cooking
So my holiday weekend is beginning to wrap up. Oddly, I did very little over this long weekend. I visited some friends from Indy on Saturday at a tailgate down town, then came back and hung out with Kim. Then I spent the last two days sitting around the apartment. I did a lot of cooking this weekend. I enjoy making stuff that I can then enjoy. It is a lot like writing software. It is approachable and directly rewarding. I can just as easily try out a new type of cuisine and can select dishes for different diets. I get to try different methods, like timing the parts of a dish or long term marinades or cures. There is a certain satisfaction to exploring new things and then getting to taste the success.
I have gotten to explore a lot of new things. I cured my first slab of bacon almost a year ago. Kim found a place that sells slabs of pork belly and I ordered some of the whole spices and made the cure. Then cured the belly for a week and slow cooked it (I don’t have a smoker… yet). It was awesome, I have cured a number of slabs since then. It adds a new level of flavor using your own bacon for a recipe rather than some store bought thing (you can also cut the slices to your liking, so I usually cube chunks for a recipe). I also tried pickling something this weekend. Kim likes pickled unripe mangos (it seems common in south east Asia) and I had watched a Good Eats episode on pickling so I figured it was worth a shot. The pickling has another day to go (Kim said it didn’t taste fully done today), but she liked it. I will probably try pickling some other stuff down the road, need to get comfortable with it and explore some of the potential. I also would like to try some other charcuterie, I tried corning my own beef, but that recipe turned out horrible, I probably need to adjust the recipe a bunch or look for some alternatives.
I have been trying a lot of different cuisine and using different ingredients. When I first got out of college, it was beef all the time (I absolutely love beef). For my new years resolution, I have decided to only eat beef once a week. This was for both health reasons and to force me to diversify my diet and taste. I have tried to do more seafood and vegetarian dishes and use chicken and pork more. I feel like I have been largely successful in this. This weekend I made a cheddar and garlic bisque (technically not a bisque as there is no shellfish in it) that turned out amazing. I went back from seconds and thirds. Tonight I made a mushroom and bacon rigatoni. I used my own bacon for it and it turned out great. A year ago, I doubt I would have been cooking with mushrooms ever, yet I find myself doing it more and more often. I also made a dessert yesterday, it was a cookie dough cheesecake bar. It is very rich and turned out good. I am trying out some desserts these days, even though I shouldn’t do it too often. I feel like there is a lot of fun in making desserts, but Kim doesn’t eat them much and I really shouldn’t eat them much.
I am continuing to look for new and exciting things to try in the kitchen. I feel like there is so much to learn and try that it will be hard to ever grow bored with cooking. Maybe the mangoes will get me into canning more. Only time will tell.