Adventures in Cooking Part 3: Mayonnaise

Remember way back when I wrote that post about mayonnaise and frosting? Well, spurred on by the 2 dozen hard boiled eggs in my fridge, I finally got up the courage to make mayonnaise, using Alton Brown's recipe. Oh boy is it good.



It is much tarter than store bought mayonnaise, and has more mustard flavor to it. It probably isn't for everyone. But if you/ like a bit more tang in your egg salad, then go for it. It's easier than I would have thought.

A few words of advice:
1) Use your food processor. I don't know about you, but I'm not coordinated enough to whisk with one hand and deposit a carefully-controlled stream of vegetable oil with the other. Nor am I strong enough to whisk that vigorously without stopping to massage my forearms every 15 seconds.
2) Use some kind of pouring device for the oil. Alton Brown uses a very snazzy squeeze bottle. I used a water pitcher. Whatever. You need to add it veeery sloooowly, and I can't be trusted to do that out of a bowl. See above comment about coordination issues.
3) Several other things you might not know (mostly gleaned from watching Alton Brown): fresh eggs make better mayo, mustard powder is in mayonnaise for important structural reasons, and if you use unpasteurized eggs, you should leave you mayo out on the counter, in the jar, for 4-6 hours.

I don't know if I'll last that long. Egg salad, here I come!

Pantry Raid

The backstory: I've always hated the pantry in our kitchen. The shelving inside was poorly laid out, and we really couldn't fit all that much inside. Here is the photo I took at our housing inspection 3 years ago

This photo is also a nice illustration of the overall look of the kitchen before we moved in. The woman in the picture is the last owner--she tried that wall color on two walls before deciding it was a terrible idea and giving up. We painted over it before we even moved in. The light fixture was also terrible. It was ugly as sin (strike one, brass...strike two, random curlicues...strike three, frosted glass globes) and Ross was always hitting his head on it (no small thing when the attachment between the fixture and the ceiling is a solid brass rod). We replaced it with a more attractive, lighter (read: more head-friendly) fixture from IKEA. It now looks like this (although we have a different picture hanging on the wall):



Anyway...since the pantry was near useless, we were using a set of wire shelves, which made the already-cramped kitchen even harder to use (I don't have a picture of the shelves, but there were three of them, and they took up one entire wall of the kitchen).

The objective was to redesign the pantry to make a useful space and get the wire shelves out of the kitchen. Ross tore out two little bookcase-style shelves in the pantry. We planned on 4 new shelves, about 12" deep and spanning the entire width of the pantry. The nice man at Lowes cut two pieces of birch plywood into four shelves. Ross cut some narrow wood into rails for the shelves to rest on, leveled them, and screwed them into the walls. Meanwhile, I painted all of the shelves. We had one slight hitch with the painting--when we went to buy a second can of paint, they sold us "base 5" instead of white. It took us a while to figure out what was going on, because while it looks white in the can, it goes on basically clear. Anyway...after approximately 42 coats of paint and a truly heroic amount of cleanup on Ross's part, we have our new pantry:

The bluish glow you see near the top of the picture is the battery-powered led light Ross installed (read: stuck to the door frame) to illuminate the top shelf. We installed the rack on the door almost as an afterthought--there was plenty of room for it, and it adds an appreciable amount of storage. The bottom of the pantry houses the recycle bins. The cat in the foreground is looking for stray bits of kibble that Ross might have missed when cleaning the floor.

If you are really interested in pictures of our pantry, Ross has posted more here.

There are many many posts coming--wedding, honeymoon and my college reunion come to mind. But I just had to make a quick post to say that after 1-1/2 years of being a run down mess, my bike is back in commission! I was having a lousy day yesterday, so I went home and worked all afternoon in the sunshine.

So here's the run-down of what I did:
1) strip components from the frame and clean everything
2) replace my 3 year old cassette with an Ultegra 12-25
3) replace my blown rear tire and tube
4) replace my 6(!) year old rear deraileur with a brand new Ultegra
5) replace cables and reassemble

The drive train is SO nice. I knew that the derailleur was falling apart, but I had no idea how much it affected my enjoyment while riding.

I have my bike back again!

Silver Bells and Cockle Shells...

Community Garden, originally uploaded by rcoconnell02.

This is me, standing in front of our newly-planted community garden plot. Before the wedding, we erected a fence to keep the critters out. Last weekend, I spent an afternoon digging the beds. Later that evening, we filled 3 of our 4 beds with heirloom tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, artichokes (really!),melons, carrots, lettuce, and radishes.

To come: beans, corn, squash, potatoes, parsnips and onions.

Note that I'm 1) dirty and 2) smiling. The two often go together in gardening.

PS: yes, my t-shirt does detail the life cycle of a frog. Try not to be too jealous.

Adventures in Cooking Part 1: Smoked Pork

I've wanted to try building a do-it-yourself smoker since I saw it on the barbecue episode of Good Eats (I told you I liked that show). So last week, I went out to get the parts for the smoker, and I spent most of Saturday outside, drinking beer and watching the smoker do it's thing. Verdict: I could definitely think of worse ways to spend a lovely spring day.

In case it isn't clear from the following am *very* proud of myself with this one--the smoker worked swimmingly and the pork was outstanding. So here's the run down in case you feel the desire to make one yourself. (NOTE: try this at your own risk. I am NOT responsible if you shock yourself/burn your house down/ruin a perfectly good piece of meat. I'm just not.)

