Kevin Warnock

I learned a new word today: Aquaponics

Aquaponics is a way to grow vegetables with very little water in very little space in a very short amount of time.

The key element that makes this possible is that the vegetables are grown in harmony with a tank of edible fish. The fish tank water is used to flood the vegetable growing containers multiple times per day. The growing containers then drain slowly back into the fish tank. The plants take up the rich nutrients in the fish tank water, and they grow really well and really quickly as a result. The process also cleanses and aerates the water, so the fish are happy they have clean water to live in.

No outside inputs are needed besides water to top off the system for the water lost to evaporation, and fish food to feed the fish. The fish tank density is high, at about a pound of fish to each gallon of water. The fish grow quickly as well in this system.

I found a website dedicated to home aquaponics installations at BackyardAquaponics. There is also a magazine called Backyard Aquaponics Magazine. Their first issue is free as a PDF file here.

I never knew that you could farm your own fish at home, and in large enough quantities that you would be eating fish pretty often with a medium sized system.

I’ve now added this to my long list of projects I’d like to pursue.

Kevin's BMW 525i in front of Golden Gate Bridge

My 2001 BMW 525i is up for sale on Craigslist. Here are some pictures I took of it yesterday by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. I paid my mechanic to do a pre-sale inspection, and it needs brake pads, a $5 seal and a new lens for the driver’s side front parking light. The car has 89,890 miles on it and is in very nice shape. It runs very well, and cosmetically I would rate it very good. The tires are Michelin, and appear to have 80% of their tread life remaining. The full size spare has never been used as far as I can tell. The car is in my garage at my home, and is available for viewing. I have the service records since I bought the car, and I always take it in to be serviced at a specialist shop that works only on German cars and comes well regarded on Yelp.com.

This is the best car I have ever owned, and I will be sorry to see it go. My wife wants a new car.

With regard to price, I am asking $8,995, to reflect the outstanding condition of this car.

Kevin's BMW 525i in San Francisco Presidio

Interior of Kevin's BMW 525i

Interior of Kevin's BMW from passenger door

Interior of Kevin's BMW 525i from rear driver's side door

Engine compartment of Kevin's BMW 525i

Trunk of Kevin's BMW 525i

Spare tire for BMW 525i

VIN plate for Kevin's BMW 525i

Odometer for Kevin's BMW 525i

Exterior rear view mirror for BMW 525i

Interior door latch for BMW 525i

Sunroof for BMW 525i

Brake and gas pedals for BMW 525i

BMW 525i audio system

BMW 525i close-up with Golden Gate Bridge in the distance

Kevin Warnock's gOffice license plate

I have a hobby that I’ve been shy about disclosing. But, I have come to regard this hobby as vital research for a venture I would love to start, low cost housing built from ocean shipping containers. Such housing is available in Europe and many other parts of the world, but it’s rare in the United States.

My ‘secret hobby’ is converting commercial buses to self-contained residential dwellings on wheels, commonly referred to as bus conversions.

The link between bus conversions and shipping container homes is that both domiciles are long narrow boxes made of metal. A bus conversion is the more demanding housing type, because on a bus, one has to install all the utilities that a fixed dwelling can outsource to the city or town. So if I can build a bus conversion, I can build shipping container housing. This turns my interest in buses into legitimate research.

When I was a kid, I dreamed about camping in a motor home or trailer. My parents didn’t care for this idea, and as a family, we only went camping in tents.

One of the first motor homes I remember was the Winnebago Brave. This model had a distinctive silhouette unique to this model.

Winnebago Brave motorhome from the 1970s

The next motor home I remember was the GMC motorhome. Years ago, my grandmother Elsie Battaglia owned a beach front house in Seal Rock, Oregon. Her next door neighbor bought a brand new GMC motor home, and I fell in love with it. I recall the price of $30,000 vividly, because when grandma sold her house a few years later, she got $25,000 for it. So this motor home cost more than a beachfront house did. The GMC motor home was very expensive when new, and today, restored models from that time also cost about $30,000 and can sell for over three times that if in really fine condition. What I liked about the GMC was its curvy and unified look. It was as far from a rolling box as anything other than an Airstream trailer. The GMC also had three axles, which made it look very serious, like a Greyhound bus. Very few other motor homes had or have three axles, and I know of no other motor homes as small as the GMC that have three axles. Although the GMC seemed huge to me when I was a kid, today it would be classified as a small motor home, at just 23 to 26 feet long, depending on the version.

