVE TO TAKE THE LSAT TOMORROW MORNING!!

wish me luck :)

Pork Song

Andrew found this video and watched it for like, ten minutes and giggled constantly. the original one just keeps playing the song over and over forever, this one only does it twice. After our success with cat cheeseburger, we're sure this will be a hit, even if it is a little cannibalistic.



http://www.sharenator.com/Pork_song/

This is the link to the original, in case you want to watch it forever.



Okay, who wants to go to Leatherby's?

Vegas

We're in vegas, we know you're just going to skip the words, so we'll just put up pictures.



in front of the cool fountain thing in caesar's palace




us, katrina and her kids and dave and his kids at FAO schwarz in the big giant trojan horse. you can't really tell that's where we are, but it's true.

in general, i think that vegas kind of sucks in principle, but it's on the way to san diego (where we're going on monday) and we mostly just hang out in the condo and go swimming with kids, so all in all, it's a pretty fun vacation :)