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. ...
First of all, we had a great time. We stayed busy, and it was incredibly hot in Paris. But overall, it was great to see a few new places (for me at least), and as always great to see our friends living in Europe. I really wanted to get this post out of the way so that I wouldn’t be stuck in posting. That seems to be how it always happens. You have something you want to write about, and you put off writing about it because it was a big deal, and then you never write anything else. I did not want that to happen. ...
First off, let me say how much I love Lufthansa. They give you food on short, regional flights. I appreciate that. And it’s real food, with hearty bread. The picture on the right I think is Budapest, as the captain mentioned we’d be flying over it shortly, and this was the biggest thing out the window at that time. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2448”] Real food on a 1.5 hour flight. Amazing, much love to the Germans. [/caption] ...
Copper River Salmon is my favorite salmon. I still remember the first time I had some copper river. It was in Seattle with my parents on our last hurrah family vacation the summer after my first year of graduate school. I didn’t know salmon could taste like that. It was the first properly-cooked, wild-caught salmon I had ever tasted. When Carrie and I saw that Costco had wild-caught Copper River Sockeye for sale a few weeks ago, I had to get some. I went ahead and grilled it, along with some mushrooms. All I did was put some salt and lemon on it. With salmon that has so much flavor, you don’t need a lot of extras. The fire video below is just me playing with the SloMo on the iPhone 6. (I recommend going to the Vimeo page to view it in HD if it won’t let you view HD on the embedded player.) ...
And it’s glorious. Basically, we needed to make some salsa with garden tomatoes and my fake jalapeños. Seemed like breakfast tacos were the way to go.
I have wanted to sous vide steak for a while. It seemed like something that didn’t make sense for a random Tuesday, and Carrie’s not a big steak fan anyway. With Carrie out of town this weekend I invited some of my old UT Cycling team friends over for supper, to catch up, and to play some video games. One cannot have only steak for a meal, so I decided to make macaroni and cheese from scratch. I had always wanted to do this, so out to the internet I went. I decided to base my batch off of Alton Brown’s baked macaroni and cheese. ...