GMC Motorhome from 1970s. This is the 23 foot long Birchaven model.

I have a bus conversion that I bought already converted. It’s a 1967 MC-5a model from Motor Coach Industries, currently the largest manufacturer of commercial highway busses in the United States. I bought my conversion in 2001 from John Ridly of Santa Rosa, California. My dream at that time was to drive to New York City over a period of months to really see the country first hand. In 2002 I made the trip. I made the significant mistake of traveling in July and August, when it was just too hot to be traveling in the particular conversion I had bought. But I still enjoyed the trip, and I’m glad I took it. Fuel was only about $1.75 a gallon then, thankfully.

I videotaped the entire drive from San Francisco to New York City using a video camera I mounted in the passenger window. I stopped hourly to replace the Mini DV tape in my camcorder. I brought a global positioning receiver with me, and I videotaped the screen showing my location at the start and end of each video tape. I did this so I could plot the trip on a map one day.

I mounted the camera on a shock mount that I made to smooth out the image. I plan to edit the 90 hours of footage into a 91 hour movie I will post on this blog. This is a big project, and I’ve never watched the 90 hours of tape yet, so please don’t hold your breath waiting for the movie to appear here. I kept the camera rolling every minute I was driving, with the thinking that the tape may be very boring now, but very interesting far in the future, where people could see all the funny stores, price signs and driving habits of the day.

I was drained of energy when I returned from my two and a half month cross-country journey. It was just so hot that I couldn’t sleep some nights, as I could not run the generator through the night because it was not sound proofed, and it was located under the bed in the back of the conversion. I also did not have a ceiling fan, which would have helped a lot. I put the bus into storage for a couple of years after I got home, and it was covered with green moss when I finally took it out of storage and re-registered and insured it. It took two days to scrub clean. I moved it out from under the tree I had parked under, and now it does not get moss on it when parked for long periods.

When I met Monika, the woman I would later marry, I hesitated for a couple of months before I told her about my bus. I told her when we were staying at her parent’s vacation cabin three hours east of the Bay Area. I told Monika I had a ‘vacation home’ as well, but that it was on wheels. Thankfully, she wasn’t freaked out, and she agreed to go on trips with me. We went to Monterey, California and Yosemite National Park in California, among other destinations.

Fuel prices rose, and I felt guilty about driving a 40+ year old bus that gets just 6.4 miles to the gallon. Old buses have two-stroke engines, which are dirtier than modern four-stroke engines found in all current trucks and buses outside of the military, which still uses two-stroke engines because they are supposed to be more dependable in wartime because they more frequently contain no electronic controls that could be damaged by electronic warfare.

I decided to upgrade to a modern four-stroke engine bus with modern emission controls, and will write about the choice I made in an upcoming blog post.

Michael Pollan signing books, January 27, 2010, Campbell, California

Earlier this evening, my wife, some of my friends and I attended a fascinating interview of Michael Pollan. The event was the annual kick-off of Silicon Valley Reads. Silicon Valley Reads is designed to promote reading and literacy, broaden the exposure to and appreciation of good literature, and build community. So reads the blurb about them from their website at siliconvalleyreads.org.

Columnist Mike Cassidy from the San Jose Mercury News newspaper did a television worthy job of interviewing Michael.

Michael Pollan is the best selling author of a trilogy of books about food and eating. Earlier today I finished reading his 2006 volume The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. This 400+ page work changed my eating habits dramatically. I used to seek out the best price for food, and would eagerly buy 100 cans at once of Progresso brand soup when Safeway had it on sale at $1.25 each, and then spend the next year happily consuming them, knowing I paid less than half price. I would load up the shopping cart with 15 gallons of Safeway apple juice if the price was $3.00 or less a gallon. Just a couple of years ago it would routinely sell for $2.00 a gallon on sale. But this juice was imported as concentrate from over 5,000 miles away, according to the origin information printed on the bottles.

