One of my favorite food bloggers is Carol Blymire, author of the blogs The French Laundry at Home and Alinea at Home. Her concept is that she takes a high-end cookbook, follows each recipe and blogs her results; errors, mishaps and all. That combined with her wit and sense of humor makes for a very interesting read.

I’ve been inspired by her and I’m considering writing a similar blog, so this past weekend I decided to take some practice photos while making pound cake. This is a much simpler recipe than most of the ones that Carol makes, but it served as good practice. Any suggestions of which cookbook I should cook through? Leave them in comments.

The ingredients for pound cake: a pound of butter, a pound of eggs, a pound of flour, and a pound of sugar (are you noticing a theme here?), Grand Marnier, nutmeg, and salt.

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My mise en place; all the ingredients are measured and the eggs are separated.

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You begin by creaming the softened butter with the whisk attachment. The key to this recipe is keeping everything “fluffy.”

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After adding the sugar, keep whisking in order to keep everything light.

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Add the egg yolks two-at-a-time.

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Slowly add the 1/4 cup of Grand Marnier followed by the salt and nutmeg.

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Add the flour in thirds and transfer the batter to another bowl. At this point, the mixture should look a lot like mashed potatoes.

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After cleaning the mixing bowl, add the egg whites in preparation for whipping.

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Whip the egg whites to firm peaks, but not so much that they dry out.

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Fold the egg whites into the batter in order to keep it light. The egg whites are your leavening.

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Evenly portion the batter between two loaf pans which were prepared with butter and then lined with parchment paper.

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Smooth the top of the batter so it fills each loaf pan.

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Ready to bake.

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After baking for 70-80 minutes at 325F, the top should be split and a tester should come out clean.

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After cooling for 10 minutes in the loaf pans, remove and let cool fully on a cooling rack.

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After a little whipped cream, raspberries, and powdered sugar, it’s ready to eat!

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The thing I love most about bacon is it’s interesting texture when it curls and wrinkles. Some parts are cooked more than others, so you get a plethora of textures; crunchy, chewy, or somewhere in between.

I have to get back to the frying pan before it all burns. I’m then going to sit down and watch tonight’s episode of No Reservations.

Anyway back to the awesomeness that is this book:

Charcuterie (Pronounced: shahr-koo-tuh-REE and also shahr-KOO-tuh-ree)

This is a book on how to make pork products like cured meats and sausage. Mmmm. Sausage. Some of the recipes take hours, even days to prepare; and…if you do them wrong…you can get botulism. You cannot deny how cool that is. There’s even a chapter that explains the difference between good white mold and bad green mold.

This is so exciting! Maybe I’ll read it to my kids as a bedtime story.

I wonder what I should make first?

Update: My brother informed me that the co-author (the one whose name I didn’t recognize) is the Chef/Owner of Five Lakes Grill in my hometown of Milford, Michigan. That building was occupied by a department store while I was growing up.

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I’m so disappointed.

First I started by pouring three gallons of spring water into a five gallon stock pot and added my steeping bag with several pounds of different types (as determined by the recipe) of crushed grains. The goal is to make kind of a grain soup.

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The grains steeping in the pot.

After you steep the grains for a little while, 45 minutes at 158 degrees in this case, you remove the grains, crank the heat up to a boil, mix in your malted extract syrup and dump the hops in.

Hops are a type of flower that grow on vines.

The mixture with the hops added, now called wort but pronounced “wert.”

You need to boil it for an hour.

This is the wort chiller I bought. It’s basically a water-to-water heat exchanger. You use this to quickly cool your wort from off boil to 75-80 degrees.

The Wort Chiller in action. There is cold water running through the piping while it is submerged in the hot wort.

After about a half hour (the water isn’t that cold here) the wort is cooled down and ready to have the yeast pitched in and the fermenting to start.

You strain the wort as you pour it into the fermenter. The strainer caught all the loose hops. After that, you add enough water to the wort to equal five gallons total.

It will ferment in this container for about a week and then I’ll transfer it to a secondary, glass fermenter for a week before bottling.

I hope it turns out well. This would be a lot of work for nothing if it turned out bad.

I’m brewing a milk stout tonight with John. I hope that goes well, too.

I found the place by searching for homebrewing supplies in the Phoenix area (so I could get them quickly). Prior to my purchase, I sent them an e-mail asking for some information and they were very responsive and helpful. After I placed my order, Dave from Brew Buddies gave me a call and spoke to me about different ingredient kits and bottles (he made some recommendations). I ended up ordering the Oktoberfest kit. I’m going to make it this week and hopefully it will be ready to go for my Thank God I’m Alive(tm) party on the 29th.

