June 20, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Impromptu Ahi Tuna Filet Mignon Mustard Green Delight on Traeger

Went to the store to get some cheeses for a pizza I was going to make tonight and spotted a nice ahi tuna steak and did a pivot for dinner.

I already had filet mignon in the fridge and I just took that out and threw some olive oil and then coated it thickly with Montreal steak rub. I then created a marinade for my ahi tuna. I then pulled some mustard greens from the garden to start once the proteins were close to being done.

I started a reverse sear on the filet mignon steak and put the ahi tuna steak on 3/4 of the way for it to get some smoke before I started the sear. I let the filet mignon get to about 108 fahrenheit and the ahi tuna reached about 92 degrees. I then took then both off the Trager and ramped set the temp to 425 and put them both back on once the temperature climbed to 385. I marinated the filet mignon with butter salt and pepper mix I had melted in the microwave. I hit the ahi tuna with more marinade on both sides. I took the tuna up to 125 and the steak to 135 and then took them off.

During the searing I had started the vegetables putting onions, garlic cloves in the wok and then the greens and some yellow pear tomatoes and cherry tomatoes whole with a touch of basil all from the garden except the garlic and onions.

Ended up being so delicious and tender that when cutting the filet mignon it was as tender as the tuna which was just right. Both had a great unique flavor to go with the vegetables.

Below is the recipe I used for the ahi tuna except of course I did a reverse on .
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/seared_ahi_tuna/
Seared Ahi Tuna

2 (6 to 8 ounce) ahi tuna steaks (3/4 inch thick)
For the marinade:
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce (or gluten-free tamari)
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, grated
1 clove garlic, minced
1 scallion, thinly sliced (a few slices reserved for garnish)
1 teaspoon fresh lime juice

I wanted to add that to monitor the temperature I used the internal wired Traeger thermometer for the filet mignon and for the Meater Bluetooth temperature monitor I picked up the past Saturday for monitoring the temperature of my tuna steak.

June 19, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Medley Garden Dishes

The past few weeks I have been swamped but enjoying many quick dishes with produce from my garden here’s a few down below. The tea is exceptionally good! The salads and quick toppings for tacos and sandwiches never gets old.

I really hate when my garden stops producing for the year because there’s no where to reliably get things like pear tomatoes and the meatiness of the tomatoes you grow in a garden. Swiss chard I have year round. Peppers once they start go well into the winter here in Northern California along with collard greens which get sweet with the cold chill.

Tomatoes, mixed greens and Swiss Chard. rosemary, sage, basil salad from the garden with tri tip.

Putting my garden tea mixture into the steamer.

Hot links and Italian spicy sausage with pear tomatoes and combination of ace, beef steak tomatoes with grilled basil and Swiss chard.

Smoked pulled pork on Hawaiian rolls topped with pear tomatoes and slaw made from Swiss Chard and cabbage from my garden.

May 28, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Performed OS Security Updates Entire Site and WordPress

Updated my Linux webserver. Windows streaming server( https://dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/now-playing/) and relay server plus systems that do things internal to my environment. It’s always good to keep up with the latest security as much as possible. I also backed up my WordPress database and updated that to the latest 6.0 version along with all associated plugins and themes.

May 22, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Fantastic Tri-Tip

Wanted a nice quick cook this weekend but something substantial so bought a package of 2 small tri-tip pieces of beef. I just cooked one of the tri-tips out of the package to try out a slightly different cooking method on my Trager Silverton 620.

Today I took the tri-tip out of the fridge rubbed it down with peanut oil,I then used a dry brine of coarse kosher salt, brown sugar and coarse black pepper in a gallon plastic bag for about an hour letting it hit closer to room temperature. During that time I had the Traeger grill all heated up @ 225 degrees Fahrenheit. I washed the brine off after an hour and rubbed the tri-tip with my custom beef rub and a sprinkling of a commercial steak blend. I placed the tri-tip on a pan I like to use to make cleaning a breeze that has raised grills and was sprayed with canola oil.

Sticking to a simple quick cook I placed a whole peeled red onion, some asparagus and a potato in with the tri-tip. After the tri-tip hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit I hit it with some apple juice and butter mix and 10 minutes in foil. I heated up my gas grill and after it reached temperature right around 500 degrees plus Fahrenheit (the gauge isn’t reliable) I put the potato in foil on the gas grill, then did a quick sear on the tri-tip about 2 minutes per side, then placed it back in the Traeger @ 225 for another 10 minutes in foil. I then took the ti-tip out and let it rest for about 40 minutes and in that time it reached 138 internal degrees. I rolled my potato over a few times and then placed it back in with the asparagus and onion on the Trager to keep warm.

The tri-tip was super tender and tasty and the asparagus had that nice smoked taste along with the red onion and the potato was nice topped with chives from my garden, butter and sour cream. I also have a special tri-tip sauce I make with Worcestershire, butter, olive oil, garlic. dry mustard and some other ingredients. The tri-tip was special with the sauce or without the sauce. I will be making this my go to tri-tip process and may try this with veggies again as well.