But first, since this is a long post, I'll provide a kind of summery.

By the numbers:
$42.25 = total investment in materials for the smoker
7 pounds = weight of the pork shoulder used
8 hours = total time the pork spent in the brine
3 am = time I got up on Saturday morning
1-1/2 = bags of wood chips burned
2 = number of flareups (otherwise known as "grease fires") we had that day
12 hours = total time the pork spent in the smoke
15 = number of happy people fed

The smoker elements
1 large terra cotta pot (17.00)
1 terra cotta saucer with the same diameter (11.00)
1 replacement grate for a kettle grill (8.00)
1 hotplate with a dial thermostat (3.50 at the AA recycle center)
1 metal pie or cake pan (.25 at the recycle center)
1 metal stick-type thermometer (2.50)
1 extension cord ("free" in that I already owned one)
2 cinderblocks (ditto)

The smoking supplies
2 bags of wood chips
1 piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil (I didn't use this, and later wished I had)
1 watering can
1 fire extinguisher
1 lawn chair
1 tasty beverage

The assembly and use of the smoker
Here is an image of the smoker assembled (in my front yard--my sleeping hosta garden is in the background)


The large terra cotta pot on the bottom acts as a vessel for the rest of the elements. The earth walls of the pot aid in heat flow and retention--it is the same reason that fancy, expensive smokers have ceramic walls, and people still roast pigs in pits in the ground. In this case, I basically picked the cheapest pot I could find that was large enough to fit a grate. The cinderblocks not only give the whole thing a kind of junkyard chic, they also let a small amount of oxygen flow into the smoker through the hole in the bottom of the pot. The lid of the smoker was selected via a very scientific method--basically, I tried terra cotta items one at a time until I found something with the same diameter as the pot (believe it or not, it was the only item that had that characteristic). I was trying to find something with a hole in it (to put the thermometer in) but the saucer turned out to be useful--I rested the meat on it while changing the wood chips. The thermometer is a replacement for a turkey fryer. It worked great and cost us 2.50 at Meijer.

In the bottom of pot is the heat source for the smoker--a basic hot plate, which I picked up at the local recycle center for 3.50. The original plans had the hotplate in the bottom of the smoker, with the cord coming out of the hole in the bottom of the pot (clever, eh?). We modified this plan somewhat by taking the hotplate apart and rewiring the guts to go through the hole in the pot.

This achieved three things:
1)It left only the metal parts of the hotplate inside the pot---the plastic housing remained outside, underneath the pot. Thus, we avoided the fumes that would presumably result from leaving plastic in a 210 degree oven for 12 hours.
2)My hotplate had a dial to control the heat. This turned out to be key, because the line between partial combustion/smoke and full combustion/fire is a finer one than you might think. Dissecting the hotplate meant that I could adjust the heat from outside the pot--a real plus, as you will soon see.
3)We got to feel like real badasses. We will feel even more badass once we figure out a mounting mechanism for the bottom of the pot, so that it doesn't produce alarming blue sparks when fiddled with.

On top of the hotplate goes the metal pie tin full of wood chips. The pie plate I got at the recycle center (I don't think I would want to use it for anything else). The chips are hickory and mesquite--I got them at the local garden center/cooking supply store (be sure to use hardwood that is not treated chemically, because whatever funky tastes and chemicals are in the wood will be in the smoke, and thus in your pork). The chips should smoke, BUT NOT CATCH FIRE. We had two flareups worthy of the name--the first was at about 4am. I had just put the thing together and had no idea how high the heat should be. I turned it up too high, and the chips caught fire. Fortunately, the dial was outside the pot (see?) and I could turn off the plate, take out the thermometer, and suffocate the fire (the hole in the bottom doesn't let in enough air for fire to continue). The second fire was the result of grease dripping on the wood chips--the next time, I'm going to cover the chip pan with foil and poke some holes in it. That should both prevent it from catching fire (less oxygen) and prevent grease from getting on the wood itself. Just in case, I had a fire extinguisher on hand. I changed the chips whenever the smoking stopped--I used about 1-1/2 small bags of wood over 12 hours of smoking.


Above the chips rests the grill grate, and on top of it, the pork shoulder. The sides of the pot are slanted, so the grate should just rest in the pot without falling down. This suspends the meat about 6 inches above the heat/smoke source, letting hot air and smoke flow around it.

The whole thing is topped by the cover and the thermometer.








The Pork
I bought a 7 lb pork shoulder (bone-in, untrimmed). Fortunately, barbecue is designed to make cheap cuts of meat delicious, so the meat itself was (relatively) inexpensive. We brined the pork overnight in a mixture of molasses, pickling salt, and water. In the morning (3am--*yawn*) I extracted the pork and sprinkled it with a mixture of chili powder, onion flakes, cumin, fennel, corriander, and paprika. I smoked the meat with both hickory and mesquite chips for around 12 hours (4am-4pm), trying to keep the smoker at 210-220 degrees (in reality, it sometimes got as high as 250). We ate it with some truly outstanding Carolina-style (vinegar and hot-pepper based) sauce that a friend brought. As I mentioned earlier Ross also made a lovely omelet out of the leftovers.

Doesn't this make you want to try it?