Author: davehamby

A modern Merlin, hell bent for glory, he shot the works and nothing worked.

Categories
Video

Tablo TV Arrives

I placed my order for a 2 tuner Tablo TV on Sunday afternoon. On Monday, Tablo shipped my unit by USPS from upstate New York. It arrived in Wednesday’s post. While waiting for my Tablo TV to arrive, I did some reading and selected a LaCie Porsche Design portable USB 2/3 disk.

References

  1. http://www.tablotv.com
  2. http://www.lacie.com

What you need

To make a complete Tablo TV installation requires the following.

  • ATSC HD TV antenna, preferably external.
  • Tablo TV
  • Tablo TV iPad or Android app
  • External USB 2/3 disk drive
  • Local WiFi network for iPad/Android
  • Local WiFi network or Ethernet for Tablo TV
  • Internet access to Tablo to acquire the program guide

Choosing a Disk

DVR service is a moderately aggressive use of a disk drive. The DVR can spend 2 to 3 hours per day recording material and a similar amount of time playing back material. This duty cycle is more aggressive than the typical laptop/desktop duty cycle but less so than a corporate application server. It was with a little fear and trembling that I went looking for a disk to use with Tablo TV.

After some poking around on the InterWebs, I settled on a 1 TB LaCie USB 2/3 portable disk. These are the ones in the pretty package and are “compatible with Time Machine.” I’m hoping that LaCie chose wisely from Seagate and WD’s offerings and picked a disk that is suitable for several hours of continuous activity per day. Only one way to find out, have a smoke test.

Unboxing and Installation

Tablo double boxed Tablo TV for shipping. The inner box was typical of recent Apple or Nest packaging, simple graphics and thoughtful design to protect the product during handling at retail. The inner box was sized to be a snug fit in the outer shipping box so little dunnage was required. The package contained the following.

  • Switching power supply
  • Tablo TV
  • Ethernet cable
  • Quick start sheet
  • 2 weeks trial use of the program guide

Cabling up is simple.

  • Connect the antenna
  • Connect the disk
  • Connect the Ethernet
  • Connect the power supply
  • Plug in the power supply

The unit powers up as indicated by a blue flashing light. The light flashes at different rates during self test, program loading, OS initialization, and application initialization. Once ready, the light is solid. The behavior is similar to that of Ooma Telo so it may be a Linux thing.

Settling In

The next step is to install the partner Tablo TV application on your favorite mobile controller, for me, an iPad. Once you have a blue light, start the Tablo App and select the option Connect to TabloTV. If not previously initialized, this will be the only choice available.

If your Tablo TV is on the wired network, the application will find it without fuss. If using WiFi, the connection process is a bit more complex and is similar to that for Belkin WeMo devices. The Tablo TV will advertise its own network. You divorce from your home network, connect to the Tablo network, and do the initial configuration dialogs to set the SSID and password. Then Tablo joins your home network and you have your iPad rejoin.

Once found, the Tablo App will guide you through channel identification, program guide loading, and disk formatting. Tablo TV will reformat your external disk which will take some time. Plan on this part of the process taking 30 minutes or so.

Will Power!

Resist the temptation to watch live TV on the first day. Tablo needs some time to complete disk formatting. Once the program guide is aboard, you can schedule recordings but give time to have the disk ready and a day to settle down. That said, I was able to schedule recordings about 30 minutes after I began installation and made my first recording at 8 PM, five hours after installation started.

Using the Tablo App

The remarks that follow apply to the iPad Tablo App. I expect the Android app will be very similar.

A menu button appears in the upper left corner of the display. Tapping the menu button opens a side bar menu. From this you can choose the following.

  • Live TV
  • TV Shows
  • Movies
  • Sports
  • Scheduled
  • Recordings
  • Settings

Use the Live TV menu to view a channel/time matrix of what is now airing or about to air. From this, you can select a channel to watch by tapping the channel label in the left column. This will open a player window that you can use to play live TV on the device. On iPad, this view includes an AirPlay widget that allows you to direct playback to any AirPlay server on the local network. Think Apple TV or a Mac running Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

TV Shows, Movies, and Sports allow you to see the scheduled programs in these genres. Selecting TV Shows will show you a listing of each series or single episode show. Selecting Sports will show tiles for the major north American sports genres. Tapping a tile shows a list of available programs that can be recorded. Tapping a REC button picks that episode for recording. If the show is part of a series, the upper part of the pane while have a series record button. Activating series recording presents the choice to record all episodes or new episodes.

