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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. ...

I hope people have enjoyed my posts about baking stuff. Unfortunately those will be the last ones of that sort for a while. I’m not sure how many people know, but a few years back I won a free year membership to Pure Austin Gym because I lost a lot of weight and became passable as an amateur bike racer. I was on my bike 10+ hours a week, and while I did change my diet some, I mainly just ate real food and exercised a ton. ...

I love big breakfast. It’s just a thing I got from my parents. This past Sunday morning, I was up early and wanted to make something different. I have done biscuits more times that I can count, I had just done waffles a few weeks ago (and they take forever), so I was looking for something different. I started flipping through Carrie’s One Bowl Baking book looking for ideas, because she and I made the double-chocolate muffins out of here and they were delicious. I found the corn muffin recipe and this sounded like a good call. We had all the ingredients on hand, and it seemed like a good combination of things for a breakfast muffin. ...

Tomorrow marks the last day where the average temperature in Austin goes up. The average temperature starting Saturday starts to go down, albeit very slowly for the month of August. But for people like me who put up with this time of year begrudgingly, it’s a welcome day.

I’m not sure if people remember my biscuit fail post, but it had been a while since then and I hadn’t had the opportunity to make biscuits lately. I decided I would make a fresh batch this weekend. I also had some buttermilk leftover from the eggplant dish, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I used a combination of white wheat, AP, and rye flour. Instead of the yogurt that I normally put in I used buttermilk. ...

We had some friends over for dinner this past weekend, and we decided that this was a great time to cook up the several eggplant we had hanging out in the garden. Wanting a different take on the purple nightshade I turned to Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. The recipe we found was a eggplant tricolore, a take on an Italian classic. It turned out fantastic. One of the things that I noticed in making this was a theory I had about eggplant for a while (and one that had been pushed along by many cooking shows) was that for eggplant to be tasty you have to get the water out. For this recipe I used the convection roast at like 375˚F for 30 minutes with them up on a wire rack over my pan to get the airflow on both sides. The steam was pouring out the oven vent almost the entire time. By the end they were very shriveled and brown, but they tasted great and weren’t bitter. So remember, with eggplant water is the enemy. ...