I’ll let you know how the brew goes. Maybe I’ll even take pictures.

The conversation then turned to California wines and California wine country. I said how I’d like to take a trip to Napa or Sonoma some day so I could buy some wine to fill my 170 bottle wine cabinet with (since right now I have a paltry 15 bottles). He said that his wine cabinet holds 400 bottles.

Now I have to have my bar torn apart and modified to accept a wine cabinet that holds more than 400 bottles. Why am I so competitive?

I’m a geek of more pedestrian things like coffee, cars, consumer electronics (albeit, the high-end of CE), etc. I define geek as taking hobbies way further than is normal or healthy (like owning seven scanners just trying to find the one). I’ve never dressed up like a character from a movie unless it was Halloween. I’ve never been to a comic book convention. I don’t like Star Trek. I’ve never played a role playing game. But…

Diving so deep into things in which I have a glimmer of interest gives me the ability to “talk shop” with people who are outside of the industry I work in. I just got back from my favorite coffee shop in Phoenix, the Villiage Coffee Roastery, where I was discussing the specifics of pulling a good espresso shot with the barista while she made me and my friends a free double espresso to sample their new espresso blend and test out their new machine and grinder.

That depth of knowledge also comes in handy while attending trade shows of other industries (nice to live near Vegas). It’s fun to go to CES or NAB (I want to go to SEMA this fall) and be able to talk intelligently to people who regularly work with cool stuff. I had a teacher in high school (Mr. Marinucci) who always talked about “the unquenchable thirst for knowledge.” I think about him saying that a lot. I have that thirst.

Who knows? Maybe I’m not a geek at all. I guess I really don’t care.

I kind of mis-judged how long this was going to take to make. I’ve been cooking the sauce for two and a half hours now. I started by browning the sausage in the pot and then removing it and placing it onto a plate. I then took my diced onion and sweated it until it was translucent and added some fresh garlic. I used the vine-ripened tomatoes I bought by performing a rough dice on them and adding them to the pot just before I added two cans of crushed tomatoes.

As I was chopping up the herbs (thyme and oregano), I was thinking about how I was basically cutting up fragrant weeds. As much as things change, things stay the same. Who first decided to eat these? I added those to the pot along with some salt and pepper and set it about simmering. About an hour later, I layered in some more garlic and fresh herbs. About a half hour later I took my stick blender and made the sauce less chunky. I added the sausage about 30 minutes ago and supplemented that with some water and red wine (the same as I’ve been drinking for the past two hours) and have been letting it cook down while I wait for the pasta water to boil. I’ll add some fresh basil about five minutes before I eat.

Nice, I’m hungry now.

As I sit here drinking a homemade latte, I’m reminded of my roots in coffee geekdom. I’ve always liked the taste of coffee. I remember when I was seven and the times I would go to work with my dad. I would take one of those little Styrofoam coffee cups and put coffee, non-dairy creamer, and about five spoonfuls of sugar in it (which is probably why I still prefer my coffee sweet). Co-workers of my dad’s would see me drinking it and say “your dad lets you drink coffee?” I look back at that now and think, “my dad let me have coffee at age seven?” I think he was pretty busy working and maybe just wan’t aware of what I was doing. I would drink several cups of that syrupy concoction before we left for home though. Good times.

As an adult, I would drink soda most of the time while at the office, but I would enjoy coffee when we out to dinner and sometimes I would make it at home. When I was twenty, I received a small Mr. Coffee cappuccino maker as a gift for some occasion or holiday. My mom bought me some demitasse cups to use with it. I think I only tried to use it once or twice with lousy results (it doesn’t have a pump). I convinced myself that “making cappuccino is very difficult,” and I didn’t try to make some again for ten more years. In the meantime, I stuck to drip-brewed coffee between that time. During that time, a friend of mine who also enjoyed coffee, explained to me that making good coffee was all about the water; which turned out to be true. I started using R.O. filtered water and it improved my coffee a lot.

In 1999/2000, my older brother (who is also a total research junkie) became interested in coffee. We spent a lot of time researching and talking about coffee, its origins, its preparation methods, etc. In 2000, I bought a Hearthware Precision home coffee roaster, Bodum Antigua grinder, Starbucks Barista espresso maker, and a Starbucks Aroma drip coffee maker. After reading a lot of information on Mark Prince’s coffeegeek.com and Tom Owen’s sweetmarias.com and buying some of my equipment and supplies (green beans) from Tom, I was able to make some decent espresso at home.