TV Shows Organization

Selecting Tablo TV’s TV Shows menu item opens a matrix showing tiles for each series or unique program appearing in the program guide data. At the top of the matrix, a tool bar lets you filter the view to show all shows, series with new episodes or new shows, series that are premiering, or shows by genre. This last button opens a genre side bar. The side bar has categories for news, talk, educational, children, consumer, reality, religious, animated, sitcom, crime drama, comedy, drama, etc. This list is sorted by number of entries in the category. A program may appear in multiple bins, for example, Magnum PI might appear in drama, action, crime drama, etc. Tapping a tile brings up the program summary and recording options.

A similar Channels option lets you filter programs by the originating channel.

 Play Back

Tapping the Recordings menu item brings up a matrix of shows for which recordings are available. Tapping a tile brings up a form showing the series description plus a list of available episodes. Tapping the play button at the right side of the episode tile begins playback on the local display or on the active AirPlay server.

Disk Space Management?

I missed the part of Tablo’s materials that talk about disk space management such as deleting watched programs, etc. Disk space management is currently manual. There is actually a way to delete recordings. It’s on the episode tiles appearing in the program’s entry in the recordings view. Tapping the center of the tile reveals the episode description with a delete button located below.

Work in Progress

Tablo TV is early in its development life cycle. The product launched in April 2014. Tablo’s frequently asked questions indicates that a number of product features are coming to make it possible to save recordings, use network disks, etc.

 

Categories
Photography

Bambi Stalks Cousin Teagan

Image

 

I made this crop from a Facebook image that second cousin Teagan Gray posted. While on her June 9 morning run, Teagan found this little guy crouched in the middle of the trail. Mom was keeping a wary eye on Teagan from the tree line. I used Apple Aperture to give this critter a 60 Minutes crop and to correct the exposure and color a mite. I let Aperture Otto have his head giving the result above from Teagan’s original.

Image

Categories
Web hacking

OOMA for Business

OOMA for Business.

A small church updates its telephone system

Categories
Video

Awaiting Tablo TV

Image

 

References

  1. http://avc.com/2012/02/clearqam-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/
  2. http://www.tablotv.com

So What’s a Tablo?

Tablo is a new go at an off the air digital video recorder that appears to solve the issues I’ve been having with my EyeTV/HD homeRun combination.

SimpleTV and Tablo Functionality Compared

Tablo is an off the air only DVR similar to the Silicon Dust Simple.TV. Simple.TV can receive both ATSC broadcasts and cable TV clear QAM channels. As the reference explains, cable operators are required to carry local market broadcast channels using clear QAM that can be received by a standard HD TV without a set top box. This allows the local channel service to be pirated. The cable companies keep trying to convince Congress to eliminate the clear QAM local TV requirement to prevent theft of local service.

In many areas, especially the 757, the major broadcasters have their towers in a single area and the flat terrain permits local reception out to the tower’s radio horizon. In the 757, there is no real advantage to taking cable “limited service” from Cox as the same material is available off the air at broadcast resolution. Cox often transcodes broadcast content to lower resolution to pack more on the cable. The best signal at no cost (well $300 up front for the antenna plus installation) is available off the air.

Both products are designed to work with a set top box such as Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku. I don’t know if either will stream to an Xbox or PlayStation. Both products use a smartphone or tablet application for control and display.

Tired of the EyeTV So Soon?

After 2 years of living with EyeTV, I’ve come to recognize the following shortcomings.

  • My Mac Mini has to be logged in and running to record programs increasing its attack surface.
  • My Mac Mini is powered up 24/7 shortening its service life and increasing its operating cost
  • The HD HomeRun EyeTV combo on said Mac Mini was unable to play live TV on my Apple TV’s
  • Video had to be transcoded for AirPlay from MPEG-2 to H.264 format taking a couple of hours per hour of program.
  • TV off-the-air audio from the TV’s internal tuner couldn’t be sent to the hi-fi via TOSlink.

To fix the transcoding issue, I was looking at buying a new iMac for $2500 or so to get one with the stones for lengthy video transcodes. That’s over 1/2 month of living expense I couldn’t justify spending with other priorities around the house and yard.

