El Palenque Get-together . . .

Though we had one night in the 50’s last week, I was thinking about taking our two big heaters over to the storage room since the nighttime temps have been in the 70’s since then.

But then I looked at the forecast and saw we’ve got 4 nights in a row in the low 50’s coming up this weekend. So I’ll hold off on that, I guess.

Tomorrow Jan and I are heading up to the Spring area to meet up with long-time friends, Debi and Ed Hurlburt, and Janice and Dave Evans, at the El Palenque restaurant up there.

Really looking forward to seeing everyone again.

I decided to do a test run of our new Sous Vide Immersion cooker this evening, not to actually cook anything, but just to see if it works, and if I can control it from the phone app.

Originally I had planned to use our slow cooker to use with the Sous Vide unit, but I found that the rim of the slow cooker is too thick for the large clip on the side of the immersion cooker. So for the test I just stood the cooker up in the center of the slow cooker to check it out.

Sous Vide Test Drive

I filled the cooker with tap water and turned on the Sous Vide cooker. It showed the water temp as 73°, so I set the wanted temp to 140° and timed it.

It only took about 12 minutes to raise the temperature from 73 to 140 degrees, at which time the timer started counting down from the 11 hours that I had set it for.

The only thing I was missing were the ping pong balls.

The phone app showed me the same information as the unit itself, as well as letting me change the settings, and even receive notifications when it was done.

Sous Vide Phone App

The Custom Preset section gives me suggested cooking times and temps for many different foods. A neat touch.

Sous Vide Phone App Custom Presets

I let it run for about 30 minutes and it kept the water temp at exactly 140° the entire time with the built-in pump keeping the water circulating as well.

Since the slow cooker won’t work for actually cooking, I’ll have to check out our InstaPot pressure cooker to see how it will work, but right now it’s in the storage room so that will have to wait a bit. Otherwise I’ll have to buy a large boiler for that purpose.

We did get some hot dogs and some sausages the other day to give our new George Foreman Grill a tryout this weekend, depending on the weather, of course.


Thought For The Day:


I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter. – Winston Churchill