Now, after reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, my wife and I shop mostly at three special stores in San Francisco, Rainbow Grocery, Bi Rite Market and Guerra Meats. Rainbow Grocery doesn’t sell any meat or fish. This is a large supermarket, similar in size to a small Safeway. I have never seen a supermarket that sells no meat or fish. This means no meat or fish in cans either, so no chicken noodle soup. But even without the meat, Rainbow is the most magical food market I have ever visited. Bi Rite is much smaller, almost as small as a corner convenience store, but it’s packed with beautiful food. To get an idea of what it’s like, imagine a store smaller, more delightful, compassionate and thoughtful than a Whole Foods, but with the same type of vibe. Guerra Meats is a family owned butcher shop near our house that sells free-range organic poultry and grass fed beef from local farms. We bought our Thanksgiving turkey there last year.

These stores cost a fortune compared to Safeway. But I am happily and even eagerly shopping at my new favorite three stores because of Michael’s book. I plan to start right in on his latest book, which he was plugging tonight, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. What did he write that caused me to make such a big change in my eating and buying? What convinced me most was his belief that eating what he calls ‘industrial food’ causes people to get sick and causes extensive damage to the environment. I am able to afford the better food by cutting the quantity that I eat in about half.  I’ve also cut out about 75% of the meat I used to eat, since my wife is a vegetarian.

I used to snack all day and night. For about a month now, I’ve eaten three moderate meals a day, with no snacks in between. I’ve lost weight and feel better. Yes, I’m sometimes hungry between meals, but I’m getting used to it, and it’s not unpleasant. I find that when I do eat, I enjoy it more because this higher quality food tastes substantially better.

Michael Pollan seated next to my housemate Denise D'Amico and my wife Monika Varga, January 27, 2010

Michael Pollan is a journalist by profession, and according to the liner notes for Omnivore’s Dilemma, he got his start writing books about food when his editor at The New York Times Magazine asked him to write about food for the magazine. Michael is an engaging writer, and he researches his subject like one would expect a journalist to do. The references section of Omnivore’s Dilemma is pages in length. If he read all those books cover to cover, he was a busy man for an extended period. He also rolled up his sleeves and for a week worked on PolyFace Farms in Swoope, Virginia, perhaps the most sustainable farm in operation from the sound of it.

When my wife’s friend Aimee Epstein emailed us about the Pollan talk, I knew I was going to write a long blog post about it, as I’ve been reading his book with surprising relish for a few weeks now. I decided to try to shoot video of the interview, and I’m happy to report I was successful. This event was a free event, and there were no prohibitions posted or announced about recording. Furthermore, the event was broadcast on the radio. The event was held in the Heritage Theatre at 1 West Campbell Avenue, and every one of its 800 seats was occupied, and people had to be turned away at the door. The mayor of Campbell was on hand to welcome Pollan.

I am so happy to be able to share Pollan’s interview with you here by video. I hope this video will open a discussion about the interesting subject of food. To comment, click the comments link above just below the title of this post.

There were some funny moments in the interview. Mike from the Mercury News started things off of a humorous note when he began by saying he was running late and was hungry, so he stopped by the McDonald’s drive through window and picked some items from the dollar menu for himself and Michael. Mike handed Michael a bag of McDonald’s products, and Michael pulled out a cheeseburger wrapped in yellow paper and waved it around, to great effect judging by the audience response. I would guess most everyone there had read Omnivore’s Dilemma based on how they reacted to seeing Michael wave a cheeseburger on stage. I had earlier been joking with my wife Monika that I was going to bring Michael a bouquet of corn dogs and put them on stage like they were flowers. Pollan is particularly hard on corn in Omnivore’s Dilemma, blaming it for many of the ills of the country’s industrial food system, in ways that I found surprising and frankly disgusting. I thought it was funny that the interviewer made much the same joke I had thought would be funny, but would never have done.

