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New Dishes I Cooked in July 2020
As food stocks started to normalize towards the middle of COVID summer, I started to take advantage and try out more new dishes. It also helped that we were FINALLY able to find yeast again! The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed…
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New Dishes I cooked in May 2020 and June 2020
May was Cuban food month. I’d received a new cookbook of recipes from the Miami diaspora and back in Cuba. So I tried my hand at a few new recipes. Technically, I’d done the breaded steak (usually called Chicken Fried Steak in the USA) and pork shoulder Cuban style before, but this was the first…
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Raspberry Pi Zero W for new Projects
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using: Arduinio MKR Wif i 1010 – $32.10 Arduino MKR ENV Shield…
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New Dishes I cooked in April 2020
When it came to new dishes, April was all about bread. First, I made a no-knead bread with America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe. It came out OK. I actually tried it again the following day to try and get a darker crust. The funny thing is that this is one of the easiest breads to make…
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An Update on my Roll-Your-Own IoT
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go…
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2019 in Cooking
Without a doubt, the biggest story to tell about my cooking in 2019 is learning how to make, and no longer be intimidated by, breads. I made 15 different new breads and biscuits this year, including new family favorites like the Amish Friendship Bread and Brown Butter-Cardemom Banana bread. Also, there were the harder breads…
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New Dishes I cooked Dec 2019
December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish…
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2019 in Books
While I continued to read lots of cookbooks in 2019, this was the year of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. On the sequels front, I finished The Cosmere (except for White Sands Vol 3), continued The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. For…
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Review: Cook’s Country Magazine 2018
Cook’s Country Magazine 2018 by America’s Test Kitchen My rating: 4 of 5 stars As per usual with these reviews – I’ve already made a couple recipes from this bundle of 2018 Cook’s Country issues. It was, of course, great! In 2018 Cook’s Country continued the tradition of recipes from around the USA with fun…
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New Dishes I cooked in June 2019
The biggest dish for me this month was the pit beef, which I’d been wanting to make for at least two years now. I finally went ahead and smoked it according to Meathead’s recipe (along with his recipe for Tiger Sauce – a type of horseradish). I was afraid after waiting for so long I’d…
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BBQ Thermostat Project
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right…
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New Dishes I cooked in April 2019
April was a month for getting a little more ambitious as well as trying variations on dishes I’d made before. Among the variations I would count the tilefish, grilled chicken thighs, and bratwust hot tub. The tilefish was just a variation on the Raichlen grilled fish recipe I’d tried before with blackfish. This time I…
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New Dishes I cooked in March 2019
March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten…
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New Dishes I cooked in Feb 2019
February is when I started really getting confident about my bread-making skills. Most of it was great although I didn’t like either of the two buttermilk biscuit recipes I made in February. By contrast the Amish Cinnamon Bread (ATK’s version of Amish Friendship bread) and Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana breads were SO GOOD. Both have been…
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New Dishes I cooked in Dec 2018
It’s hard to say which dish was the best one, because lots of them came out great. But it’s pretty easy to say which was the worst – the roti canai came out very much unlike what I was trying to replicate despite following a recipe that went along with a youtube video. Second worst…