Tri-tip, potato, red onion, asparagus ready for the grill.

Ingredients on my Trager Silverton 620 starting up.

Another view of ingredients on Trager Silverton 620.

Tri-tip with smoke ring and showing how juicy it is.

May 6, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Pulled Pork Dishes

Did half of a pork shoulder last weekend that I had vacuum sealed earlier this year and it turned out great! Just fell apart when I pushed it with my fork even though It only went to 185 farenheit internally. I used some Desi Ghee clarified butter, honey and my custom mix of spice rub. I made some Swiss Chard slaw for the first nigt over Hawaiian rolls and it was delicous. The subsequent nights I made some tacos, for breakfast some pulled pork, potoes and eggs.

Tonight I topped it off my pulled pork week making some pulled pork hush puppies with shrimp, peppers, onions and cheddar cheese, fried in peanut oil wow! The hush puppies will be a favorite now going forward!

May 3, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Rebuilt Zoneminder Got Shinobi up and Updated Web SSL Certificates on Site

Not sure what was occurring with my Zoneminder CCTV but it seemed my database was corrupt or had issues authenticating with my streams periodically over the past week especially one camera. Then today they all went dark and Zoneminder couldn’t talk to any of the cameras.

I started getting errors like the following for all streams :

Can't open memory map file /dev/shm/zm.mmap

Then the management UI gave me this error after I tried to restart Zoneminder:

ZoneMinder Error
Unable to connect to ZM db using dsn mysql:host=localhost;dbname=zm

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused

ZoneMinder will retry connection in 26 seconds.

The mariadb logs gave me the following errors:

2022-05-02 10:47:55 0 [ERROR] mysqld: Server GSSAPI error (major 851968, minor 2529639093) : gss_acquire_cred failed -Unspecified GSS failure.

2022-05-02 10:47:55 0 [Warning] mysqld: GSSAPI plugin : default principal 'mariadb/coral@' not found in keytab
2022-05-02 10:47:55 0 [ERROR] mysqld: Server GSSAPI error (major 851968, minor 2529639093) : gss_acquire_cred failed -Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information. Keytab FILE:/etc/krb5.keytab is nonexistent or empty.

I hadn’t really did anything except updated the OS Rocky Linux a Centos 8 fork the day before and I checked that it didn’t update Zoneminder but maybe it did some where along the line because it said it was at 3.6.12 and the Zoneminder database was still at 3.6.8. The update script (zmupdate.pl) failed with DB user authentication errors as well.

I tried a number of quick remedies before I decided to just drop the Zoneminder database and start over but was still having issues so I uninstalled Zoneminder and attempted to reinstall using the repositories and proceeded to get another list of errors and issues:

Error:
 Problem 1: package zoneminder-httpd-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64 requires zoneminder-common(x86-64) = 1.36.12-1.el8, but none of the providers can be installed
  - conflicting requests
  - nothing provides perl(DateTime) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
  - nothing provides perl(Data::UUID) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
 Problem 2: package zoneminder-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64 requires zoneminder-common(x86-64) = 1.36.12-1.el8, but none of the providers can be installed
  - conflicting requests
  - nothing provides perl(DateTime) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
  - nothing provides perl(Data::UUID) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
(try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages or '--nobest' to use not only best candidate packages)
[root@coral log]#

I ended up having to install/enable the powertools repo:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

Once everything was up and installed and Zoneminder was running the services without crashing again I still had to get in the mariadb cli and correct the mysql password user I had been going back and forth changing to the correct password. Then I was in Zoneminder again able to recreate all my prior sources except one. I have two Speco cameras and there’s no way to hard reset or otherwise reset the password to factory settings. I’m fairly certain I have the right passwords but both cameras initially wouldn’t let me in. Then one camera let me in using the password I knew, and I created another admin user, so I set that camera source up just fine in Zoneminder along with my other 4 cameras. The other Speco camera just would not let me in and the other Speco I had created the other user with suddenly would let me login but kick me out unless I used the new user. I ran into this behavior a few times with the Speco cameras and this time I’m ordering another camera that will be here later today through Amazon with much better resolution. I’ll put the new camera in see how it performs and maybe upgrade other cameras afterwards. The Speco gives good resolution in night conditions so if the new camera matches that with more robust features I will go that route.

In parallel while looking through Zoneminder forums and ultimately the Zoneminder wiki on starting fresh I downloaded and configured Shinobi CCTV on the same Rocky Linux system and pointed it to the storage area I use for storing Zoneminder events. I had looked into Shinobi about 4 or 5 years ago and ran it in parallel with Zoneminder and tested it back then. Shinobi is much improved! The camera source URL’s aren’t out there for you to see easily any longer plus its fairly intuitive in comparison with Zoneminder, I just have more familiarity with Zoneminder now.

Shinobi did have some issues with the stream of the Speco camera I was able to configure with Zoneminder and I stopped there as Zoneminder was responsive now and I had other things to do like eat and minor domestic stuff in the kitchen plus caught some of the games on TV.

