Cooking At Home – Page 78 – Austin Food Journal

Save Your Heater. Bake More Bread.

Garlic Rosemary Boule. I am still playing with the rise times. I have it narrowed down to between two – six hours. Dough is a many wondrous thing.

Marmalade. The Hard Way.

This was my first attempt at making Marmalade and it was wacky. I haven’t quite got my arms around the process. My normal method of cooking something new is to find a few reputable recipes and compare and contrast them to learn the mechanics. I used two: Ina Garten’s Anna’s Orange Marmalade and The Busy Person’s Guide to Preserving Food Orange Marmalade.

Pizza Night with the Godfather

Another great pizza night last week. Once again, for your (visual) eating pleasure, I give you the Godfather. Italian Sausage, Caramelized Yellow Onions and Smoked Mozzarella. My New Years resolution of an all pizza diet for 2010 is right on track!

Garage Pickles

Just tried my first attempt at pickling. I am starting the traditional route, with cucumbers. I bought the little ones. They are called ‘pickling cucumbers’. It took me a little while to unwrap that naming riddle. I grabbed each one, trying to get the firmest. I also avoided the slimy ones. Not sure if that mattered, but the idea of buying slimy didn’t fly with me.

Strangers With Candy

The freeze is here, so everyone is harvesting their fruit trees like squirrels scrabbling for pecans. I was lucky enough to be offered some extra prime citrus from a friend in South Austin. Beautiful stuff. I just juiced 150 Meyer lemons. The perfume coming off this stuff is amazing. It’s all over me. I smell like some kind of citrus whorehouse. I’m sure every bee within a six hundred mile radius is honing in on me.

Cookbook Review: Cooking (that’s the title)

For the longest time, when someone would ask me “What’s a good first cookbook?”, I would recommend Julia Child’s The Way To Cook. Julia and I were having a thing in the 90’s and I want to help her out with book sales. As my personal interests shifted towards books more focused on technique, new recommendations emerged. Now, I’m a fan of Cooking, by James Peterson. It has the right balance. First, the basics: knife sharpening, boning fish, stocks, etc. Then, a wide variety of commonly prepared items: salads, salsas, roasts, pies and many more. Plus, it’s written in a comfortable tone, like your aunt dispensing a family recipe.