Just in time for summer, my May Simply KC column: The Grilling Guide.

The Grilling Guide

Cooking meat over fire is an undeniably manly endeavor, but it’s not a skill that grows naturally from the presence of a Y chromosome. Like vehicular maintenance and administering a foot massage, grilling can yield much better results with the right tools and a bit of practice. Read on for tips on mastering your grill and some essential tools for the job.

If you’re going to take this seriously, you need to be grilling over charcoal. A gas grill is appropriate for weeknights when you’re pressed for time, but it can never match the high heat or flavor of a charcoal fire. A charcoal grill can also be easily used to smoke meats by adding soaked wood chips to the hot coals. Look for natural lump charcoal or briquettes labeled “All Natural” to get the highest heat and avoid off flavors from chemical additives. When it’s time to grill, use a chimney starter to light and preheat the coals.

Successful grilling requires that you remember these three things: heat, clean, lube. Sticking will never be a problem if you perform these steps correctly.

1. Heat: Dump the hot coals from your chimney starter into one side of the grill to create a “two-stage fire”. This will allow you to sear your meat over direct heat and then move it to the cooler side of the grill to cook to desired doneness over indirect heat. Speaking of heat, it’s likely that your definition of “high heat” isn’t hot enough. On a correctly preheated grill with your hand 6 inches above the grate, you should only be able to hold it there for a two count.

2. Clean: Once the grill is preheated, pull out your grill brush and give the grate a good scrubbing. Cleaning the grill grates should always occur while they’re hot.

3. Lube: Once the grill is clean, dip a crumpled paper towel in oil with your tongs and lightly coat the grates before adding any food.

Aside from the above, all that’s required is that you avoid under/overcooking. A digital probe thermometer helps tremendously in ensuring that your food is cooked to the appropriate internal temperature. It is essential that you allow your meat to rest off the heat before cutting into it. This allows it to finish cooking and to let the internal juices redistribute. Don’t’ be afraid to stray away from the norm and grill some items your diners might not expect: radicchio, artichoke hearts or a spatchcocked turkey. Michael Ruhlman’s blog has recipes and techniques for these and many other items you might not initially think are conducive to grilling.

Spatchcocked Turkey on Grill, Photo © 2011 Donna Turner-Ruhlman

Tools
Weber Performer Charcoal Grill ($329, amazon.com)
I like this model because it has useful features such as an integrated work surface, charcoal storage bin and lid holder. Whatever model you get, you want the optional hinged cooking grate to easily add charcoal/wood chips during cooking without removing the whole grate and your partially cooked food.

Weber Rapidfire Chimney Starter ($17, amazon.com)
If you’re cooking with charcoal, and you should be, having a chimney starter to preheat the coals is absolutely essential. It heats the charcoal faster, hotter and without the need for lighter fluid. There is simply no excuse for not having one. In fact, if you have a larger grill, I’d recommend having two. It’s much easier to light two at once than it is to heat your coals in two batches.

Oxo 12” Good Grips Locking Tongs ($13, amazon.com)
OXO’s cooking accessories are almost universally bulletproof, but I especially like their tongs. The construction is precise enough to ensure that the tips meet cleanly allowing you to easily manipulate small items. Twelve inches is the perfect length to keep your hands out of the fire without sacrificing maneuverability.

Charcoal Companion Non-Stick Reversible Rib Rack ($11, amazon.com)
If you plan to smoke ribs, having a rib rack will pay for itself in convenience in fewer than three uses. It allows you to stack slabs of ribs vertically to fit more on the grill and to avoid the constant flipping that would be required if they were lying flat.

Splash-Proof Super-Fast Thermapen Instant Read Thermometer ($89, amazon.com)
Before you even say it, I know, I balked at spending $90 on a cooking thermometer too. I wasted several years stumbling around using inferior and inaccurate probe thermometers before I broke down and went with the Thermapen. Save yourself some time and money, take my word for it and buy this one. It’s impossible to understate how much better your grilling can be when you can accurately measure and control the internal temperature of your meat.

Tool Wizard Grill Brush ($11, toolwizard.com)
For such a simple product, it’s amazing how many subpar grill brushes are out there. The Tool Wizard Grill Brush is unique in that instead of a permanent field of brass bristles that bend and clog, it uses a replaceable woven mesh “scrubbie” that conforms to the grill grates and can be easily replaced without throwing out the whole brush.

“A Man’s Perspective” appears monthly in Simply KC Magazine. You can view my archived columns here. If you have any ideas you’d like me to explore, let me know. I’d love to investigate and include them in an upcoming column.

