africa (53) art (70) baja (23) boniver (15) book (42) booze (20) bsg (5) chile (19) climate_change (33) cooking (346) critters (93) dairy-free (84) dvd (192) economy (11) energy (17) fire (11) food (593) garden (98) GF (121) humor (64) iv (52) keelyandtraves (4) kevinandvana (9) macro (9) movieandadinner (2) music (173) nola (9) npr (304) nwc (15) ocean (61) onionav (134) oregon (70) photos (219) politics (13) r/s/l (35) randomroles (12) RS (8) s+s (126) SB (21) school (30) sports (108) tori (10) travel (142) utah (5) weather (33) worldcup2010 (39) wwsd (2) year-in-review (1)

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Honey Lemon Curd

There is essentially one lemon curd made with honey instead of sugar recipe on the web, which seems to be copied over and over. Based on the date, I think this is the original. Sara made a bunch of macaroons, so we're drowning in egg yolks right now, and we're trying to reduce processed sugar, so gave it a go. 8 yolks, 2/3 c juice, zest from the 3 lemons used plus 1 extra, salt, 1/3 c honey plus 2T cause it wasn't sweet enough, ~4T coconut oil at the end. Pretty good!

Lattkes

chicken, cranberry sauce, some brussels sprouts from under the bird, and Sara's lattkes
I ate alot of them... not a big fan of sour cream, but good otherwise.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Kale in the Limelight

Nice story from npr, prompted by the Eat More Kale/Chic-fil-A thing.

West Camino Cielo. Chilly.

depth of field
Lichen!

Homemade Cheese Preserved in Oil

The hope was to produce feta cheese preserved in olive oil. I ran into some hitches, though. First problem was my candy thermometer starts measuring temperature at 100 degrees, but the recipe wanted me to heat the milk to 86. Doh! I generally followed this recipe. It ended up as a soft white cheese, cream cheese-like. I drained it using a weight to reduce the moisture content, but it was still a heck of alot closer to cream cheese than feta. I packed it all into a 1/2 gallon jar and put some oil on top. Taste was really not too exciting. A couple of months later, including some more microbial activity cause it bubbled over some in the fridge, I decided to use it to saute veggies. Basically heating the 'cheese' caused it to separate into tasty butter-like stuff and some milk solids. Made for some pretty tasty cheese+peppers tacos, though I think I might just stick to ricotta from now on....
empty jar

Cheater Fish Tacos

Sara came up with this and it's genius. There's a company called la tortilla factory that makes a corn tortilla with wheat gluten. She made a tuna salad and it it in said tortillas. A proper baja fish taco is a white fish fried with a batter, served with mayo in a corn tortilla. Tuna with mayo and celery, etc on a corn + wheat tortilla REALLY reminded me of a fish taco. Epic!