Happy early Turkey Day! Those of you that know me know I love to cook, and I have to say one of my favorite Thanksgiving treats is deep fried turkey. But as wonderful as this is, it can be very dangerous if not done correctly. In a video guaranteed to make any property and casualty insurance agent cringe, Alton Brown demonstrates that here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_0v5u-QnJA
There is a lot of good news here... First of all, you don't have to use Alton's turkey derrick to do this safely. But having fried a few birds myself, there are a few simple but important tips that I'd like to share to help you insure a safe and delicious holiday...
1. Never, under any circumstances, attempt to fry a frozen (or even partially frozen) bird. This is known as a turkey bomb and you will NOT enjoy the results. They may include but not necessarily be limited to: Third degree burns and a house fire. While I present that with humor, the truth is, every year, your local fire dept and EMS gets calls for severe burns and house fires because someone decided it would be ok to drop a frozen or partially frozen bird into a 450 degree vat of peanut oil. If you are planning to fry, best practice is to use a fresh bird. That way, there is no question about whether or not it is fully thawed. Plus, if you're going to do that, you're also likely going to have to buy local, which allows you to support a local farm and will also most likely give you a tastier bird!
2. Set up the fryer a safe distance from anything flammable. If you have a deck, NOT THERE. Put it in the yard, well away from your deck, fence, house... If it's raining, don't set it up in your garage... As obvious as these seem, people do it every year and end up with the fire department at their Thanksgiving celebration.
3. Use protection when lowering the bird into the oil and when getting it out. If you're going to invest $75 or more into a turkey fryer and oil, invest an extra $10 in a large, heat resistant cooking mitten to protect your hand and arm. One that covers you to the elbow is the best bet. Trust me on this one, I've had severe burns from hot oil splashing on me and it is excruciating. Plus that extra $10 is sooo much cheaper than a $1000+ trip to the emergency room...
4. Pay attention to the size of the bird. Your fryer will have guidelines on the maximum size of the bird your equipment will accommodate. Heed it. Too much bird will result in a boil over, which can result in a turkey bomb... See the Alton Brown video above. A very good practice is to put the bird in a dry pot, fill it with water until it just covers the bird. Then remove the bird and note where the water level is. Fill with oil just above that mark. Assuming you're within the bird size for your fryer, you have the right temperature and you immerse and remove it slowly, you should effectively minimize your chances of a boil over and the accompanying fire risk.
5. Check the wind. This is important for 2 reasons. If you do have a flare up, you want to make sure that there's nothing downwind that can catch fire. Second, it can mess up your cooking process. If possible, set your fryer up where it is shielded from the wind in order to ensure an evenly cooked bird.
6. Brine that bird!! As Alton points out in his video, brining will make for a very tasty turkey! The seasoning will be all through the bird and it will help lock the moisture in. Sierra Nevada posted a very good brining recipe here on their fb page: https://www.facebook.com/sierranevadabeer. Hmmm... Might have to try that one myself this year.
Hope you all have a happy, safe and delicious Thanksgiving!!
Spence
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
SE Crime Reports and Props to a Hard Working Dude
I'll start with the props... One of the twitter posters I follow regularly is Justin Fenton, who is a crime beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covers the SE district and he does it quite well. I've had a couple conversations with him via email when I've had specific questions about a story that affects our neighborhood and he has always taken the time to answer personally. As I've started paying attention to what's happening in this neighborhood, his articles and tweets have been a great source of information... If you don't follow him, you can find him on Twitter as justin_fenton.
Here is a link to an article he posted this morning which, imo, everyone in SE Baltimore should read... http://baltimoreguide.com/http:/baltimoreguide.com/southeast-crime-woman-stabbed-while-unlocking-her-car-near-patterson-park/
I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I would like to summarize and point out a couple of things. First, there were 12 robberies in SE Baltimore last week. Seven of them happened on Friday. Seven! Why Friday? I'd submit that Fridays are paydays for a lot of companies and lots of people are walking around with more cash than they would normally carry. The second thing that jumped out at me is the 5 burglaries... four of which happened between 8am and 6pm, while people are at work. From what I have seen, this appears to be something that is becoming more common in this neighborhood and in my opinion will continue to do so until the economy improves significantly (That's as far as I ever intend to get into politics here!).
