In September I made two new recipes. One was the Lamb and Grilled Onion burger from Weber’s Big Book of Burgers. I also tried a hot and fast recipe for pulled pork from Raichlen’s Project Fire. The taste was good, but the biggest hit was the recipe he had for a mustard sauce.
Just one new dish in August. We had lots of repeat foods, but only one new dish. As far as I know, I didn’t have it until I was an adult and visited my sister-in-law in Long Island. At their favorite Italian restuarant / pizza joint I ordered it once when we were on the restaurant side. This America’s Test Kitchen version was very tasty and I would definitely make it again. Danielle liked it too, but it wasn’t a MUST COOK AGAIN dish with her.
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!
Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
oatmeal-rasin bread
Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
succotash
vanilla icebox cookies
The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed to have both time and pepperoni at the same time. So I finally made it. I think America’s Test Kitchen’s decision to have me precook the pepperoni to render some of the fat helped both mellow the pepperoni taste (my kids were able to eat it) and keep this from being a greasy mess.
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 time doing it with these recipes. I was very happy with all the results, although I learned a few things along the way for the next time I make these dishes.
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.
Almost No-Knead Bread
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 and yet it’s the one I’ve had the worst results with. The crumb wasn’t as open as it was supposed to be and for all the time it took to proof it was pretty meh.
While I did a lot of cooking in March, I only made one new dish - Brown Sugar cookies. I’d had regular sugar cookies my entire life. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I had sugar cookies made with brown sugar instead. The brown sugar definitely took these cookies to a whole other taste realm where the molasses in the sugar added another dimension to the taste. I’m not saying it’s supplanted [white] sugar cookies in my heart, but that there’s a place for each of them. If the kids ate more cookies or if I didn’t care about my heart health (most cookies have a LOT of butter) I’d make these a lot more often.
Very low number of new dishes. Mostly because I was obsessed with programming and Gwent.
Both recipes were from America’s Test Kitchen. The pizza recipe was a challenge to be able to make a pizza that would be ready in an hour and not suffer too much from not having the pizza ferment for a few days. I thought it was alright. Despite liberally dusting the pizza peel, had a hard time getting the pizza off.
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 like the braided cinnamon bread and hot cross buns.
cinnamon swirl bread
After spending years wanting to make my own bacon, I finally did!
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 garlic soup was pretty good, except they didn’t mention how much Sherry vinegar to use and I guessed a little too high. The coffee cake was pretty good, and the first time I’d made one.
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp