18 men entered, 1 emerged victorious. For this year, Mikey rules supreme.

The results can be seen here.

More photos at my flickr page.

Instead of posting them here, I’ve started to host my videos at Vimeo. More storage and they don;t get compressed as much it seems. So enjoy these if you are bored or just want to see more of Otto.

I also did some salting/pickling of meat and vegetables this weekend. Got started on corning 12lbs of brisket for the St. Patrick’s Day Cribbage Tournament. Also feling a little saucy, so i’m doing a batch of refrigerator pickles withe cukes, carrots, beans, and sweet peppers.

We spent a lovely week in Mexico with Brain, Tamara, and Blake. Otto made his first trip outside of the country. He was a good traveler. It helped that both flights to and from San Jose were direst flights. Not a whole lot of action on the trip.. lots of lounging at the condo, cooking food, drinking, and going to the beach. Weather was pleasant 80 and either partly sunny or sunny. One of the highlights was brain having to “practice” his spanish while arranging for the tow truck to take our car to a local garage to get fixed. The fresh tortillas were a hit. Tom/cuke/pepper salad was tasty at every meal. The waitresses at one of the restaurants took turns holding Otto while we ate our dinner.

trying out yet another way to easily post a group of pictures at a time. We’ll try the flicker route for some of the bigger sets.

Since I had borrowed the fryer from Chard, I figured I’d have to get one more use out of it. Empanadas sounded delicious. I made up a batch of beef picadillo for the savory and also made a batch of chocolate chip – banana ones as the sweet. Very delicious!

The weather had threatened to rain the whole time we were there but the sunshine broke out for awhile during the day on Sunday. I’ve got a picture of sunset and one during the day. It’s nice to have this kind of paradise so close. If we hit the ferry right, it’s less than an hour from door to door.

food fight war

My first attempt is a prosciutto ring loaf. I picked this first as a form of instant gratification. Just mix up the dough, let it rise for an hour or so, and then cook for 30-40 min.

Here is a before the rise

Here is a finished product

A good number of the bread recipes require a starter to help the yeast start moving before you add all of the flour and water. You can make the starter, refrigerate it and then use it the next few days to complete the loaf. The first one I’m trying is a ciabatta. Currently, the starter is rising for 12-24 hours. I’ll then stick it in the fridge over night, bring it out an hour before, mix in the rest of the ingredients, let it rise again, bake it and hopefully have a nice ciabatta when I’m done. I post pictures of that when it’s finished.

edit: here’s the ciabatta. It didn’t rise as much as I had hoped but that’s cause it’s freezing in our house. The book suggests having it rise in a room at a temp of 75-80 degrees. Granted the author is working in a kitchen that has action going on all the time. But in the blurry second pic, you can see some of the lattice work like structure the ciabatta is supposed to have.

The first book I came across, Cooking By Hand, was a good start. I cjecked it out from the library, read a bit of it. However, my inspiration was lacking as I had to return the book. Being the goofy engineer that I am, I’m comforted by directions and instructions spelled out.

Christmas came around and Megan bought me Cooking by Hand and Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. This book was incredible. Now that I had a copy of my own, it was time to determine what I wanted to try first.

Due to the quick turnaround time and the short curing process, I was decided to give bacon and pancetta a try. Next, I had to find places to access the required pieces of the process. The main two things I needed were – pork belly and curing salt. Uwajimaya was my source for the pork belly and a small restaurant supply store south of Safeco Field had the curing salt.

Both processes were quite easy. About a 1/4 cup of the curing mix (regular salt, curing salt, and sugar), throw it in a bag in the fridge for a week or so. Remove from the fridge and wash the cure off. The bacon was then smoked for a couple hours in my smoker and the pancetta was rolled into a loaf and then hung to dry for a couple of weeks.

I’ve eaten some bacon I’ve already made. Quite tasty and smoky delicious. I fried some of it up but there wasn’t enough fat/grease released to cook it very well. I baked it the next time which turned out excellent.

The pancetta still has another week to cure. I need to figure out what kind of tasty meal I’m going to include that with.

These pictures show the bacon curing in the fridge and the pancetta hanging in the garage,

I may move on to sausages and salamis next. I would like to do a prosciutto at some point but I need to figure out the logistics of where to hang and cure. I’m contemplating the crawlspace beneath the house but I need to build a sturdy cage to hold it in.