Rosemary-lemon roasted chickens, roasted red potatoes, sauteed zucchini and vidalia onions, corn on the cob, and fresh honey-wheat bread. A dear friend brought along some northern-style baked beans that were quite good. A nice change of pace from the traditional southern style beans, which have both molasses and (generally) brown sugar in them. Naturally, I have some pictures.

About two hours before dinner, I had a pre-dinner warmup.

This is because my weight is now under 110. 108.5 the other day, 110 today on the oncologist’s scale, 109 on the lab’s scale. If I were bolder, I’d take a photo of my midsection, to let you see how many ribs you can count.

This is one of the two chickens I roasted. We wound up two people short, so ended up with an entire chicken left over. I broke it down afterwards, and tossed both carcasses into a freezer bag to make stock later.

The cavity is seasoned with salt and pepper, then stuffed with half a lemon, a sprig of rosemary, and a few crushed garlic cloves. The outside is seasoned again with salt and pepper, and under the skin is a butter compound with finely chopped rosemary, salt, and pepper – not too much on the rosemary, since it can be rather overpowering and I wanted to balance it with the lemon. The butter is to keep the skin and the meat moist during roasting. About 40 minutes in, I tossed some quartered new potatoes in the bottom of the roasting pan. You can see a couple of stragglers in the photo.

More important than both of those, though, is the bread. I love to make bread more than anything else in baking. It’s so simple, and yet so hard to get right. We begin with just two types of flour, salt, water, honey, and yeast.

The sponge is first.

The flour mixture goes atop the sponge, and then is covered for about four hours to ferment.

During that time, the sponge breaks through the flour mixture.

After the final mix of the dough, resting, kneading, rising, kneading, and rising again, the dough goes into the pan and then into the oven. The top is misted with some water as it goes in to give it that nice crust.

No one could wait before the first slices were taken from the loaf, so I have no photos of the entire loaf itself.

I’m incredibly pleased with the crumb on this. You can see the specks of wheat. The top crust was firm and crispy, while the inside was moist, with a fine crumb and that wheaty, heady aroma so familiar to everyone. The bread is not overly sweet, as it does not have a ton of honey in it, yet it is not overly sour from too much wheat: a great balance struck here.

Dinner was not until almost 8, what my friend calls Manhattan-style dining. Since most of the dinner guests are early risers with real jobs, I’ve decided that from this point forward, dinner really should be earlier than 7:30 or so. This is also for slightly selfish reasons: it takes me so long to eat that by the time I’ve finally finished, everyone else has already finished, enjoyed some after dinner conversation, and is ready to go home. Earlier dinners mean that I’d be able to finish and then join in on the conversation so as not to miss time with my friends and family.

Today is bread day.

I’ve been turning ideas over in my head for dinner Sunday evening, which should bring four to five people to the table, with a sixth joining in after working late. I had picked Sunday as the start of The Challenge, so coming up with something tasty, nutritious, but not budget busting is in order. To help myself think more clearly, I’ve had some ice cream for breakfast. One thing that occurred to me while I was melting the ice cream a bit in order to get it down was that I hsould make some bread.

“Hey!” I said to myself. “You should make some bread, since you mentioned the pricing on your site.”

So, if I can find my loaf pans, I’ll be making some honey wheat bread, and perhaps some cinnamon bread as well. The nice thing about making bread is that there are preiods where you do nothing. The dough has to rise, after all. I love bread, although I can’t really eat any at the moment. The aroma of rising dough and then baking bread perfuming the house is delectable and comforting, and that smell is one for which I have a great deal of fondness.

Since Costco does not sell whole wheat flour at all, whether in 25 pound bags or 50, nor yeast, a trip to Publix is in order. We’ll just see how much cash one has to lay out for ingredients to make a couple loaves of bread, shall we?

More to come.

The cookie entry was the 100th entry on the new blog. A milestone.

Today, I was presented with a most interesting – and unusual – challenge by someone. The email I received, which I’m posting in its entirety, is in the extended entry as it’s rather long and includes some followups.

Continue reading In this episode: A Challenge is Offered →

This batch definitely turned out better than the last. Parchment paper this time rather than the silpat.

Alas, I am unable to eat them, as the sharper edges can be quite painful on a tender tongue. Those that have eaten them confirm my visual estimation as this batch being superior to the last.

I’m not sure about anyone else, but when I have a real breakfast, eggs are always on the menu. They can be accompanied by other things – bacon, grits, pancackes, ham, and so on – but for some reason, to me the egg will always be the centerpiece.

The other night, I was poking around for something to eat and decided that breakfast for dinner would be jsut the ticket. I’ll confess that when I eat out, I always order eggs over easy. When I eat in, it’s scrambled, with or without fillers.