Comparing Tablo and EyeTV

EyeTV runs on your computer and controls an external TV tuner. Tablo combines the computer, DVR software, and tuner into a single compact low power device. Tablo has

  • A Linux computer
  • Two or 4 ATSC TV tuners
  • Ethernet
  • WiFi 802.11n. Sorry, not ac
  • 2 USB ports for external disks
  • Tablo transcodes to H.264! The mini be off when not actually in use.
  • The core DVR functionality
  • Remote control server
  • Streaming playback server

You bring

  • A USB 2/3 disk <= 2 TB
  • A set top box like Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku 3
  • An iPad or Android tablet or an iPhone or Android phone
  • The phone/tablet Tablo App.

Where Things Stand

  • Sunday 6/8 ordered
  • Monday 6/9 UPS picked up and reported the parcel hand off.
  • Portable disk to purchase while awaiting the truck
  • Tablo app installed on iPad.

The Tablo App — It Needs a Buddy!

Tablo uses a smart phone, tablet, or computer as a remote and viewing device. The Table iPad App is useless until hardware comes. I was hoping I could play with the UI while awaiting hardware but the first thing the App does is to look for a Tablo on the LAN. So it just sits there until you have one to add.

More to come …

Categories
Web hacking

OOMA for Business

My church had been dissatisfied by the service from its phone carrier. Multiple annoyances led the office staff to seek an alternative but the most telling was that the phone system was difficult to manage. Most troubling was that the staff could not change call forwarding from outside the office.

The Incumbent

The incumbent was providing 2 line business service using VoIP off the cable. The cable split between a carrier provided ATA and a Motorola SurfBoard cable modem feeding a Linksys WiFI router. The carrier provides a custom front end web site for managing phone service that was proving difficult to navigate and use. And we were paying about $80/month for service. The box supported two AT&T office desk sets that are somewhat clunky to use.

The Challenger

Given the office’s frustrations I began looking about for alternatives and found Ooma for Business. Ooma for Business is Ooma’s small business VOiP offering and is similar to its home offering in many ways but different in ways important to businesses. And different in some ways important to UCN.

Objective Capabilities

  • Calling for 3 staff members, Minister, Office Administrator, and religious education director.
  • Ability to call out while an inbound call was active
  • Call forwarding for 3 internal phones
  • Voice mail for 3 internal phones
  • A single inbound number.
  • Auto-attendant to free the office administrator to roam the building as needed.
  • Off-site management during weather closures
  • Off-site voice mail access during weather closures

Testing your ISP Service

Ooma for Business requires about 256 Kbps or so of bandwidth to service an active call plus the auto-attendant. You can verify an adequate Internet service using the speed test on the Ooma support pages. This test verifies through-put, latency, and latency jitter. Successful completion of this test is recommended prior to ordering.

Ooma Premisses Equipment

The Ooma premisses equipment is a trade paperback sized black box with 2 Ethernet ports and a POTS port that connects to the Ethernet. You may connect it between the gateway router and switch using the two Ethernet ports or to an inside port on the switch. If you have a robust service, the internal location is preferred. With DSL service, connection between the DSL modem and switch is preferred.

The little black box runs a tailored instance of Asterix private branch exchange software that supports internal calling, an auto-attendant, and voice mail.

In addition, the base system comes with two DECT 6.0 Linx devices. These provide a wireless connection for a regular 1 line business or home phone with caller ID support. The base configuration supports 3 internal lines, one on the PBX device and 2 using included Linx devices. Two additional Linx devices may be added with current firmware for a total of 5 extensions. Future releases of software are expected to increase this to a total of 10 local RJ-11 drops.

The system can support an additional 10 virtual extensions. A virtual extension pairs a PBX number with a POTS phone number somewhere in the US or Canada. The PBX forwards the call to the paired number. To the caller it appears as a local call. This is very similar to Google Voice forwarding a call to your mobile number to your home phone.

The Ooma PBX also has a teleconference bridge. This service requires an additional extension to be used for joining conferences.

Lines?

Ooma’s marketing is a bit confusing on how Ooma for Business works. The best way to learn is to read the support pages. You purchase 2 resource types from OOMA, phone numbers and internal destinations (extensions or virtual extensions).

A phone number is a 10 digit dialed telephone service address associated with the system.  UCN needed one of these.

An extension is an internal port that is able to make and receive calls. These come in 3 varieties.

