January 2017 – Mary used it for the girls on chicken fried and roasted. Olivia now always wants chicken. Of course, she has always asks for more chicken. Continue reading
12/9/2017 – Molina’s Cantina, the oldest and one of the best Tex-Mex Restaurant in Houston, shared their famous Chili Con Carne recipe. This turned out great and got even better when warmed up a few days later. Unusual for us with no onions and no beans. The Ancho dried chiles made all the difference. Continue reading
INGREDIENTS for 4 pints:
- 6½ pounds apples, peeled, cored and sliced (I used a combination of Granny Smith, Fuji and Honeycrisp)
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 cup light brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
DIRECTIONS:
- Place apples in slow cooker. In a medium bowl, whisk together the sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and salt. Sprinkle over the apples and stir gently to combine. Cook on low for 10 hours.
- Stir in vanilla extract, breaking up any large chunks of apples that remain. Cover and cook for an additional 2 hours.
- Remove cover and use an immersion blender to puree the apple butter until completely smooth. (Alternately, you could puree in batches in a food processor or regular blender.) If you want the apple butter thicker, you can continue to cook it on low with the lid of the slow cooker slightly ajar so that steam can escape.
- Allow the mixture to cool, then spoon into jars and store in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks, or freeze for up to 2 months.
Using bread that is getting stake leave it out on the counter for a day or two to get hard.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons Simon & Garfunkel Spice Blend & Baste or NEW: All-Purpose Italian Spice Blend Try Creole Seasoning.
1 cup freshly grated breadcrumbs
Do this
1) Take the dried bread and break it into golfball size chunks. Whenever I do this in the kitchen I get yelled at for making the floor crunchy, so now I do this outdoors where the birds can benefit from my clumsiness. One cold day I put the hard bread in a paper bag and smashed it with a rolling pin. This is a very effective technique. The big chunks then go into the blender or food processor and are pulsed until they are about the size of kosher salt.
2) Run the crumbs through a colander, not a strainer, into a bowl so large bits are left behind. Pulse the left behinds. Now measure out 1 cup quantities and store them in zipper bags in the freezer. They stay fresh longer in the cold, and then you can season each bag however you like.
12/4/2017 – First-ever fermented tomato salsa. This was a total fail as everything was mushy. It has promise if more salt will keep at least some of the ingredients firm. Continue reading
12/3/2017 – This turned out great. We will make more chorizo with this recipe and try others. Kelley and the Girls were over to decorate the Christmas tree. I bought a small fresh pork shoulder and after trimming the fat and silver skin, removed the bone and cut into about 1″ chunks and what was left weighed 5 pounds. Left some of the strips–before cutting them into chunks–to try in the grinder in contrast to chucks. [The strips worked better than the chunks as the feed quantity was more consistent. Continue reading
This cook turned out ok and provide a few lessons. The large butt was de-fatted, cut into three chunks, dry-brined plus rubbed with creole seasoning, and then smoked a long time with the initial 3 hours with full grey smoke and the middle 3 hours of light blue pecan smoke. With no wrap after the stall and a long time in the MES it had a firm dry bark.
12/01/2017, 8:30 pm – Trimmed fat from an 11.04 lb. pork shoulder and wound up as three chunks. Sprinkled on Creole Seasoning then table salt rather heavy to dry brine overnight — added like a serving that needed a lot of salt. Covered with plastic wrap on a baking sheet and back in the refer to smoke tomorrow.
Heated Passila dried peppers with seeds in a cast iron skillet to dry and crispy. Chopped into about 1/2″ rings, ground in the blender then sprinkled on the chunks. Preheated the MES set at 250 and let it coast up to 270.
12/02/2017, 7:30 AM – Put in the chunks and smoked at a grate temp of 245 with both ends of the Amazen Tray burning with pecan pellets mixed with CookinPellets Perfect Mix (no do like much) mixed 50/50 to help get rid of the Perfect Mix.
Smoke until the stall and the pellets burn out.
Wrapped in foil with more creole seasoning and a 1/4 C of ACV in each foil pack. Cooked in the oven at 250 until IT is 200 then tested for doneness; i.e. table knife inserts like into warm butter.
11:30 – Amazen tray had burned out as it jumped to the center track and all three had been burning; i.e. a steady flow of grey/blue smoke since about 9:00. Went with the girls to buy a Christmas tree.
12:30 – Refilled one slot with only pecan pellets, lite it and inserted it at this time into the MES. Inserted a temp probe into the one that was the average thickness. IT was 160.
1:30 – IT was 167 with a thin blue smoke stream.
2:30 – IT was 181 with a thin blue smoke stream
3:30 – IT was 187 with a thin blue smoke stream
4:30 – IT was 196 with a thin blue smoke stream
Kelley and the girls left and Mary and I went to the Pam & Bob Hughes Open House. Stayed longer than expected so pulled the meat at 8:30 PM. The timer had been set at 10 hours and started at 7:30 so it must have shut down about the time we left for the Hughes.
So, it set inside the slowly cooling MES and the bark dried out to a chewy almost crunchy state. But, even though the long cook should have left it falling apart, it is not. Keep in mind this was never wrapped.
The flavor of the bark is mild with a lot of smoke but not smutty. There is a slight heat or spice from the peppers in the creole seasoning and the fresh ground dry pasilla peppers.
Next Time – Do not leave it on so long. Once it hits the stall pull, wrapped and finish in the oven. Well…not so quick…read the comments below.
12/3/2017 – Mary warmed some slowly in a pot with some of the sauce. As there is a lot of firm but not hard bark and the meat is moist it was enjoyable.
11/23/2017 – Made to take to Becky’s for Thanksgiving 2017 and it was a big hit. Inspired by the recipe at https://www.spendwithpennies.com/cranberry-waldorf-salad/ Later, had with several small dollops of vanilla yogurt for dessert and it was great.
INGREDIENTS:
- 3 cups chopped cranberries
- 1 1/3 cup seedless green grapes, chopped
- 1 1/3 cup seedless purple grapes, chopped
- 2 sweet apples, chopped with skin left on
- 2 cups celery, chopped
- 2/3 cup raisins
- 2/3 cup dried cranberries
- 1 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/2 tablespoon white sugar as the cranberries were tart
- 2 cups vanilla yogurt
- zest of an average orange.
11/18/2017 – First time to brine a fresh bird in the larger Briner bucket with Chef JJ’s Family Favorite Brine. Had good pecan smoke with temps in the 300’s. Turned out fine with, very moist even in the parts that were more none than others. Bones were a bit red but meat was done.
11/12/2017 – This was our second batch and followed the recipe used in our first batch. It did not turn out as well as the first batch although everything was crunchy and not too salty. It became very cloudy and seemed like too much yeast that may be added an off taste.
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