Salmon and Fire

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.) ...

June 18, 2015 · 1 min

Sometimes you just have to have breakfast tacos for supper

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.

June 17, 2015 · 1 min

A meal of experiments for friends

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. ...

June 15, 2015 · 3 min

Chainsaws (without cords) are Amazing

Hackberry trees are terrible. Well, they may have uses other places, but in Austin they mainly act like weeds on steroids. At some point in the early spring, we went from being able to see our back fence, to not being able to see it. It was a hackberry explosion. I had been meaning to get out there for a while and cut them down. But that would require me using my little chainsaw, and it is corded. I had picked up a bunch of Ryobi 40V cordless stuff, and I just didn’t want to use anything with a cord anymore. So the other weekend, I went pick up this at the Home Depot: ...

June 10, 2015 · 2 min

The tale of the failed biscuits

Many people know that I really enjoy a good biscuit. Several years ago I decided that Bisquick couldn’t be that hard to produce, and decided to look up some good biscuit recipes on the internet. I wanted a completely-from-scratch biscuit. It had to start with all standard ingredients that we would normally have around the house (e.g. flour, butter, salt, etc.) and be relatively straight-forward to produce (i.e. I didn’t want to have to spend 2 hours making biscuits). ...

June 8, 2015 · 2 min

Lazy + Impatient Occasionally Wins

Today I experienced the future we were promised, a.k.a. Amazon Prime Now. I wanted to try something out on my Mac that required a flash drive, and a coworker suggested a Kensington model with no silly moving plastic parts. I liked it, and decided to check Prime Now to see if they had it. They did! So since there is a $15-minimum-order rule, my coworker said to get him one as well. I placed the order on the app, and it told me it would be here b/w 2 and 4 PM. ...

June 4, 2015 · 1 min

A quick love letter to cycling...

A few years ago I basically gave up bike riding. After having spent several years racing on and off, I had spent the better part of 2 years spending a lot of time on the bike, I got thin, got fit, and then decided that I was just tired of it. I wasn’t sure if it was watching a guy and his bike bounce down a hill (separately, but amazingly synchronized) at the last race I ever did. Or maybe it was the two people who rode into the shoulder while basically looking right at me in one week commuting home. Regardless, I was done cycling. ...

June 3, 2015 · 2 min

Restarting Again

Welcome to djwhitebread.com 3.0. Carrie has been telling recently that I should start a “lifestyle blog.” Apparently, these are a thing. Fair enough. The joke was that I would call it, “What’s fermenting now?” My fermentation game hasn’t quite been up to par as of late, unfortunately. So what the heck am I going to do here, you ask? Make a hopefully useful attempt at showing the things that I find make life interesting. I am not much of a builder, but I do like to create things (and these things mostly can be eaten or imbibed). I like to play golf, I like to ride my bike, and I like men’s fashion. I also love to travel and see and eat and drink new things. So here we go. ...

May 31, 2015 · 1 min