There is nothing like fresh roasted coffee beans, and it’s amazing how easy it is once you know the basics. I’ve since upgraded my espresso machine to a Rancilio Sylvia and my grinder to a Rancilio Rocky and there isn’t a coffee shop in town (in Phoenix anyway) that can make as good of coffee as I can make at home now. Here are some tips that I’ve learned about how to make good coffee and espresso:

Coffee:

• Cleanliness. Everything must be scrupulously clean. Everything.
• Grind. A good grinder makes a difference. When all the ground coffee granules are the sames size, you get even extraction. There won’t be some coffee that gives up it’s flavor too fast or too slow.
• Method. There are many methods for brewing. My favorite for quality is a vacuum pot, followed by a french press and then a good drip brewer. My favorite for speed is that list backwards. I most commonly use my drip brewer.
• Water. Above all else, use good water. Reverse Osmosis filtered water is probably the best cheap option. Afterall, coffee is something like 99% water.

Espresso:

• Cleanliness. Just like coffee, everything need to be clean, clean, clean.
• Grind. A good grinder is very important. Because espresso is so intense, any over-extraction (bitter) or under-extraction (watery) is very pronounced. A good grinder is also required to be able to grind fine enough to control the flow-time of the espresso.
• Tamp. The other component of flow-time (which is important to extraction even with proper grind) is tamping. A 30 Ft-lb tamp is what you’re looking for. Get a good tamper (I have a Reg Barber) and practice your tamp strength on a bathroom scale until you can repeat a 30 lb tamp out of habit.
• Temperature. Let your espresso machine warm up for at least 30 minutes so all the internal parts, some of which are made from thick brass, can all heat up to the same temperature. Preheat the cup/mug with hot water. Set it on top of the espresso machine to keep it warm. Run some water through your portofilter before making your espresso, to warm it up. Run that hot water into your shot glass(s) that you’ll be using so they’re hot, too. Temperature differential is the enemy.
• Time. Adjust your grind (or tamp harder if your grinder won’t grind fine enough) to pull an 18–22 second shot.
• Steam. If you’re going to make a drink which contains milk, you’ll need a machine that will generate and endless supply of dry steam.
• Water. Just like coffee, Espresso is mostly water so good water is important.

Jamey’s family is coming over on Christmas Eve (as always) and I’m making a standing rib roast. As a sidenote: a 10 lb. standing rib roast costs as much as a new Buick. I made one (a roast, not a Buick) last year and everyone liked it so it has become a tradition. Like last year, I started dry aging it last week. It’s going to be so good, I can’t wait.

Christmas morning we just spend together as a family before going to my parents in the afternoon. I’ll be brining a turkey on Christmas Eve to take over there and cook for dinner on Christmas Day. I think I’m gonna gain at least ten pounds this season…

Here is what I bought people for Christmas:

Jamey: Epson PictureMate Printer
The boys: Nintendo Gameboys (a red one and a blue one, with all the accessories and some games to share).

MMmmm. Leftover turkey sandwiches…
We had both our families over for Thanksgiving yesterday (16 people in all), and I did most of the cooking (Turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and bread pudding). Everything went smooth, since I did everything the day before, except for the mashed potatoes (my stand mixer was too small). So dinner was only server 50 minutes late (which is a record for my family).
The Menu
Roasted Turkey
Brined overnight
Mashed Potatoes
Prepared with sour cream, cream cheese, butter, and full cream. Served with homemade turkey gravy.
Cranberry sauce
Made with fresh cranberries, bits of Granny Smith apple, raisins, pecans and enriched with orange and lemon zest.
Stuffing
Made with onions and celery sauteed in butter, homemade croutons and turkey stock, then baked until the top forms a nice toasted brown crust.
Green Bean Bake
Green beans in a mushroom cream sauce with baked with crispy fried onions on top.
Candied Yams
Sliced yams cooked in a brown sugar butter syrup with toasted marshmallows on top.
Bread Pudding
Made using white and cinnamon breads with golden raisins and pecans (first toasted with butter and brown sugar) added. Served with a homemade creme caramel sauce. (actual photo below)

Pecan Pie
Pumpkin Pie
Dutch Apple Pie