Contact Me

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions I would love to hear from you!


Click to send me a message.


Popular posts from this blog

Freezer Cooking 2014: Broth

Image
Did you enjoy my post yesterday talking about prepping meat and organs for quick and easy dinners ? I hope so. Today we are talking about BROTH!  Besides getting wonderful meat, organ meats, and tallow from Indian Creek angus , I also get lots of bones. Speaking of bones, I am a fan of any type of meat that is bone-in that require a long slow cooking time. Because the bones add lots of flavor and tenderness to the meat, it adds minerals, and dissolving the connective tissue in the cooking process fills the dish with easily absorbed amino acids and soothing collagen that benefits our skin and joints. Seriously, you are missing out if you only eat boneless skinless meat! Okay, back to the bones. I had an assortment of marrow and joint bones that I wanted to use to make broth. I was excited because they had lots of fat and connective tissue. First I loaded them into two pans and roasted them for an hour and a half at 375 F. Roasting gives them a great flavor, and renders o...
Read more

DIY Airlock for Lacto-fermentation

Image
Today I want to talk about lacto-fermentation. You may or may not know what it is, so let's start there.  The gist is that you take any kind of vegetable and chop it up, add salt and sometimes a little bit of water and let it ferment for anywhere between 3 days-4 weeks. The salt in the recipe kills off the bad bacteria, but there are good gut-friendly lactic acid bacteria that can survive the salt solution. The lactic acid bacteria (LAB's) feed off the sugars in the veggies and produce lactic acid and a whole bunch of probiotics that help to repopulate our gut with beneficial bacteria and sway our gut culture in the right direction :). Also, the process of lacto-fermentation preserves the veggies without having to use any heat (I've had batches of kimchi and sauerkraut last for months in the fridge and it just gets better with age). Also, fermentation makes the nutrients already present in the vegetables more bioavailable. Meaning when we eat fermented veggies our bodi...
Read more

Treasure Map Cake

Image
One of our good friends got married on Saturday. Months before the wedding the groom asked me to make a treasure map cake. Of course I said yes! I took TONS of pictures and tried to be selective about the ones I chose to include in this post. Still, I think I have over 40 pictures here so you have been warned. Now you can sit back and enjoy looking through the pictures of a cake that took me three days to make! I made my own fondant for all of the decorations. Since fondant alone doesn't hold its shape very well, I added tylose powder (it is used in making gumpaste). It worked like a charm. I kneaded it in after adding the color until it went from playdough consistency to clay consistency.  I let the palm tree leaves harden on upside down muffin pans for 1 day before I assembled them.  The 1st layer. The 2nd layer The 3rd and final brown layer.  The fondant showed the bumps and unevenness of the rice krispies a lot more than I anticipat...
Read more