I then went to my dhoytt.com site and was hit with the web certificate being out of date as of today. I went to Godaddy downloaded the certs and in 10 minutes had the new ones in place.

What a Monday I thought would be relaxing and making progress on other things. Oh well that’s how it goes sometimes!

So Zoneminder is back up will evaluate Shinobi some more and my web certificates are up to date on my site. I will incorporate newer cameras into the mix and I also need to look into the release notes of Zoneminder as I noticed some new authentication methods with streams so maybe that tripped me up. Bedtime is here!

April 9, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Awesome Front Yard Roses 2022

The front yard small as it may be is looking great due to the roses. Each year certain bushes always produce well. Other years some rose bushes produce more than other years. This year the yellow rose bush is more prolific early than it has ever been. The blooms are even larger on the yellow roses.

The white roses by the fence and the long stem red roses by the door continue to produce beautiful flowers every year. My pink roses on the other side of the garden haven’t been as plentiful the past 2 years but the hybrid purple roses behind them are growing and popping out more flowers this year.

I gave them a nice feeding of slow release fertilizer and a mix to fight off insects like aphids so they will continue nice and healthy this year. I put down some more black bark down earlier this week to keep weeds out and sets the flowers off nicely with that background.

Night time shot of roses earlier this week in the evening after putting the black bark down.

Full shot of the roses in the front. The way the homes are configured the grass or white rocks in the front aren’t mine or they would be looking different.

April 3, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Removed Replanted Gourmet Collard Greens

I removed the “gourmet collard greens” that seemed to have gone to seed that I had replanted from last year and brought up from seed . The gourmet greens had a huge amount or aphid like bugs the other collard greens didn’t have. I think I could have nursed some production out of them but figured the other collard greens would take up the slack without all the bugs that weren’t on them. I placed some celebrity and large cherry red, tomato plants from the discount pack that I had in the place of gourmet greens and stevia from last year.

The stevia from last year I had in a planter and had given up on. The stevia had went dormant suddenly back in February after seeming to flourish then in a week was gone ! Very unusual to see a plant go from flourishing to dormant that quickly, then I noticed growth in the planter box and it wasn’t even getting water but the stevia came right on up!

I also made some adjustments on the drip system and tested that along with some snipping of rose bushes in the front of the house. A lot of tiny buds ready to bloom into roses in the front very soon on each of the rose bushes, with some having blooms already.

Garden spot where the gourmet collard greens were pulled from with more tomato plants and stevia in their place.

This side of the garden blooming but will need weeds pulled aggressively this week.

March 28, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

2022 Vegetable Garden in Pool Ready Good Food Weekend Done

Finished my custom pvc pipe tomato trellises for now. I even added some more vegetables to my already over crowded vegetable garden when I couldn’t find poblano\ancho chilli pepper plants sprouting in my garden. I picked up some poblano\ancho peppers, Fresno peppers and another habanero pepper plant as well putting them in various spots.

I went to the old traditional pool store I had used for most of the time the past 25 years until they consolidated to one store in 2009. This store was quite a bit further out than the second store they had they closed and picked up some pool filters, I left my automatic pool vacuum to be repaired as well. I normally do repairs myself on my pool vacuum but with supply chain slow downs and no time I let them do it. They also had the filters no one else had in stock locally. After finishing vacuuming all the dirt from my garden excursions that collected on the pool bottom and some shock treatments, getting my pool salt content up to what it should be making sure the chlorinator was working the pool water is looking inviting! Once the pool gets a bit more warm I will start up my pool workouts doubling my cardio from treadmill sessions and eventually back to my road courses.

This week I picked up whole chicken as my protein of the week. I fire cooked with pellet apple wood on one of my Traeger grills after a nice 24 hour plus brine. The cook went well and the chicken was tender after letting it rest for awhile with the juices pouring out when cut. Even the breast meat was as juicy as a thigh. I ate with some store bought lobster ravioli and shrimp in garlic sauce along with some collard greens from my garden.

On my pvc pipe trellises I used tie wraps and heavy duty rubber bands made to resist heat and outside weather. On one row I will use traditional wired tomato baskets to test against my custom trellises This also satisfies my mission not to have useful things around the yard not being utilized and in my way.

I already have lots of tomato blooms and one beefsteak tomato on one plant. I should start seeing produce from recent plants as soon as two weeks. My transplants from the previous season are already producing as they recover, especially the herbs.

March 27, 2022
by dhoytt
0 comments

Brisket 2 Weeks Ago Various Dishes

Picked up a small brisket from Costco a couple of weeks ago, injected it with a custom beef enhancing mix and rubbed it down with my custom beef rub. I smoked this baby on my Traeger pellet smoker starting Friday into Saturday evening using hickory pellets.

Over the week I made sandwiches, various breakfast treats but the best leftover meal I made was beef stroganoff with the tacos being almost as good. The spaghetti brisket with marinara sauce wasn’t a hit, not bad just not the right sauce with a smoked brisket.