I’m working on the brine for March’s Charcutepalooza challenge. The basic challenge is a brined whole chicken or pork chops, the advanced one is a corned beef brisket. Right now we’re sufficiently meat-ed out, so I’m opting for a basic-and-a-half challenge, and brining a duck. (Yes, this is the one I was originally going to […]
February Charcutepalooza: Bacon
So a few weeks ago, I came back from TipTop Meats in Carlsbad with a nearly five-pound pork belly. Only I had no pink salt (that’s salt with nitrites, for you folks playing along at home). When it finally arrived, I had to defrost the pork belly. Then it had to cure in the bacon-curing […]
Basics: Hazelnut-Roasted Fruit
I wanted something easy and delicious to go with the catfish Mark smoked tonight, something that would offer a sweet and light, yet hearty contrast. After discussion on the order of “well, we haven’t had fruit today” (Sundays are hockey days — we have a tiny breakfast and then go out for lunch), I poked […]
Night Barbecue
As I’ve mentioned, the in-laws gave me a big pile of wood chips for Christmas: three kinds of which I’d never used before, and one (apple) that I had, but wasn’t sure about. Faced with twenty-plus pounds of wood filling up my closet, I decided that I needed to try them out, one at a […]
Improv: Harvest Breakfast
Out of a desire for breakfast that didn’t involve low-carb bread (Mark has trouble with his blood sugar in the mornings), and also out of a desire to try to work more veggies into my day, I concocted this dish last night, and made it this morning. This is a total winner — sweet from […]
Garden: Looking forward to 2011
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about my garden. Part of that is that by mid-autumn, a summer garden is not much to look at — leggy and straggly and browning. We got a couple of the veggie boxes set up before the massive amounts of rain hit, but we didn’t schedule everything quite […]
Picspam and Recipe: Christmas Eve and Cu...
I could go on and on and on about how fabulous my Christmas was this year. I really could. I think, instead, I’ll let the photos speak for me. Sadly, I have no pictures of the wonderful cannoli that my Grandma made. They were fabulous. They were so good they were gone before pictures could […]
Feast of the Seven, er, Two Smoked Fishe...
So we hosted the Feast of the N Fishes for Christmas Eve, and yours truly was responsible for two of them (both smoked, of course): a salmon, and a catfish. The salmon is pretty simple. So simple that the original only takes two paragraphs in the 1969 printing of the Sunset Barbecue Cookbook. Place your […]
Christmas Traditions 2: Cuduridi and Ali...
Like a lot of other Italian-Americans, and like a lot of Italians, it’s traditional in our family to serve a special fish dinner on Christmas Eve. My family has never used the term “Feast of the Seven Fishes” for the Christmas Eve dinner, but that seems to be the common phrase for it. I actually […]
Christmas Traditions 1: Potiça for the
Several years ago, when my mother-in-law told me that she rarely got potiça for the holidays, and no one made it any more, I vowed to find out what this mysterious substance was and make some for her as a surprise. Only I didn’t know how to spell it. It took a while for me […]