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Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway. John Wayne

Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much. John Wayne

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This post is part of the Man’s Man series. You can find the full index of Man’s Man posts here.

Setlist
Bloom
15 Step
Morning Mr. Magpie
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
All I Need
Pyramid Song
The Daily Mail
Supercollider (tour debut)
Nude
Identikit (song restarted after Clive messed up on drums. Halfway through second attempt, house lights came on)
Lotus Flower
There There
Feral
How to Disappear Completely (tour debut)
Reckoner

Encore:
Separator
Myxomatosis
Idioteque
Lucky
Everything In Its Right Place

Encore 2:
Give Up the Ghost
Paranoid Android

Note: Myxomatosis added to setlist during Encore break, Street Spirit cut as original show closer

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My new Simply KC ‘A Man’s Perspective’ column is out today: Man on Location: Dining in Denver. It was born out of a love for the city and the generosity of a few very tasteful locals. Even if you have to tuck it under your arm and burrow through a snowbank as I did, you’ll be eating well.

Man On Location: Denver

I’m in Denver, writing to you from under a couple feet of snow. Rather than try to tunnel out and head for the slopes, I think I’ll stick around town. This is the perfect opportunity to explore the best of Denver and pass it along to you, dear reader. Before you hit the road for your annual Spring Break ski week, allow me a moment to persuade you to explore more of Denver than the travel plaza along I-70. There’s a lot you’re missing.

Highland
Highland is Denver’s newest hip spot and, as a result, plays host to some of the most exciting new bars and restaurants. I was introduced to the neighborhood through weekend brunch at LoLa (loladenver.com). It’s a sleek, modern space whose cuisine draws inspiration from coastal Mexican regions. The dinner menu and downstairs tequila bar looked great, but it was my brunch dish that won me over: Green Chili Hash. Paired with strong coffee and guacamole prepared tableside, it’s a hell of a start to the day.
For dinner in Highland, you can’t do better than Chef Nelson Perkins’ fantastic Colt & Gray (coltandgray.com). Their stated goal is to redefine the neighborhood restaurant. If this is the direction we’re headed, the future is bright indeed. Colt & Gray has a great bar tended by serious barmen who know their stuff. We had several rounds of custom-created cocktails, all of which were excellent. The menu is right up my alley, with dedicated sections for house-made Charcuterie and Offal. We ordered a smattering of items for the table, my favorites of which were the Roasted Marrow Bones, Grilled Beef Hearts – thinly sliced with roasted beets and horseradish vinaigrette over grilled bread – and a charcuterie item mysteriously titled “Forest Moon of Endor”. That’s right Star Wars nerds, Ewok sausage. More accurately, the chef’s interpretation of how a sausage of Wicket might look and taste. Amusing and delicious.

Capitol Hill
NOVO Coffee (novocoffee.com) is my drink of choice while in town. It’s available at any of the Denver Whole Foods Markets (wholefoodsmarket.com), but visiting their roasting facility at 3008 Larimer St. allows you to see them work their magic and is the only venue in town where I can safely recommend attending a “Friday cupping”.
Start your Capitol Hill evening at Bones (bonesdenver.com) which occupies the corner spot in Chef Frank Bonanno‘s complex of deliciousness at 7th & Grant (all 3 of his restaurants there are worthy of your attention). Bones is primarily a noodle bar, but they do many things well. Our entire meal was delicious, starting with the Pork Belly Steamed Buns and ending with Frank’s Soft Serve Ice Cream. I got the Udon noodles with slow cooked pork shoulder, plum-soy broth and poached egg. Dynamite.
After dinner, walk a few blocks up the hill to Dazzle Jazz (dazzlejazz.com) for cocktails and live music. The night I was there, David Amram was on stage rocking his double penny whistles.

City Park
Honestly, who doesn’t love a taco truck? Pinche Tacos (pinchetacos.com) has gained wide acclaim around Denver for its fantastic Mexican street food. On the back of that success, owner Kevin Morrison was able to open Pinche Taqueria as a stationary outpost last fall. You can’t go wrong with anything on the menu, but my favorites were the carnitas, the lengua – crispy Colorado beef tongue – and the queso a la plancha (griddled cotija cheese, avocado, and roasted tomatillo salsa).
Pinche Taqueria’s storyline is strikingly similar to KC’s Port Fonda (@portfondakc), Chef Patrick Ryan’s beloved taco-producing Airstream trailer. They too will be parlaying their food truck success into a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Port Fonda is slated to open in Westport in May.