The only crime I'll comment specifically on is the break-in on the 100 block of N East Ave. I know for a fact that there was another break in within a block of there in the last six months because I sold an alarm system to one of my neighbors there--unfortunately, it was after the burglary occurred, so it was kinda like closing the barn door after the horse was already out. It bothers me personally a great deal, because I hate walking in after the fact--especially when it's a neighbor (I live 2 blocks away). I always feel like if I had just met with them a week before, it could have minimized their personal loss.
I want to finish this entry with a few basic personal safety tips (chances are we all know these, but we all ignore them from time to time... Goodness knows I have, but they are still important and can keep you out of trouble!):
1. First of all, please be aware of this. There is a very common and very dangerous scam going around the Baltimore area right now that goes like this: A stranger knocks on your door. When you go to the door they make up some story about needing money for a locksmith, bus fare or any myriad of reasons. One outcome is that the person chooses to "help" and gets taken for how ever many dollars they give up to the person. The other outcome is much worse. If no one comes to the door, the one who knocks signals an accomplice who breaks in the back door, or the knocker goes around back and does it himself, under the assumption that no one is home. This could potentially lead to a very dangerous encounter with a desperate individual inside your home. The best way to respond to this is to go to a CLOSED window and tell the person who knocks you cannot help them. In this case, they typically move on to a house where no one is home. After calling you a vulgar name or two, of course...
2. Remember that people from legitimate companies with legitimate business will be wearing uniforms or carrying some type of company ID when they knock on your door. If you ever have even the slightest hint that something isn't right, call the company in question for confirmation before you open the door. A someone there on legitimate business should never mind.
3. Don't assume that just because it's daylight, or early in the evening, you're safe. Look at the times on the robberies. Half of them happened in broad daylight, and the latest time any of them occurred was 10pm. Same with the burglaries, most happened during the day. Take a look at the addresses too. These are areas we would typically think of as relatively safe. Criminals don't think that way. They think of those neighborhoods as relatively rich and relatively close instead!
4. When you are walking around the neighborhood, pay attention to your surroundings. Stay off your cellphone, get the earphones out of your ears and notice what is happening 360 degrees around you. A person engaged in a conversation on a cell phone or listening to earphones is distracted, and a person who is distracted is an easy mark.
5. If you've been out drinking at the bar or a restaurant and you have a distance to walk home, take a cab. If it's just a few blocks and you must walk, don't walk alone. Criminals know that people walking out of bars are often easy marks and they lay in wait for them.
6. If you are walking somewhere and you feel you're being followed, cross the street. If the person you suspect crosses, assume you are correct and find safety immediately. An business is a good place to duck into.(aka, your nearest pub!) also, if you are on your block, beat on the door of a neighbor you trust for help. Trying to get into your own place can be risky, especially if you live alone, because the person could force their way in when you open the door and then you are in a very bad situation in private. (BTW, I had to use this one myself a few years ago. The person I suspected walked back and forth in front of the front window of the bar I ducked into for 10 minutes... Needless to say, this one saved me from getting mugged!)
5. Finally, if you have an alarm system in your home, have it tested regularly to make sure it is functioning properly. Most monitoring companies offer a weekly test for a minimal fee. If you system is over 3 years old, you may want to talk to a professional like me to see how much the technology has changed in just a few years and what upgrades are available--chances are, you can get a whole lot more functionality for the same or just a little more than you're paying now in monitoring. And if you feel like you don't want all of the bells and whistles, chances are I can save you a significant amount of money every month on your monitoring fees if you're out of contract.
Well, I hope this has been a good reminder to folks about personal safety... I would ideally like for this blog to be a resource more than it is an advertisement and I hope I've gotten started on the right foot. If you have input or questions, please comment below, or if you feel it is more private, email me at alarmanswerman@gmail.com.
