Doug's Project 365

I received this game in my office’s Yankee Swap this year, and we played it last night. It was better than I expected!

Whole duck was super cheap at the store today, so I bought one. This is the fattiest duck I have ever cut up — it yielded 2.5 lbs of cuts for the freezer, 1.5 lbs of carcass for the stock pot, and over 2 lbs of fat and extra skin. Rendered, the fat produced over 3 cups of clarified duck fat and about half a cup of cracklings.

Christmas cactus, this year as billed.

We have a trivet — originally from a pre-electric clothes iron, no doubt — that reminds me of the Hydra logo from Agents of Shield.

Tacos tonight. Cutting the semi-frozen ground beef into pieces promotes better browning. Arranging them in the pan as pictured promotes amusement for the cook.

 

I was playing around with the new camera today, making sure certain things work as I expect. This was a throwaway shot of Ferrous, but he’s just so darn adorable I had to post it.

This was a test of my 3rd-party 1.4x teleconverter, on my 300mm lens (f/6.3, 1/320th/sec, ISO 4500). Works fine, nothing objectionable in the image quality.

Inspired by my friend Chris, I made a cocktail out of the dregs of the Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. I went in a different direction than he did: a few Tbsp of cranberry sauce, shaken with mezcal, Cointreau, and a generous amount of Peychaud’s bitters. Pretty good.

My office building is in the middle of the Illuminus Boston exhibition this year. Some of the exhibits are really quite striking. If you’re interested in projected-light art in an urban context, it’s running tomorrow night as well.

My coworkers have started a small planted aquarium in the break room (more power to them). And one of my other coworkers brought in some goldfish for it.

Leftover Thanksgiving stuffing plus antique waffle iron equals winning!