  • The RJ-11 POTS port on the Ooma PBX
  • The RJ-11 POTS port on each Ooma Linx wireless device
  • Virtual extensions.

It seems obvious that you would pay for numbers but shouldn’t extensions be free? Why is Ooma charging for them? The Ooma PBX creates one “line” for each extension. They are 100 percent provisioned for external service access. All may be active on external calls simultaneously. Most large scale branch exchanges assume that most calls will be internal and that some fraction will be external. This is an invalid assumption in a small office context.

Virtual extensions are internal extensions that are paired with a POTS phone number, typically a home office or mobile number.

UCN needed 3 extensions and 0 virtual extensions.

Pricing

Ooma prices the business service based on numbers and extensions.

  • Numbers are $20 per month
  • Extensions are $10 per month
  • Taxes, 911, and universal service fund are $5/month per number.

UCN’s bill is about $55 per month

Auto-Attendant

The auto attendant uses a synthesized voice to deliver a greeting and directory information. It has different greetings and behavior for business hours and non-business hours.

  • During business hours, you can dial an extension
  • Outside business hours, it sends you to extension voice mail or to the common office closed voice mail queue.

This behavior is customizable and each day of the week can be a business day or a closed day. Each day of the week can have different business hours but only one period per day of business hours.

Phones

The system is bring your own device. Any RJ-11 POTS phone (desk set or cordless) may be used provided that it has an electronic ringer. The RJ-11 ports do not have the heft to power mechanical ringers or some older caller ID desk sets.

The system does not support direct pairing of DECT 6 wireless phones with the Ooma base station. Ooma uses a high definition voice codec to communicate between the base station and Linx end points. Ooma’s HD hand sets will not pair with the Ooma Business base station in current form.

Voice Mail

The system provides voice mail delivery in several ways.

  • Directly to the handset. Dialing the handset’s number takes you to its voice mail queue.
  • By E-mail. Ooma also delivers the recorded message by E-mail as an audio file attachment to an E-mail address paired with the extension. Transcription is not currently supported.
  • Voice mail can be managed from off site using a web browser.

Service Continuity

During power outages and Internet fades, Ooma HQ picks up service and will take messages in much the same way that your mobile carrier sends calls to voice mail when a mobile handset is indisposed. Ooma will read or play your recorded announcement and direct callers to voice mail.

Voice mails will be queued for delivery on site and delivered by E-mail as described above.

Reliability

UCN has experienced one service interruption associated with our router loosing its DHCP leases from our ISP. Basically, everything inside the router lost DNS access. Restarting the router and Ooma PBX corrected the problem.

Categories
Personal Computing

New Life for an Old (early 2009) Mac Mini

My beloved Oswald (named after Nick’s grand sire) was getting as slow as his deceased name sake. The internal disk was failing, boot and shutdown times were long, and the machine was getting unstable. Time for a new iMac? Being a retired moocher, the thought of parting with $2500 while totally out of pocket was a bit unsettling. What could I do with an overhaul?

The Symptoms

The machine’s symptoms were

  • Dying in its sleep. I’d find the forbidden icon up on a gray background
  • Slow to log in
  • Slow to log out
  • Programs like Aperture ran slowly
  • Machine was not CPU bound
  • Machine was not swapping
  • Disk I/O looked reasonable. Most things read, modify in memory, then write.

Initial Investigation

  1. Review syslog using Console.app. Nothing scary. No panics called, no device errors for disks mentioned.
  2. Reinstall Mavericks. This helped for a while
  3. Check /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons. They were full of crap from 12 years of Mac OS X updates and retired software. Clean these out.
  4. Do a general clean up using Clean My Mac 2. Remove broken startup items and broken preferences. There were some.
  5. Run About This Mac and check the kernel extensions. I found some from PPC days and the OS was actually trying to load one.
  6. Check and remove all KEXT’s older than Intel only OS X, say 2009. Remove all that were PPC only.

At this point the machine was somewhat improved. At least log in and log out were moving nicely. But the machine died in its sleep a week later.

On to Hardware

Now that the system was cleaned up, was the hardware old, ailing, or failing? Time for a visit to the Genius Bar.

I took the machine and power supply to the local Genius Bar at the MacArthur Mall Apple Store. After a few minutes to review the symptoms and my corrective actions, the Genius rounded up a monitor and keyboard and began a quick inspection. Once complete, he recommended running diagnostics. The disk phase quickly found a failing Hitachi Death Star disk. Apple could only put a disk like the original back in. Apple business rules did not allow Apple to make an alteration equivalent to repair. So I elected to reinstall Mavericks at the Genius Bar and restore the disk from Time Machine upon my return home.

On the way out, I launched a few things on the Mac Pro. Blinding fast. What’s in that sucker? About this Mac found a 256 GB SSD. Ah Ha! What can I do?

Alternative Courses of Action

While Time Machine was chugging, about 8 hours for 1/4 TB to restore, I did some research.

  • How hard was it to replace a disk? Not very.
  • How hard was it to reinstall and restore? Been there, done that, got the tee shirt!
  • Could I increase the memory? Yes, from 4 GB to 8 GB if the last firmware update had been installed. It was.
  • Could I put an SSD in? Yes.
  • Whose SSD?

SSD Selection

After some reading, I concluded that Samsung and Crucial were the go-to SSD suppliers. Both made their own flash and Samsung made its own controllers. Crucial was using recent Marvel controllers that were well regarded.

Could I get the memory and SSD from the same source? Maybe. Who?

  • Amazon did not have a good memory advisor AI so I ruled them out.
  • Samsung did not have a good memory advisor so I ruled them out.
  • Tiger Direct and NewEgg? They did not have Mac savvy memory  advisors so I ruled them out.
  • Crucial has supplied memory upgrades in the past and had a good Mac memory advisor. Did they also have a good SSD? The consensus of Ars, Toms’s Hardware, and AnandTech was that Crucial’s M550 was in the hunt.

So, I ordered 8 GB of expansion memory, and a 512 GB M550 laptop form factor eSATA 3 SSD. The SSD included a 9 MM spacer that would be needed in the Mac Mini. I also ordered Crucial’s Apple tools which included a spudger and small screw drivers.

Installation

Crucial was a bit back ordered so it was 10 days waiting for parts to come. Oswald took another header so I put an OS image on my media Drobo Gen2 to limp along while waiting for parts.

Parts arrived in Tuesday’s evening UPS run so I elected wisely to do the installation Wednesday morning.

 

  1. Are you satisfied with your backup? No. Run Time Machine and be sure things are up to date. They weren’t so I kicked that off around noon on Tuesday. Note which TM volume of three had the fresh backup.
  2. TM1 was mounted read only. Why? Run  Disk Utility to repair the disk. Nothing was wrong but it was 12 hours to find that out. Better safe than sorry.
  3. Does a recovery partition boot and run? Yes, from thumb drive made using the recovery disk tool from the App store, and also the recovery partition on the external media disk.
  4. Clean up and draw file an edge on a putty knife as described at iFixit.
  5. Do a normal shutdown before breakfast on Wednesday.
  6. After breakfast do the replacement following OWC’s 2009 Mac Mini disk replacement video.

OWC advises that the replacement is easy but not so easy. As to be expected, I found out why.

  • Getting the old disk out and the new one in looks easy when you watch an experienced tech do it. In practice, there are some sticky bits
  • Getting the drive tabs into the riser socket is tricky because there are no guides for the drive body. But it can be done with patience.
  • Getting the drive carrier tab into the mother board connector is a bit tricky. It took me 3 tries.
  • Seating the ribbon cable on the disk connector is a bit tricky. It needs a good push.
  • Replacing the memory was trivial. No skinned knuckles like desk top memory transplanting produces.

Once all was back together (well, almost all, one screw went missing), I fired the machine up. No happy chord. I let the machine boot. No internal disk. Three checks to find all the stuff mentioned above. Then the lost chord was back.

System Installation

Mac OS X installation goes like this.

  1. Start from the thumb drive (Alt/Opt down while booting until the drop down box shows).
  2. Start disk utility and partition the SSD. One 64GB Win81 partition and the balance to OS X HFS+ Journaled. ESPlanner brought the camel into the tent. Frown!
  3. Connect the Time Machine Drobo and restore the system disk from Time Machine. This took 8 hours for 1/4 TB of data.
  4. When Time Machine completes, the machine restarts.
  5. Complete the setup wizard.

Other than being agonizingly slow, the whole process was without drama. Only a bit of futzing around to get connectors seated.