For about two years now I have been learning to cook Chinese food. The cookbook I got to learn from wasn’t helpful, and the recipes were lackluster. As a result, I have just experimented by buying anything that looked interesting at the local Chinese market at 22nd and Irving Streets in San Francisco.

I’ve been planning to make a cooking channel on Vimeo.com, the video hosting community site similar to YouTube. I got a turkey fryer for Christmas two years ago. I asked for it because I hoped to use the burner as a high heat wok burner, not to deep fry a turkey. I have used the turkey burner once, at full heat. It was so hot it burned the dish, so I need to conduct more experiments. I suspect half of the maximum flame will be ideal.

It’s a big project to video tape cooking, and I’m not there yet. But I made a dish tonight that I particularly like, so I thought I would just write up the recipe here. It will be tough for me to lose it once it’s on my blog, an added benefit.

My wife Monika is vegetarian, and is our housemate Denise, so this is a vegetarian dish. But I also made a variation with chicken and cashew nuts that was also good.

So, this is my first published recipe. I did not borrow any of this from a cookbook, so all the blame or credit for how it tastes rests with me.

I call this recipe Zucchini and Pepper with Peanut and Garlic Sauce

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter, melted
1 medium white onion
3 cm piece whole ginger
1/2 small red bell pepper
1/2 small yellow bell pepper
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon ground bean sauce
1 teaspoon Chinese barbecue sauce
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 ripe Roma tomato
1 green onion
1 teaspoon brown sugar

Instructions

Dice the onion. Fine chop the ginger. Dice the bell peppers. Chop the green onion into 1 cm sections.

1. In a wok over a high flame, add the butter and heat for 30 seconds

2. Add all the ingredients at once except for the tomato. Stir with a spatula until the onions are translucent and the zucchini is still not yet translucent, about 6 minutes.

3. Add the tomato, and stir for 2 more minutes.

Serve immediately over rice.

I went shopping today at Rainbow Grocery, a most amazing grocery store unlike any other I’ve been to. It’s at 1745 Folsom Street in San Francisco. The web address is Rainbow.coop. I had never seen a site with the .coop extension before today. It’s a fitting address as the store is a worker owned cooperative.

This store has more variety than even the largest Safeway or Whole Foods Market, in my estimation. There is a bulk foods section where you bag your own ingredients, and it’s this section I most enjoyed today. They have perhaps 20 kinds of rice for sale. I bought two varieties today: Lotus brand Volcano rice and a different brand of rice called Wehani rice. The Wehani rice was the standout, though both were delicious. The Volcano rice is light brown, and the Wehani rice is dark brown. When the Wehani is cooking in the rice cooker, it sort of looks like melted chocolate cooking.

The prices are higher than Safeway, but lower than Whole Foods, I estimate. There is only one Rainbow, so it’s not a chain. The staff really seems happy to be there, and so do the customers. It’s actually an adventure just walking the isles, as there are few national brands for sale.

I’ll need to return with my video camera to do a short walk through so you can see what an unusual store this is. Highly recommended.

If you try the recipe above, please let me know and provide feedback, as I know nothing about writing recipes. I hope you like it.

I got a great cookbook for Christmas from my wife’s aunt Nancy. It’s published by the cookware store Sur la Table. The name is The Art & Soul of Baking, and the author is Cindy Mushet. This is a beautifully printed book that’s fascinating to read. I learned an enormous amount by reading the first 71 pages, which tell the reader that All Purpose Flour is better thought of as No Purpose Flour, as it’s a compromise blend not best suited for anything. When I went to Safeway in search of actual bread flour, I discovered they only stock one brand in one size, but have numerous brands and sizes of ‘no purpose flour.’

The pictures are nearly works of art. The photographer experimented with shallow depth of field in many of the shots, which I’ve not seen done in a cookbook so well. Some of the shots even have blurred motion in them, such as when showing how to use a rolling pin.

I wanted a bread machine for Christmas, but I didn’t get one. I did get a bread machine specific cook book from my mother, but I’ve not had a chance to use it yet. I don’t know what machine to get, as I’ve read some of the machines can hop off the counter by themselves. If anyone has any good suggestions, please let me know.