Federal Blvd
Chances are unless you’re seeking a dispensary, you’re headed to Federal Boulevard in search of some delicious Asian cuisine. You can scarcely throw a rock without hitting one or the other, but I’ve weeded out the distractions and found the phrase you need to remember: Xiao Long Bao.
Xiao Long Bao – Shanghai soup dumplings – are steamed dumplings that contain a small amount of gelatinized meat aspic along with the filling. As the dumplings steam, the aspic melts into a liquid filling the dumpling with a warm meaty broth. Lao Wang Noodle House (303.975.2497) on Federal is where I was introduced to this culinary wonder and is still my favorite place to get them.

Congress Park
Don’t leave town without grabbing breakfast at Snooze (snoozeeatery.com) in Congress Park. They’re justifiably famous for their pancakes, particularly the Pineapple Upside Down Pancake. It’s actually not as sweet as it sounds and I found it quite good, even as a savory breakfast man. Conveniently, Snooze offers a pancake flight which allows you to try three smaller portions of their wide selection of creations. More my speed though is the Breakfast Pot Pie – egg, puff pastry and rosemary sausage gravy. Yeah. The wait can get long on the weekends, but I’ve never been disappointed by a meal at Snooze.

“A Man’s Perspective” appears monthly in Simply KC Magazine. You can view my archived columns here. If you have any ideas you’d like me to explore, let me know. I’d love to investigate and include them in an upcoming column.

I enjoyed this short piece in Esquire on Roger Craig and how he drew on his bioinformatics background to maximize his odds for success on Jeopardy!. Aside from my nerdy love of all things Jeopardy!, I really appreciated the explanation of his problem solving strategy because it’s exactly the manner in which I enjoy attacking a problem: analyzing the data, leveraging technology & incorporating a bit of clever ingenuity. Well done, sir.

Basically, he data mined the J! Archive and used that historical data to assign importance (based on frequency of occurrence, when they appear in the game etc.) to categories of clues. He then tested himself repeatedly to identify weaknesses in his own knowledge and create a “snapshot” of his Jeopardy brain. Cross referencing the two gave him a study guide of sorts showing which gaps in his knowledge were most critical to fill to maximize success. Couple that with a bit of knowledge about the game and how to exploit the Daily Doubles and he was poised to dominate. If you didn’t get a chance to watch his run of 7 wins in September of 2010 (he set the current single-day cash winnings record of $77,000 in his second win, breaking Ken Jennings $75,000 previous record) and his subsequent domination of the 2011 Tournament of Champions, you really missed out on some entertaining television.

January 25, 2012, 10:32 AM

If You Could Master All the Data in the World…

Roger Craig won more money in a single episode than any other Jeopardy! contestant. And the way he did it — through something called the quantified self — made his victory almost inevitable.

By Chris Jones

There is a movement afoot — there have been small meetings in New York and San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, among others — a growing group of people who do something called self-tracking. The way financial analysts data-mine stock histories or Bill James divined baseball statistics, self-trackers plumb their own lives, creating something they call the quantified self, in the hopes of making meaningful corrections. Most self-trackers document their physical being — their sleep patterns, their diet, their mood swings, even their silences — but six years ago a then-twenty-nine-year-old Delaware man named Roger Craig took self-tracking one step further. He sought to create a snapshot of his brain. He wanted to know exactly what he knew.

As it turned out, Craig knew many things. He had played Quiz Bowl in high school and college, where he earned a Ph.D. in computer science, specifically in bioinformatics, in teaching machines how to think. He knew a lot about biology, about astronomy, about the architecture of the brain. He was good at statistics and their analysis. He knew the Periodic Table of the Elements.

Craig knew, too, that there were just as many things he didn’t know. He has an eye for weaknesses, and he saw them wherever he looked: in his machines, in himself. From a young age, he saw them in Jeopardy! too. He saw the soft spots in the game itself — that the Daily Doubles were often hidden in the same position on the board, that the game’s designers had never accounted for the contestant free from self-doubt — but he also saw the soft spots in the players, in the people who might one day be his opposition. Even the best Jeopardy! contestants were good at some categories and bad at others. There was always some blindness.

Craig wondered whether he could train himself the way he had trained his machines. He wondered if he could find and track the holes in his brain and fill them so that he could see all things.

In 2006, he went to work. First, he found an online cache of 215,000 Jeopardy! clues maintained by a group of volunteer archivists. He downloaded it and divided the clues into categories, a basic sort of data mining. The categories were broad at first — history, literature — and then he made them more granular, hoping to find patterns: Maybe there were some things that were more important for him to know than others. And of course there were patterns, because true randomness is a very rare thing.