The Results

For $500 and a day of BS&T, I have a new machine that is quick to boot, quick to log in, and pleasant to use. Even Aperture launch and Aperture import, both painful, are reasonably quick. This without making a working Aperture library on the SSD. Aperture is quick enough that there is no need to make a working library in addition to the archival library on the Drobo. Even image correction, which was slow before, is reasonably quick. Here’s why.

  • 4GB of memory was too little although nothing appeared to be swapped. My normal workload shows about 4.5 GB of App memory so stuff that was paging is no longer paging.
  • There is about 3GB of buffer cache. Enough said.
  • The SSD eliminates seek latency and rotational latency. Apps load much more quickly because they page in without mechanical waits.

Why the slow logins?

Just what were those LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons? Would  you believe

  • A Google daemon to enhance the user experience?
  • An Adobe daemon to find the latest screwed up version of Flash?
  • An Oracle daemon to find the latest Java vulnerabilities?

Any or all of these were ill behaved. They’re worm food now. And the machine is happy. And Google’s helper is not missed.

Categories
Retired Live

Second Life, Google Apps Edition

After responding to questions from a fellow Unitarian Universalist Association Congregation, I’ve updated this article to make it a better reference for other UUA congregations and small non-profits. The changes include addition of references and a how we should have done it section.

So, what have I been up to these past four months? A lot of goofing off to find a new normal and a bit of  non-profit hacking for my church’s communications committee. Unitarian Church of Norfolk, like most 200 member churches, needs significant technical infrastructure but is not large enough to provide it organically. Our solution has been to subscribe to Google Apps which provides E-mail, Google Groups, Google Drive, Google Analytics, and other services to non-profits.

Continue reading “Second Life, Google Apps Edition”
Categories
Site changes

New look for 2014

New Look

Retirement gives me some free time to play around with my hobbies so I gave davehamby.wordpress.com a new look using the WordPress  2014 theme. This themes is designed for magazines rather than for “blogging”. I expect this site will become a scrap book over the coming years so the new theme fits the site’s mission well. I can use the blog for announcements and the pages to share photos, music, and video.

Copyright and License

With the new look comes a copyright statement and Creative Commons License down in the footer. All of the material hosted here is created by me. When sharing material created by others, I’ll do that by link.

Comment Policy

Comments are welcome but moderated and there are rules.

  1. Comments must be relevant
  2. Comments must be relevant
  3. No plugging your commercial interests
  4. Abuse of others will not be tolerated
  5. Rants will not be tolerated
  6. Links are frowned upon to protect the naive from drive-bys
Categories
Recipes

Bread by the numbers

Bread by the numbers gives my favorite bread recipe. This recipe is a mash up of the basic white bread from Joy of Cooking and the learning recipe from the book Bread Alone and cooking ratios. By knowing the ratios, remembering the recipe becomes easy.

I’ve been doing some WordPress hacking the past couple of days.

  • The site now has a custom header image
  • The site now has a custom side bar.
  • The top level pages now have child pages
  • The top level pages and child pages have a custom side bar that shows the page tree for navigation.
  • The home page now allows navigation by categories.
  • I added my favorite bread recipe.

 

Categories
Recipes

And The Priest Fainted Lentil Soup

I have no idea why I named it thus other than to warn you that this is not Mom’s Lentil Soup. It has a good bit of other stuff in it as inspired by several recipes for lentil soup that I found on the Internet. I know, Internet recipes are risky. Often they assume experience but this one does not. If you can measure, dice stuff keeping all your parts, and sauté without burning the house down, you can make this main dish soup. It is pretty thick so it can be served as a soup or over rice as a curry but it is a vegetable stock not relying on cream or coconut milk.

This recipe is assembled in three passes. The first pass does all the slicing and dicing. The second pass sautés the veggies. The third pass creates the soup.

Vegan Note

I use Better than Bouillon “chicken” stock for this soup. This product contains a small amount of rendered chicken fat. The largest ingredient is salt. Most of the flavor is from glutamates and other wonders of food science that have non-chicken origins. A table spoon gives a whole lot of flavor that beats most home made vegetable stock. This product is an America’s Test Kitchen favorite. And is the start of most canned stocks. Do yourself a favor and use it. And rest assured that not even Grissom or Sherlock Holmes can find chicken in this product.

How much

This recipe makes four to five servings. I ate a bowl and filled 4 pint containers with the leftovers.

