The Hungry Engineer

I love making things from scratch that seem like they should only be purchased. It was with particular pleasure that I made homemade marshmallows last year. This year for the holidays, we tried out some flavored marshmallows.

I have sort of a love/hate relationship with some of the new eco-friendly restaurants that have been opening around here. On one hand, I love what they’re trying to do. Energy-efficient appliances, green building materials, grass-fed meat, local produce – these are all things I can happily embrace. But when I tell people about the food, I catch myself adding qualifiers. Not bad … for low-fat, grass-fed beef. Pretty good … for healthy fries. I’m happy to report that Promise Pizza, a new “green” pizza joint up in Round Rock, is actually just good pizza – no qualifiers required (well, almost no qualifiers).

I talk a lot about creating all manner of fun charcuterie projects. Things like sausage and confit and pate are lovely on their own, to be sure, but they’re raised to a new level with the inclusion of a few well-prepared condiments. One of my new favorites to serve with a succulent sausage or braised pork belly is Pickled Shallots.

I found it useful to refer back to my Thanksgiving post from last year when planning this year’s meal, so I figured I’d recap our Thanksgiving meal again this year … you know, for posterity. This year Sean and I had seven guests (though to be fair, the littlest one brought her own food) over to the house for a very pleasant feast. It was so pleasant, in fact, that we didn’t remember to take very many pictures.

Roast turkey is fine and all, but I won’t lie to you, it’s not my favorite thing to eat. The recipe we did last year for salted turkey was the best I’ve ever used, and I was tempted to do that again this year. At the end of the day though, I wanted to do something different. Since I’ve been having so much fun with all my charcuterie projects, I decided to go that route for the Thanksgiving turkey. I give you turkey-cranberry sausage and turkey leg confit.

It seems like ages ago now that I first subscribed to Gourmet. I wanted to learn how to be a better cook. I had graduated from college and learned a few basics, but at the time the Internet was kind of a sketchy resource, and I didn’t have the experience to tell a good recipe from a bad one. My solution was to subscribe to a cooking magazine. One of the few I had heard of at the time was Gourmet, so that’s the one I chose. From the first day, I was hooked.

Remember me whining about how I couldn’t case the sausages I was making? Well, that is a problem no longer. My indulgent husband went with me to our local Academy store “just to look” at the sausage stuffer they sell there. We examined it, decided it would work for what we wanted to do, then went home and researched it. Within a few days of me waffling around, he finally decided we were just going to buy it, and we had ourselves one shiny new 5-pound LEM sausage stuffer.

We were recently sent on a treacherous errand, full of drudgery and malcontent. We were forced, practically at gunpoint, to go eat doughnuts for lunch earlier this week because our friend needed us to pick up a fancy doughnut for her husband for his birthday. Fine, who am I kidding. I’ve been lusting after these doughnuts since I heard about Gourdough’s and this week we finally had an excuse to try them out.

A couple years ago (back when we were a two-income household, I might add), we had the opportunity to spend an incredible evening consuming the most amazing food at the Inn at Little Washington. The traffic was murder and thanks to that and bad weather, we were over an hour late for ourreservation (I called en route and apologized). They accommodated us with grace, and we proceeded to eat the best meal of our lives thus far.

I love dumplings. I don’t mean chicken and dumplings (though I love those dumplings too). I mean beautiful little meat or vegetable stuffed Asian dumplings that have been perfectly steamed or pan fried and are usually served with an extremely flavorful sauce. Andrea Nguyen’s new book, Asian Dumplings, makes these little bundles of goodness accessible to enthusiastic home cooks as well.