Thanks for reading,
Spence
Here is a link to an article he posted this morning which, imo, everyone in SE Baltimore should read... http://baltimoreguide.com/http:/baltimoreguide.com/southeast-crime-woman-stabbed-while-unlocking-her-car-near-patterson-park/
I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I would like to summarize and point out a couple of things. First, there were 12 robberies in SE Baltimore last week. Seven of them happened on Friday. Seven! Why Friday? I'd submit that Fridays are paydays for a lot of companies and lots of people are walking around with more cash than they would normally carry. The second thing that jumped out at me is the 5 burglaries... four of which happened between 8am and 6pm, while people are at work. From what I have seen, this appears to be something that is becoming more common in this neighborhood and in my opinion will continue to do so until the economy improves significantly (That's as far as I ever intend to get into politics here!).
The only crime I'll comment specifically on is the break-in on the 100 block of N East Ave. I know for a fact that there was another break in within a block of there in the last six months because I sold an alarm system to one of my neighbors there--unfortunately, it was after the burglary occurred, so it was kinda like closing the barn door after the horse was already out. It bothers me personally a great deal, because I hate walking in after the fact--especially when it's a neighbor (I live 2 blocks away). I always feel like if I had just met with them a week before, it could have minimized their personal loss.
I want to finish this entry with a few basic personal safety tips (chances are we all know these, but we all ignore them from time to time... Goodness knows I have, but they are still important and can keep you out of trouble!):
1. First of all, please be aware of this. There is a very common and very dangerous scam going around the Baltimore area right now that goes like this: A stranger knocks on your door. When you go to the door they make up some story about needing money for a locksmith, bus fare or any myriad of reasons. One outcome is that the person chooses to "help" and gets taken for how ever many dollars they give up to the person. The other outcome is much worse. If no one comes to the door, the one who knocks signals an accomplice who breaks in the back door, or the knocker goes around back and does it himself, under the assumption that no one is home. This could potentially lead to a very dangerous encounter with a desperate individual inside your home. The best way to respond to this is to go to a CLOSED window and tell the person who knocks you cannot help them. In this case, they typically move on to a house where no one is home. After calling you a vulgar name or two, of course...
2. Remember that people from legitimate companies with legitimate business will be wearing uniforms or carrying some type of company ID when they knock on your door. If you ever have even the slightest hint that something isn't right, call the company in question for confirmation before you open the door. A someone there on legitimate business should never mind.
3. Don't assume that just because it's daylight, or early in the evening, you're safe. Look at the times on the robberies. Half of them happened in broad daylight, and the latest time any of them occurred was 10pm. Same with the burglaries, most happened during the day. Take a look at the addresses too. These are areas we would typically think of as relatively safe. Criminals don't think that way. They think of those neighborhoods as relatively rich and relatively close instead!
4. When you are walking around the neighborhood, pay attention to your surroundings. Stay off your cellphone, get the earphones out of your ears and notice what is happening 360 degrees around you. A person engaged in a conversation on a cell phone or listening to earphones is distracted, and a person who is distracted is an easy mark.
5. If you've been out drinking at the bar or a restaurant and you have a distance to walk home, take a cab. If it's just a few blocks and you must walk, don't walk alone. Criminals know that people walking out of bars are often easy marks and they lay in wait for them.
6. If you are walking somewhere and you feel you're being followed, cross the street. If the person you suspect crosses, assume you are correct and find safety immediately. An business is a good place to duck into.(aka, your nearest pub!) also, if you are on your block, beat on the door of a neighbor you trust for help. Trying to get into your own place can be risky, especially if you live alone, because the person could force their way in when you open the door and then you are in a very bad situation in private. (BTW, I had to use this one myself a few years ago. The person I suspected walked back and forth in front of the front window of the bar I ducked into for 10 minutes... Needless to say, this one saved me from getting mugged!)
5. Finally, if you have an alarm system in your home, have it tested regularly to make sure it is functioning properly. Most monitoring companies offer a weekly test for a minimal fee. If you system is over 3 years old, you may want to talk to a professional like me to see how much the technology has changed in just a few years and what upgrades are available--chances are, you can get a whole lot more functionality for the same or just a little more than you're paying now in monitoring. And if you feel like you don't want all of the bells and whistles, chances are I can save you a significant amount of money every month on your monitoring fees if you're out of contract.