For my first loaf, I made the first recipe in the book, for plain white bread. This was no Wonder bread however. I discovered it takes a lot of time to make bread, and I had to refrigerate the dough overnight since it got too late to bake the bread. The dough rose further in the cool refrigerator, but when I took off the plastic wrap, it sank an inch within 30 seconds. It never regained its height, so the loaf was shorter than the loaf pan, when it was supposed to be higher.

Here’s a video I shot of my first loaf of bread. I sliced it while it was hot so the video would look especially appealing.

My wife Monika and I went to my parents’ house at 8:30 this morning to open presents. My brother and his family flew in from their home in Colorado, which they do every other year. My grandmother Elsie Battaglia lives in Portland, Oregon and is 98 years old, so she no longer visits at the holidays. However, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, she participated in the present opening via video conference using iChat on my brother’s MacBook computer. We set the laptop up on the coffee table by the Christmas tree, and she was able to ‘be there.’

This sounds like it might be awkward or impersonal, but it wasn’t at all. The kids seemed to really like showing off each new gift they received by holding it up close to the camera. Grandma’s live-in helper Claudia would describe the goings on on screen to Grandma, who has lost much of her sight in recent years to macular degeneration. Both Claudia and Grandma really seemed to enjoy the experience. Grandma bought a 24″ iMac about a year ago specifically for video conferencing with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so this wasn’t the first time she’s done conferencing. But it was the first time she joined in opening presents Christmas morning around the tree.

I set up my video camera on a tripod and let it record a segment. I think it turned out great because you can see Grandma on the laptop and you can see everyone interacting with her almost as if she were sitting on the couch in person. I heartily recommend you try this at home with your loved ones that can’t travel for important events. It was really a special day today.

Monika and Kevin, Christmas picture, 2009, San Francisco, California

This Christmas my wife Monika and I sent out Christmas cards with an enclosed picture. This picture turned out to be one of the nicest pictures we have of the two of us together. Monika bought me my first set of pajamas with feet since I was a child. She got a set for herself as well. These pajamas keep us warm on cold San Francisco winter nights. Monika had an 11 x 14″ print of this shot made, framed it and we gave it to her grandfather Imre, Sr. for Christmas. This picture was taken in my house in front of our Christmas tree. Monika’s smile is just beautiful.

Forester Ray Morit explains University's proposed plan

I went on the walking tour today that University of California at San Francisco conducted to solicit community feedback about its plan to make its forested lands less prone to wildfire. The University had an actual Forester conduct the tour, and I feel I learned a lot. There were about 20 people there including the representatives from UC.

The information I was most surprised to learn is that when trees are cut down they will usually grow back if left unchecked. The regrowth can be stopped by applying a herbicide. We were told the herbicide can be applied with a paint brush or roller directly to the cut stump, and that only a cup of herbicide is enough to kill a stump about two feet across, which would be a large tree for this relatively young forest.

Here is a short video clip that I shot. It shows an example area on UCSF’s property that is already in the shape they plan to get the rest of their property in using in part the FEMA grant money they are applying to the United States Federal Government for. What I was impressed with is how good this area looks, and how safe it appears to me.

This clip is in true 1980 x 1020 high definition, and if you click on the Vimeo logo on the video above, you will be taken to Vimeo.com, which handles the video display on this blog. In the lower right corner of the Vimeo page that displays this video, there is a link where you can download the full resolution HD file, which is 316 megabytes. If you save it on your computer, you can just click on the file and watch the full HD version, which shows much more detail than the 1280 x 768 version you see here on this blog page. In any event, be sure to watch this video full screen, which you can enter by clicking the icon that looks sort of like a capital X in the lower right corner of the video player window.

My wife Monika went to high school at Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, California. Her biology teacher Father Maurus Nemeth, a Hungarian monk, officiated at my wedding to Monika. Tonight Monika, her parents, brother and sister went to a fundraising show and dinner at The Priory.

I can’t remember the name of the piano player, but he was interesting, so I shot a video of one of the pieces he played, above.

Woodside Priory dinner November 7, 2009