Gas or clothes? A math problem for a hot day

Here's a hypothetical situation (or maybe it was real...) that weighs the cost of having the wrong clothes. You work at an office 12 miles north of your home, a 25-minute drive in normal workday traffic. Today, it's 100 degrees out and your office space is under remodeling (i.e. the office is rather dusty right now); therefore, it is appropriate to show up to work in a t-shirt and shorts. There's an evening meeting taking place at another office location, another 12 miles and 25 minutes north of your office (i.e., twice as far from home). Midday, you find out that the dress code for the evening meeting is "business casual." There is unmistakably no "business" about your currently casual clothes.

There are several possible solutions to this problem, really. But, let's say showing up under-dressed is not a good one, and you aren't lucky enough to be able to borrow clothes from an officemate. We'll instead narrow it down to two main choices: retrieve clothes from home or go shopping? You must decide how to best spend your time and money this afternoon.

Do you drive home, change clothes, and then drive back, passing your office and continuing on to the evening meeting's location?

Do you purchase an outfit from somewhere near the office?

Do you spend on gas or clothes? Let's do some calculations.

At today's gas prices of close to $6/gallon, and your car averaging a decent 30 miles or more per gallon in suburban driving, the extra 24-mile home and back will cost around $5 in gas.

Buying a brand new outfit costs much more than that of course, but one shirt and a pair of pants from a thrift store can be less than $10. With the luck of a few thrift stores within a 3-mile radius of your office, you can spend less than $1 on gas getting to one or even two of them.

In dollars alone, driving home beats buying an outfit. But, we should also calculate time. The round trip from office to home and back to office is going to cost you about an hour. A trip to a nearby store, with a few minutes shopping and another few trying on... Let's say you might successfully purchase an outfit in under 20 minutes.

We're at 50-60 minutes and $5 on gas vs. 20 minutes and $10 on clothes. Are those 30-40 minutes worth more or less than $5 to you?

Let's think about other hidden costs here. Calculating wear and tear on the car is not precise, but we'll guesstimate about $7 for the trip home and back, using a rough average of $0.30 per mile based on various charts. And how about the fact that you simply burn the gas, adding pollution to the air and getting nothing in return except the privilege of wearing clothes you already own.

You can argue that you don't need more clothes, so it is impractical to buy a new outfit, but at least you're getting something for your money! You get to keep the clothes and wear them again -- if you happen to find something you like. It's possible the thrift store will offer only choices you find tolerable to wear for one night, in which case you can donate the clothes back later. You'll be out ten bucks, but you'll have saved at least 30 minutes and won't have degraded the air quality or added anything to a landfill. (Someone may suggest buying a new outfit from a regular store, wearing it with the sales tags intact, and simply returning it the next day to spend $0 on the clothes, but I will remind you -- beyond the fact that you'd be committing a form a fraud -- it is 100 degrees out! That outfit will certainly appear used.)

Can you tell I've reached what I consider the most logical conclusion? Thrift-store clothes win over gas. Do you disagree? Tell me why.

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #14 - Spider-Man Cake 2

It's really more of a building cake or a city cake, and you certainly could top it with any superhero (or no superhero at all), but let me tell you the story of how this so-called Spider-Man cake came to be.

Once upon a time, I made a Spider-Man-Batman cake...

and afterward vowed never again to use red icing as the main color...

only to do it again on a Mickey Mouse cake.

The next time I included Spider-Man on a cake, I used red as the main color but only for his small section of the cake. That's right, it was the Multi-Hero cake!

A new Spider-Man cake request came up this year. Because the birthday boy and his mom had no specific design in mind, I had the perfect plan for using no red icing: a Spider-Man scene, instead of a cake that looked like the hero himself. 

I remembered that small toys make handy cake decorations (a competing interest with my preference for everything on the cake to be edible, but a much easier option than sculpting a Spider-Man figurine out of modeling chocolate!). And so I had a vision -- two skyscraper cakes, with a Spider-Man swinging from his web between them!

OK, in reality, two moderately sized city building cakes, with some spiderwebs piped here and there and Spider-Man standing atop one building, shooting a white chocolate web to the other. A white cardboard cake board underneath it all would provide a canvas for drawing city streets below to complete the scene. What follows is how I executed this plan, with a photo of the finished product, of course. One note: As with many of my cakes, I rushed to finish.

