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Miles Biked: 23.14
Average Speed: 13.0 mph

Miles Biked: 22.15
Average Speed: 13.6 mph

Thanks to a sunny 37-degree high, I spent the morning discovering that both my bike and my legs still function well enough to transport me from home to work and back. I was a bit down on speed, especially on the way there — 55 minutes today vs. 45 minutes last summer — but I imagine that’ll improve as my quadriceps continue to emerge from hibernation.

Sigh… first bread, then peanut butter, then hummus, and now noodles. At this rate I’m not going to have time to do anything else: this past weeked I bought a shiny new pasta maker. It’s steel, heavy, has some gears, a few knobs, a big crank, and a C-clamp for attaching to the table. Certainly nothing to complain about there… but I wonder if those smiling Italian factory workers in their cute little European cars would still be smiling if they knew that I haven’t made a single Italian noodle with their noodly contraption.

Instead, I’ve begun an ill-adivsed quest to make a perfect bowl of tonkotsu ramen. Failing that, I’d at least like to come up with something that people would pay five or six bucks for. Some people might say that because the soup is the most important part of tonkotsu ramen (I don’t think I’m going to bother italicizing that every time), I should just use cheap noodles until I get the soup right. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about setting up Virtual Private Networks, it’s that you should put the simple stuff in place first, and slowly add complexity until you break something. And of course this applies to ramen as well. I think.

As it turns out, the noodles themselves are dead simple.

These turned out pretty damned good on my first try. A couple of notes:

• The noodles often wanted to stick together as they came out of the noodler. I think that drying the dough out by adding a bit more flour would help this; it might be easiest to stick to the inital two cups and add a bit more while putting the dough through the rollers.

• This recipe makes 4 – 6 servings, depending on how fat you want to get. To avoid problems with really long strips of dough, it’s best to cut the dough into pieces before starting to roll it: 1 piece per serving if you have a helper and want longer noodles, 2 pieces per serving otherwise.

• Toss the noodles in more flour as they come out of the noodler — this will prevent them from sticking together during wrapping and in storage. The extra flour will come off when they’re boiled.

• I used bread flour; I’d be curious to find out if I can tell the difference between that and all-purpose flour.

A New York cousin has recently begun to scratch his personal web-based publishing itch: witness Party of the Purple, an “irreverent contribution across the spectrum between blue and red, perhaps even in spite of it.” Sounds like something David would write.

Anyway, I count at least 3 good points in as many substantive posts, which is just as impressive for a blogger as it would be for a batter. I especially appreciated the connection made here between two of our favorite current controversies.

But really… “subluxation?” I don’t get it even after I looked it up.

Also, I’ve turned off commenting for a few reasons:

• Not many people are using it
• The interface was kind of klunky anyway
• I’d recieved a few hundred comments like this one:

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Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness. by free

Yeah. So, I’d had about enough of that crap. But if anyone feels the need to play some internet poker, let me know.