Balls and Walnuts

About ten days ago, I described how I went about brining my pork shoulder. Here it is, getting ready for its salty bath:
It’s in a plastic garbage bag. I added the brine, tied it off, and kept it at approximately 36 degrees F for ten days. Every day, I turned it or shook it up [...]

No, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Yes, I’ve been writing — editing, to be precise. I finished the second/third pass-through on Gator & Shark, and I’ve sent it to an editor. Now I’m trying to breathe new life into The Brakan Correspondent. It’s rough; I finished it eight years ago, and have been fiddling [...]

I’ve finished the first major pass-through and I’ve sent the manuscript off to my betas. These are all folks who have expressed an interest in seeing the manuscript, so if I’ve overlooked you, let me know. It’s a bit big, 138K words. Sadly, I was not able to pare it down. I cut out at [...]

Not only have I blogged beef tongue before, I did a decent job of it, too. That was seven years ago, I’ve since become allergic to beef, but my method of preparation has not changed a bit. I’ll throw in some commentary along the way, but here we go with beef tongue, baby:
Glorious beef tongue. [...]

Lately, I’ve been using this new product in my facial recon work — pig basement membrane, which takes the place of an autogenous skin graft. The sales rep was in the OR today, and I guess he was trying to impress me, because he’d google me (I guess) and wanted to let me know how [...]

For tonight, I made Tyler Florence’s recipe for galumpkis (stuffed cabbage). And now that I think about it, I did futz with the recipe: I used a pound of lamb and a pound of pork, no beef. Otherwise, yeah, everything was the same.
Quite good, although the sauce came out watery. I suspect the only fix [...]

There’s two loaves there. Karen braided 1.5 loaves. I am a braiding dyslexic.
D.

Mee krob is one of those pain in the ass Thai dishes that even the Thai restaurants rarely make. Back in Crescent City, we had a lovely restaurateur/chef who would make it for us if we begged prettily. Aside from her* mee krob, most others have been overly greasy, or have used too much sauce [...]

Yeah, not often I find a new recipe playing Facebook Scrabble (oh, they don’t call it Scrabble, but are there really any differences?) But when it occurred to me to check whether I could add a E to BARD to create BARDE, thinking perhaps it would be an alternate spelling, the game said yeah, go [...]

Dessert photos, decent pic of my son, fat pic of yours truly below the fold.