But not that night. I decided it was high time to do at home what I’d had others do for me.

So, after frying up some bacon, I put a couple pats of butter into a hot pan and cracked open an egg. The beauty of butter and nonstick is that no spatula is needed: let the egg cook a bit, give the pan a shake to make sure the egg is not sticking, then shake the egg toward the far end of the pan. When you’re ready to take the plunge, flip the egg using the pan by dipping down the far end a bit and then shoving the pan away from you while flicking up the end. Gently, of course. It isn’t necessary to throw the egg a foot into the air. Just get it out of the pan far enough to catch it on its opposite side when it lands. As it lands, lower the pan so it doesn’t just splat back down. After all, it isn’t one of the old space capsules with a parachute. It’s a fragile yellow orb that should be intact at the end. After letting it cook for as long as necessary – only about 10 seconds, in my case – do the same thing and flip it back over. Voila, the perfectly done egg over easy.

There’s nothing quite like that first cut into the soft yolk.

There’s also this sort of breakfast: bacon, freshly made biscuits with (of course) freshly made gravy, some honey, and grits and eggs (no pics of that).

I know, it’s been a few days. What can I say? Work intrudes on my cooking hobby. I just read an interesting article, the link to which was sent to me by a friend who also – sometimes with some snark attached – pointed out that the author was spot on in various respects with regard to my own pursuits. Bitch. I say that with love, of course. She also sent me this, asked if I were ghostwriting now. Har har har. Funny gal.

But back to my magnificent butt. Just how often do you get to use that line while completely sober?

I’ve done a turkey, I’ve done lots of ribs, and quite naturally at some point I had to make pulled pork. My small circle of regular readers will recall my search for pork butt last week. I drove about 100 miles that day in all my travels. But Friday, I returned to CostCo and picked up some supplies.

Nice pile o’ meat there, eh? From left to right: pork butt (contains two butts, total just over 15 pounds), one pack of ribs (two slabs), a double pack of maple bacon, boneless skinless chicken breasts, and another pack of ribs (also containing two slabs). That was all the meat, but not all of the stuff, which also included more dispoable steam trays, an industrial pack of foil, and these goodies.

If one of my sisters ever brings me more shrimp, the Old Bay will get some use. Until then, though, this is a story of pork.

I brined the butt overnight in a simple mixture of salt, water, and molasses. The next morning, I drained them, patted them dry, and them gave them a rub (the recipe for which I actually wrote down). The butts rested for about an hour or so after being rubbed.

They were then ready to go on the smoker. It started to rain about three hours in, and maintaining temperature became quite the adventure.

At about the seven hour mark, we had this.

They were coming along nicely, and I pulled them just after ten hours on the smoker.

I couldn’t resist picking at the edge of one of the butts before even getting the twine off after giving them a rest for about 30 minutes.

Beautiful, tender, juicy, smoky meat. Better than most smoked butt I’ve had in many places, if I do say so myself. A closeup of a morsel of meat.

A few chunks pulled to check the smoke ring.

Perfect.

Time to start pulling. A good portion of crispy bits and even a little burnt end, done on purpose since we have several people who just lvoe burnt ends.

Finally, both butts were pulled. I started with just over 15 pounds of pretty well trimmed butt. The ending weight was about 13 pounds. Thirteen pounds of wonderful porky goodness.

Of course, you can’t have barbeque without some sides.

And since I’m tiring out my jaws and killing my fillings by eating, I had a little myself. I managed to finish it, except for the crispy bits that made it into my pile of pork. The mouth and teeth just aren’t up for it. Yet.

We still have plenty. I’m going to have to pack some away in the vacuum packs and stuff them in the freezer so the pork o’ plenty will be available whenever someone gets a hankering for it.

In all my adult life, I cannot recall ever stepping foot into a butcher shop (a real butcher shop, that is). There may have been moments when I was a kidlet that I had the opportunity to visit one, but my memory is pretty darn good, and I don’t recall any from that time, either.

But, during the Big Bash, one of my aunts recommended that I stop into a local butcher shop and check out what the guy had to offer. So I did. The answer: after noon, not a lot that was of interest. I spied some frozen filets mignon that looked as if they’d been there since the beginning of time, quite a bit of bacon, and a huge 17-pound pork butt package (two butts in the package, as is common with boneless butts). One of the more amusing factoids I’ve always carried around in my head is that regarding the term “pork butt”. It is not, as the name might suggest to the unwary, really the ass end of the pig. Rather, it is the upper shoulder of the animal (the picnic is the lower shoulder). Quite a lot of people may know it as a Boston butt instead.

In any case, a nice butt – of the porcine variety, in today’s journeys – was my goal. While the package I saw at the first butcher was hefty and looked nice, I decided to bypass that one and continue my search.

Continue reading Feeding day →