Author: doug

These wild-caught US shrimp followed me home from the Boston Public Market today. I guess I know what’s for dinner!

Blood oranges are so tasty. Especially in cocktails. This one is going into a sidecar made with calvados.

Several of my skiing buddies posted similar photos today, but I can’t resist. We spent basically the whole day at Jay in the trees.

I am skiing at Jay Peak this weekend with friends. The only injury today was to my boot, which was violently separated from the pictured buckle. The sad part is that this happened at lunch, on the stairs.

Was the Quincy Army heading south to invade Braintree this morning?

#20 at 7:05am

The brawn from yesterday’s cooking session is done, and I had some for lunch today. The flavor and texture are good, though I could have used a little less broth (gelatin) and weighted it down for a denser product. It’s certainly within the range of photos I’ve seen online.

The guanciale (un-smoked bacon made from hog jowl) is curing in the fridge, which will take about a week, then it has to hang to dry for about a month. I’m sure there will be more pictures of this process.

Kris came over today to help me cook the half pig’s head I got from Michael last fall. Here are Kris and Lis using dissection tools to remove the pig’s eye prior to cooking, which was surprisingly difficult. The difficulty was partially the head having been frozen then thawed, but mostly by none of us ever having done this before.

We made guanciale with the jowl, and brawn (head cheese) with the remainder of the head.

We had a great solar power day today, in fact our best so far. This photo is our system’s monitoring page, and it shows most of the panels at nearly their rated (280W) power.

This crocus may have been blooming at this time last year too, for all I know, but if it was we didn’t see it under all the snow.

 

Like Lis the other day, I am practicing posting from the tablet today.