Tools

This recipe requires the following tools.

  • 5 quart Dutch oven for 1 pot simplicity
  • 5 or so 2 cup prep bowls to hold diced vegtables
  • 1 quart prep bowl to hold the sliced potato
  • measuring spoons
  • chef’s knife
  • cutting board

As you can see, it is all basic stuff. If you elect to double the recipe, you will need larger prep bowls and a 7 quart Dutch oven.

Ingredients

I like to list the ingredients in the order they are prepared and added, so here goes.

Spices

For this recipe, I went lazy and used a prepared curry seasoning, Frontier Natural Products Co-Op Balti Curry found at Whole Foods. This curry seasoning is a blend of coriander, garlic, ginger, cumin, roasted red chili powder, cinnamon, brown mustard, and a whole bunch of other stuff that will give a complex taste. This goes into the oil while it is being heated to begin the sauté step.

2 to 3 tsp curry seasoning of your choice

Carnivore Option

I’ve not tried this but if I wanted to add a bit of meat flavor without adding a whole lot of beast, I’d add one Chorizo sausage prepared as follows. Skin the sausage and mush it flat on your cutting board. Toss it in the Dutch oven, set the heat on medium high (7.5) and brown. Then pick up with sauteing the vegetables using the rendered sausage fat as a starting point. Add additional olive oil as needed and run with it.

Diced stuff

Prepare these vegetables for sauté by dicing small. Small dice is about pea sized for purposes of this recipe. The idea is that all these ingredients be about the same size as the cooked lentils.

  • olive oil to sauté, enough to cover the pan bottom, usually 1 to 2 ounces
  • 1 red pepper, diced small to give about 1 to 1 1/2 cup of product
  • 1 large onion, diced small to give about 1 1/2 cup of product
  • 2 carrots diced small to give about 1 to 1 1/2 cup of product
  • 4 ribs celery diced small to give about 1 to 1 1/2 cup of product
  • 2 cloves garlic minced

Soup Step Ingredients

I sliced the potato into thin quartered slices for no good reason that that is what I’d seen done in a dehydrated Minestrone soup kit I use from time to time.

  • 4 cups water
  • 1 Tbsp Better Than Bouillon “Chicken” flavor
  • 1 potato quartered length wise and potato crisp sliced into thin slices
  • One can (14 oz) Muir Glen fire roasted diced tomatoes
  • 1 cup green lentils

Procedure

I use the following procedure for my soups. First, I gather up all the ingredients and measure out the spices, salt, liquids, etc into prep bowls. I dice up all of the vegetables into prep bowls. Multiple ingredients may go into a prep bowl provided that they are added at the same stage in assembly. For example, all of the vegetables being sautéed can be staged into a mixing bowl or sauce pot. Similarly, the water and Better Than Bouillon may be measured and combined in a 2 quart sauce pan for later addition.

  1. If making the carnivore option, skin, mush, and brown the Chorizo. Scramble it up good.
  2. Next, add the diced vegetables, curry powder, and oil and sauté. I usually start the sauté at medium hot (7.5). Things will get off to a slow start but should start sizzling nicely as the vegetables give up their water. For this recipe, continue the sauté process until the vegetables are soft, the onions are translucent, and volume is reduced about by 1/2 to 2/3. The sauté process concentrates the vegetable flavors. I didn’t elect to caramelize the onions to save time. As the rate or water release drops (sizzle reduces), lower the heat to 5 then to 3 lest you burn the onions. If you have the heat right, there is no standing water in the pan and nothing is burning with a nice sizzling sound and visible steam release. Most recipes blatantly lie about the time required for this step. I play it by ear, literally. The step is done when things get quiet and stay quiet when stirred. The amount of steam coming off is greatly reduced from that observed when things were sizzling vigorously at the start. The vegetables will cover the pan in a shallow layer. I’d guess 15 to 20 minutes to this stage.
  3. Finally, add the water, Better Than Bouillon, tomatoes, and lentils. Bring to a boil at and reduce the heat to a simmer. Let simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. If desired you can add some extra salt but usually, the Better Than Bouillon base provides enough. If too salty, you’ve probably used a heaping measure of BTB. A level tablespoon please.
  4. When done, the lentils will be al dente. Add lemon or lime juice, salt, and pepper to taste at time of serving. I suggest 1 tsp of lemon juice or lime juice per serving as bowled.