Keeping up with the Koske's: 4th of July

The only 4th of July Oliver knows is one in Tahoe. But, this year we had to change things up a bit due to imminent arrival of Oliver's first cousin. We were trying to decide what to do. Do we go deal with the crowds at some public display? Then I remembered that Dublin is one of the last bastions in the bay area that allow personal fireworks. Unfortunately you can't light the fireworks off in multi-family housing (apartments, townhomes). But fortunately the park less than 100 yards from our front door closes the parking lot down and allows people to light off fireworks there. Who knows how much longer we'll be able to light fireworks off as it's too much fun and the authorities sure don't like us to have too much fun. So we decided to BBQ, then go light off fireworks at the park.

The firework haul

When I came home from the firework stand and showed Oliver the fireworks he started giggling and said, "ooh this is going to be fun." I decided to barrow the immersion circulator from work and sous vide a Tri Tip. For those not in the know, sous vide is a slow cooking process in which you control a water bath temperature then you place you meat (or other thing) in to the water bath for some amount of time. The idea is you set the bath temperature for beef to 134 degrees F, which is the temperature for medium rare. Then you 'cook' it for some time, but you can't really over cook it since your at 134 F. The longer you go the more tender the meat gets (I've had 24 hour sous vide veal that nearly melts in your mouth). Since you can't really over cook it you don't have to baby sit it like cooking meat on a grill. Once you decide to take the meat out you need to 'finish' it in one of many ways (grill, frying pan, broiler, etc...) to get a char on the surface. The nice thing about sous vide is no baby sitting and the ability to make inexpensive cuts of meat more tender. It turned out pretty yummy, but I think it could have gone longer in the bath.

Once dinner an desert was done we hung out and waited for the sun to go down. I explained to Oliver that he can't have too much fun or they won't let us do it again next year. He didn't really understand that. Once the sun started going down we headed over to the park and started having too much fun.