Saturday, June 04, 2022

my big worry (+ eye-round news)

So I bought this new, 2019-era iMac, and it's great to have a true desktop on my desk again. But then, I think back to my previous iMac, given to me as a 40th-birthday gift in 2009. It, too, was great while it lasted, but it lasted only four years before dying on me. It died while I was teaching in the Daegu area, and when I took it to a local computer shop, the guy opened it up and saw it was full of dust, to the point where the damage done was deemed irreparable. I guess the dust got in and shorted so many tiny circuits that the computer's guts had become a shit-show. My big worry, with this new iMac, is that it might suffer a similar fate, so I'm seriously contemplating buying an air purifier to minimize ambient dust. Lots of Korean homes and offices have these purifiers because of the bad air quality here in Seoul, so this might qualify as an "I should have bought this ten years ago" purchase.

In other news, my eye round is in the sous vide, cooking away happily. My Instant Pot's timer does indeed go way beyond the 24-hour mark; as of right now, I've got a little more than 20 hours to go. I started the timer somewhere around the 27-hour mark (i.e., around noon today), so I ought to be pulling the beef out around Sunday mid-afternoon. I'll be very curious as to the results. 27 hours of cooking, according to the videos I've watched, ought to result in something fairly tender, but not at the level of a filet mignon.

I also need to think about shopping for better-quality meat elsewhere. There's a place near work called Seolseong-mokjang (설성목장—a mokjang is a farm, but I don't know what Seolseong means) that sells nice cuts of meat, so I might try them, even though I expect them to be pretty expensive. When I got my eye round from the downstairs butcher I'd used for the filet, I saw with some disappointment that this eye round was marbled. I didn't want that: I was looking for solid meat. Still, the eye round was less fatty than the filet, and for an occasional steak-eater like me, that's the thing I want to avoid in my steaks: cutting away those big, useless, fatty chunks that might contribute to flavor while the steak is being prepared, but that are useless on your plate—good for little more than scraps for your dog.

More eye-round news tomorrow.



3 comments:

John from Daejeon said...

Best solution is to set a quarterly timer and blow the dust out. Or do it everytime you clean you air conditioner's filter.

Kevin Kim said...

How do you do that with an iMac? The only thing resembling vents is at the bottom of the CPU/monitor, and those vents are so narrow that, if I aimed a dust-blower in there, it would merely blow the dust around, not blow it out.

John from Daejeon said...

It's a little involved, but there are numerous videos on cleaning the it's guts. Maybe just clean it every 18 months or so.