reflective tape effectiveness

So I've been commuting by bike much of my life, and lately that has entailed traveling on the roads after dark.  While I have bright lights, I really like reflectors.  A bright light can run out of battery and/or be over powered by a car headlight.  On the other hand, at reasonable distances, retro reflective materials require no power and work quite well when light from the left headlight is incident upon a sample.  (Effective means make the bike more visible to car drivers.  A light source simply needs to be near the driver's eye and incident upon the reflector for this to work.)  For this reason, I like to have both lights and reflectors. However I don't like to have too many things hanging off my bike.  As such I've put together a partial solution with reflective tape.  

I've posted a pic comparing a daytime view to a nighttime view of my bike in which a flash was used.  I think the pic speaks for itself.  I have silver reflective tape (ANSI level 2, as I recall) in between the spokes on the wheels, and red reflective tape on the seat stays.  The red reflective tape can't be as bright as the silver, but I didn't want to mess up the aesthetics of the bike.   Let me know in the comments if there are any questions about what I did.  

More food stuff: pork recipie

I recently baked some pork chops.  It's tricky to get them out of the oven at the correct time.  The flavor was excellent.  I served them with sauerkraut  and that went quite well.  

The link to the recipie is here:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/honey-dijon-pork-chops/

Here is the relevant part:

0.25 cup Dijon mustard
0.25 cup honey
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
4 pork chops

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a baking dish.

-Mix Dijon mustard, honey, black pepper, and garlic powder in a bowl. Arrange pork chops in prepared baking dish and pour mustard mixture over pork.

-Bake in preheated oven until pork is slightly pink in the center, about 45 minutes. An instant-read thermometer inserted into the center should read at least 145 degrees F (63 degrees C).

Enjoy.

A seared salmon recipe

Now that I have a little more free time and my own kitchen, I'm endeavoring to cook a little more.  I'm generally only willing to cook things that require a minimum number of ingredients, most of which should be used in other dishes I like.  Recipes calling for exotic oils, things that can't be purchased at Aldi and such are automatically out.

Here's one modified from here that fit the bill and turned out well:

• 4 6-ounce salmon filets, boneless, skin on
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 10 12 turns freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
• 4 cups cooked brown rice
• 1 cup low-sodium soy sauce
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
• 1 clove of garlic, peeled and minced
• In a small saucepan add soy sauce, honey, ginger and garlic. Set over medium-high heat and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Set aside.
• Take a non-stick pan and set over high heat. Rub filets all over lightly with vegetable oil. Season both sides with salt and pepper. Once pan is very hot place the filets skin-side down and press down gently with a spatula so the skin remains flat to the pan. Cook for about 6 minutes then liberally glaze the top side of the filets - you want to have some glaze swirling in the bottom of the pan too as this will caramelize with the crispy skin. Turn off heat and flip salmon so skin side is now on top. Allow to rest in pan for 3 more minutes until cooked through.
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• I had skinless salmon filets, and substituted 1 teaspoon of garlic powder for 1 clove of garlic.  In addition, I scaled the recipe down for my purpose. The critical thing is placing the fish on a super hot pan to sear the skin/bottom side to make it crispy.  
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