It started with one vanilla cake and one chocolate cake, each baked as large, thin rectangle. I used baking sheets rather than cake pans so I could simply cut squares out for stacking multiple thin layers of the two flavors:

I froze these stacks overnight. In the morning, I trimmed, shaved, and sculpted the uneven sides of the frozen cakes with a serrated bread knife. I spread a thin layer of light chocolate buttercream on all sides (the "crumb coat"), and froze it again just to harden the icing faster.

The light chocolate buttercream became the main frosting for the brownstone-like buildings. Fudge chocolate icing right out of the can is what's top. A little white buttercream with yellow coloring made the windows, with the remaining white used to pipe a couple of spiderwebs on the building corners.

The web coming from Spider-Man's hand is white chocolate. I melted white chocolate morsels and piped a web pattern onto wax paper (it turned out more like a net or a lattice, but within the scene it works). I propped the wax paper into a slight curve -- how I wanted the white chocolate to cool and harden, rather than just flat. It worked but was very delicate and broke when I moved it. Not to worry -- I melted the extra white chocolate and used it as glue to hold the web pieces back together... But I didn't have time to let the repair solidify before we needed to transport the cake to the birthday party. So, toothpicks are holding the broken web in place.

Ta-da!

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Homemade tomato paste and a sun-drying experience

Don't underestimate the power of tomato paste umami. The times I leave tomato paste out of recipes that call for it ("oh, it's only 2 tablespoons"), the recipes turn out just fine, but... they lack a depth I know should be there, having tasted them with tomato paste before. I've come to know which of my recipes benefit the most from tomato paste and, for these, try to keep some handy in the pantry or freezer.

There isn't a huge need to make your own tomato paste, because the little cans are inexpensive, and you can repackage and freeze the leftovers. 

However. 

If you have an abundance of tomatoes, and you're looking for a way to use them besides tomato sauce or salsa, homemade tomato paste is another way to preserve and intensify the tomatoey taste of summer.

I usually make my tomato paste in the oven -- a great method, except that recently we had a string of 90-degree, sunny days at the same time I was dealing with a ton of tomatoes. No way was I going to sabotage my efforts to keep the house cool on a hot day by oven-roasting for three-plus hours. I considered the crock pot, a somewhat energy-conscious alternative, but it cannot duplicate the roasty flavor from oven heat. While looking for my usual recipe (just instructions, really), I discovered the eco-friendliest alternative that was shining right in front of me: sun-drying.

Hot diggity! I had the sun, the heat, and the time (it can take a few days).

Ultimately, I used a combination of sun-drying and slow cooker methods to make tomato paste this time.

Different recipes online use different amounts -- 8 lbs tomatoes, 10 lbs, 11 lbs. Whatever. I quartered an armload of Roma tomatoes until they filled my large pot. It happened to total about 8 pounds.

I cooked the tomatoes for a short time until the skins started to peel and juice started to ooze. 

Then, I processed the tomatoes through a conical food mill (a.k.a. chinois, a.k.a. "china cap"), stirred in a sprinkling of salt, and spread the puree across a baking sheet. You may need more than one baking sheet to keep the layer of puree fairly thin.

Out into the sun it went, protected from bugs and everything the maple tree drops by a rigged picnic net and cheese cloth.

Just because of the configuration of our fence, our house, and the surrounding trees, no one spot in our back yard gets full sun all day long, so I did have to move the setup a couple of times throughout the day so it maintained maximum sun exposure.

Besides protecting sun-dried foods from critters and debris, you also must protect it from overnight humidity, which can reintroduce moisture you had spent all day evaporating and promote spoilage. Temperatures were falling below 80 each night, and it was somewhat humid, so I brought the tomato-paste-in-progress inside each night, where I transferred it to the crock pot on low for continued slow reduction. In the morning, I spread it back out on a baking sheet and put it back outside.

On Day 3, my paste had reduced into a thick, brick-red paste.

Lesson learned: When I make this in the oven, I check it every half hour and stir or scrape the puree as needed to keep a nice even layer. Out in the sun, I didn't need to check it as frequently as that, but I should have checked on it a few times to scrape the thinnest edges in toward the center. Not having done this, I ended up with some areas that were more like fruit leather than paste (see the darkest smears where the metal really shows through).

Nevertheless, the portion I could scrape into a jar tasted great and is now in my freezer, awaiting its proper place in my next Zucornchile Rajas Bake.

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