Presidents were critical to Jeopardy! but not every president. “You need to know your twentieth-century presidents and your Founding Fathers,” Craig says today. “You don’t need to know much about Millard Fillmore or Chester Arthur.” World capitals are important. Art, too. But of all the artists in the history of the world, Picasso was the one whose name came up the most.

Now that he knew the ideal, Craig began testing himself to see how far he was from it, working his way through samples from each category. If he couldn’t summon the information in three seconds, he counted it a failure. He plotted his knowledge on a graph with colored bubbles. The bigger the bubble, the more often that category came up in the game; its position on the x-axis represented its relative importance. (Some categories had more value than others because they came up more often later in the game, when the dollar amounts were larger.) The y-axis represented Craig’s percentage knowledge of that subject. A big bubble low and to the right? Those were the holes that Craig needed to fill. He needed to make those bubbles rise.

In January 2010, after two failed auditions, Craig dedicated himself more fully to his quest. His dissertation was nearly finished; he didn’t have a wife or kids. He studied. Fashion and fashion designers represented a particular weakness for him. Craig didn’t know much about food or its preparation, either. Broadway musicals. European monarchs. Later in his preparation, he pulled up a list of Denmark’s kings, and even there he found patterns. He saw that for hundreds of years, they were all named either Christian or Frederik.

He finally passed through Jeopardy!’s audition process that summer and made it onto the show that fall. He took his place behind the podium and picked up his buzzer. He had slept soundly the night before. He felt ready. Confident.

Jeopardy! tapes five shows in a single day. Craig was a challenger in the first game on a Monday morning. He won. In his second game, he bet massively on himself, always as much as he could, and he set the record for the most money earned in a single episode: $77,000. In his third game, he let out a little laugh when Alex Trebek read out the clue for Final Jeopardy!: “From 1513 to 1972, only men named Christian and Frederik alternated as rulers of this nation.”

“Just before that, I’d seen the movie Inception,” Craig remembers. “I actually wondered if I was dreaming. I thought, This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.”

It happened. He’d won nearly $140,000 before they broke for lunch. Then he steamed through the afternoon, winning more than $195,000, more than anyone ever had in their first five episodes. He finished his run in 2010 as the game’s third-biggest winner. Later, this past November, he came back and crushed the Tournament of Champions, winning another $250,000 in a runaway.

But on that first night, back in his hotel, Craig was sleepless, still unable to believe it. He couldn’t stop thinking about his new range of possibility. If he could train himself to beat Jeopardy! he could train himself — he could train anybody — to beat just about anything. He’s gone on to data-mine professionally, and he’s about to release a quiz app (called QED), but now he’s thinking bigger. Maybe he could take education, this giant, immovable thing, and turn it into something small and manageable and tailored. Maybe he could become the Henry Ford of learning, blowing up the system and making it more efficient, more productive — self-tracking on an enormous scale.

“You and I learned the way our parents did, more or less,” Craig says. “I think our kids are going to learn totally differently. Everything’s going to go digital, and everything’s going to be saved. We’ll have data, and we’ll see that every learner is like some learner in the past. Now imagine everything’s a bubble — Spanish, creative writing, car repair. Once you know who the learner is, you can better instruct them on what they should learn next and how they should learn it. Everything becomes more like math. First comes algebra, next comes calculus.”

Until student by student, brain by brain, all the bubbles rise — like the Periodic Table, like the kings of Denmark, first Christian, then Frederik, one after another, over and over again.

Caption:
Craig tracked his mastery of Jeopardy!-relevant knowledge by category and charted his progress over time. The different colors identify broad categories, like geography or history, with specific bubbles representing subcategories (a few examples are shown above).

1. The vertical axis measures his level of knowledge in a particular category (based on his ability to answer archived Jeopardy! questions). As his knowledge grew, the bubble of that category rose.

2. The horizontal axis measures the mean dollar value of the category — based on its place on the game board and whether it tended to arise more in Double Jeopardy! The farther right a category appears, the more valuable it is.

3. Bubble size reflects the frequency with which the category appeared in the game — larger means more common. (The big red bubble represents Wordplay.)

4. The brightness of the bubble reflects its position over time — at the start of his tracking (lighter), in the middle, and at the end (brightest).

[via Esquire, February 2012]

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The Keys released their video for Gold on the Ceiling today, the second from the El Camino album. Enjoy.

The Black Keys – Gold On The Ceiling Video, World Premiere

[via MTV]
[banner image via nygroove.blogspot.com]