Well, I hope this has been a good reminder to folks about personal safety... I would ideally like for this blog to be a resource more than it is an advertisement and I hope I've gotten started on the right foot. If you have input or questions, please comment below, or if you feel it is more private, email me at alarmanswerman@gmail.com.
Thanks for reading,
Spence
Greetings and Expectations!
Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Spencer Garrett and I'm a resident of the Patterson Park neighborhood of Baltimore. I have been a resident of SE Baltimore for over 10 years and I have lived in the Baltimore area for almost two decades. I have considered myself a naturalized Baltimorian ever since the first time I was able to get full cracking crabs without loading up on potatoes or corn! I'm also the full time single dad of a very cool 12 year old boy and a 3 year old Rottie mix who is a hot mess.
Professionally, I work for a local alarm system company who has been in the business for over 45 years. I'm doing this blog unsanctioned as an experiment, so for now I won't name them here. Suffice it to say that I'm proud to work for a company with an A+ BBB rating and one of the best reputations in the region. Good people too... Can't beat that!
As I said, this is a bit of an experiment for me, but nonetheless I'd like to set some expectations for us from the start. First of all, this blog is going to primarily be Baltimore-centric, meaning that I'm going to talk about things that affect us as neighbors here in this city. I expect that the neighborhoods I'll talk about the most will be those here in SE... Canton, Fells Point, Patterson Park and Highlandtown. As a Patterson Park resident, I know SE well, so we'll start here and work outwards. What I'm not going to do is turn this into a crime report, there are plenty of those out there and I can just link to them, which I will do on a regular basis. What I am going to do is talk about quite a few topics as far as security is concerned, home, business and personal, just like the title says. This is a topic that has interested me for a long time, but was brought to a head by an incident that happened a few years ago on my block. I may make that a topic of a future blog, I'm not sure. And yes, we're going to occasionally talk about alarm systems, but I promise not to make this the only topic here. I might even invite a guest blogger or two to contribute from time to time, or use this space to conduct a print interview or two... I feel like there's a lot of potential here to make this interesting, and I haven't even remotely figured it all out yet.
So I hope you'll stay with me on this and give me a few tries to get this up and running. Please comment if you like it, if you don't, if you have an idea or just want to say hi. And if you're interested talking to someone about an alarm system or even just having a free security assessment for your home or business, you can reach me at alarmanswerman@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!
Spence
Professionally, I work for a local alarm system company who has been in the business for over 45 years. I'm doing this blog unsanctioned as an experiment, so for now I won't name them here. Suffice it to say that I'm proud to work for a company with an A+ BBB rating and one of the best reputations in the region. Good people too... Can't beat that!
As I said, this is a bit of an experiment for me, but nonetheless I'd like to set some expectations for us from the start. First of all, this blog is going to primarily be Baltimore-centric, meaning that I'm going to talk about things that affect us as neighbors here in this city. I expect that the neighborhoods I'll talk about the most will be those here in SE... Canton, Fells Point, Patterson Park and Highlandtown. As a Patterson Park resident, I know SE well, so we'll start here and work outwards. What I'm not going to do is turn this into a crime report, there are plenty of those out there and I can just link to them, which I will do on a regular basis. What I am going to do is talk about quite a few topics as far as security is concerned, home, business and personal, just like the title says. This is a topic that has interested me for a long time, but was brought to a head by an incident that happened a few years ago on my block. I may make that a topic of a future blog, I'm not sure. And yes, we're going to occasionally talk about alarm systems, but I promise not to make this the only topic here. I might even invite a guest blogger or two to contribute from time to time, or use this space to conduct a print interview or two... I feel like there's a lot of potential here to make this interesting, and I haven't even remotely figured it all out yet.
So I hope you'll stay with me on this and give me a few tries to get this up and running. Please comment if you like it, if you don't, if you have an idea or just want to say hi. And if you're interested talking to someone about an alarm system or even just having a free security assessment for your home or business, you can reach me at alarmanswerman@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!
Spence
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