Sketchblog

I’ve never rendered my own lard, but I am a fan of the wonderful substance. It isn’t exactly health food, but Lard has half the cholesterol and half the saturated fat of butter. I don’t eat it every day, but I think Americans need to get over the fear of the stuff.
One of my favorites [...]

Making homemade stock is one of my favorite things to do. It takes forever, but is completely worth it.
This blog post explains it better:
Beef stock tastes like Chef-Boy-R-Dee ravioli.
Veal stock is more velvety than actual velvet.
Beef stock is a sweaty, hairy truck driver on the final leg of a cross-country haul, in which he [...]

I am not really qualified to talk about bread or baking, but I have taken a crack at baking recently. I even attempt to maintain my own sourdough starter. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.
Anyways, go check out the bread blog Wild Yeast
and learn about sourdough.
link.
For the record, I got the starter of [...]

FXcuisine

Before there was Harold McGee’s On Food & Cooking and before Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking there was The Grocer’s Encyclopedia by Aretemas Ward. This extensive work from 1911 is available online for free here.

I picked up quite a few books when I was in Texas at Half Price Books and other places.
Technically, I have already finished the one on the top, Gentlemen of the Road. It is a cool adventure novel and was originally going to be called Jews With Swords. It was fun to read and [...]

The amazing food science genius Harold McGee has a great article in the NYT about the very basic yet often overlooked subject of heat in cooking.

The solution is to cook with more than one level of heat. Start with very cold meat and very high heat to get the surface browned as quickly as [...]

OK, so I have been wanting to do this for some time now. I used to go crabbing/fishing with my dad as a young fella. We would go to the HEB, get some chicken necks, and load up our crab trap and check it a few hours later. This was exciting for me as a [...]

I mostly used Atlon Brown’s method.

The Meat. I didn’t age it quite as long as Alton said.

The Meat again, with digital probe thermometer properly inserted. I started the roast in the oven at 200 degrees.

The Meat Under Foil. After the roast got up to the desired internal temp of 118 degrees, I took it out [...]

I made this amazing dinner for myself. Labor day is the best.
This is a variation on mole poblano. I was missing one type of chile in the dish so it is a little lighter in color than mole that you might be used to. I used a Rick Bayless method that was sort of similar [...]