Today was something else. The short version: we didn’t eat enough and probably didn’t have enough water. All things that can be fixed (former cyclist Taylor is judging current Taylor for making such a rookie mistake). The views were amazing, however. And honestly, I felt pretty great other than the last hour. The internet isn’t great here, so this will be text only. The hotel we are at is super cute and supper was included which was nice. ...
For those following along, we had a great couple of days in the Netherlands. 🇳🇱 We are currently traveling to Zurich to see some friends there and tomorrow we head into the Alps at Chamonix in France. 🇫🇷 Will report more once we get settled in Chamonix.
[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“4032”] Henri (the black one) and GiGi (the gray one) relax in a rare moment of snuggling that didn’t lead to fighting. We’ll miss our kitties on our trip, but they’re in good hands! [/caption] ...
I always thought to myself, “Yeah, I have goals…” But I never wrote them down, or told anybody about them, or really thought much about it. I mean, there were big things I knew I wanted to do… get married, graduate from grad school, get a job, etc. But I never really thought about it on a yearly or monthly basis, “What’s the thing that I need to be doing right now?” ...
Well, today is the last day of 2019, and it appears that I didn’t write anything here all year. It was an interesting year for various reasons. Some good, some bad. I always used to put a picture of Pierre on these posts, but unfortunately we had finally say goodbye to our little old man this year. It was tough - I had had him for 17 years. That’s 17 years of coming home and having him run up to me and say hello. That’s a long time to all of a sudden not see him. ...
One of my goals for the year was to learn how to smoke a brisket. True, wood-fired barbecue is one of the main culinary traditions of Central Texas, especially barbecuing beef brisket. The time had finally come for me to get an offset smoker, a “stick-burner” as they are called, and start this journey into a new cooking genre. Three weeks ago, I (along with some help getting it home from my fellow National Instruments Meat Guild members) acquired an Old Country BBQ Pits Pecos: ...
I have had good success with the pork shoulder in the sous vide, and I was curious how baby back ribs would turn out. It seemed like it would work without requiring as much time in the sous vide (the shoulder takes a 24 hour dip in the bath). So I used the pork shoulder recipe at chef steps.com as a starting point. (Funny side note, in just looking this up I saw that they actually have a baby back rib recipe. It varies slightly from what I did, so I may have to give this another try.) ...
It’s been a while since I fired up the ol’blog. November of 2015, in fact. Ah, those were simpler times. I had just discovered that you can sous vide a pork shoulder and make it taste like it came out of a smoker. I had just started singing in the choir at church. Oh, and the president wasn’t a fascist narcissist with a white supremacist as one of his main advisors. Good times. ...
As anybody who has read my blog knows, I’m a big fan of cooking things sous vide. It’s one of the best ways to get meat to be tender and juicy. Another place on the internet that loves sous vide is chefsteps.com. I have been very intrigued by their Smokerless Smoked Pork Shoulder for a while (they also do a brisket, but the pork butt seemed like a safer first step). I basically followed their steps exactly. Their webpage is really nice because you can change one of the ingredients, and it scales all the rest to match. My pork butt was only about 2kg so I scaled the entire recipe down 50%. ...
So it’s been about a month since I first posted about this. Good progress was made. While that first week was brutal, I felt much better the second week and the weight continued to fall off. I was at 211 going into the wedding, and my tux and vest fit. The pants were a little snug, but nothing uncomfortable. I decided the wedding weekend and the week after would be a cheat week to give myself a mental break and try to squash some of the cravings. Though, to be honest, I was ready to get back to meat and veggies by the end of it. We have been eating so many vegetables that I quickly started craving vegetables during the cheat week. ...