I recently made some Bratwurst at home. It’s probably the easiest sausage to make and the most rewarding. There’s nothing in the grocery store freezer section that compares to these homemade, German-style sausages.
31
Mar 11
Mar 11
Chicken & Apple Sausage
I recently made a bunch of sausages at home, the most unusual of which was chicken & apple. It’s basically just chicken thighs, a granny smith apple, some chardonnay, and few spices, but it combines to make a very tender sausage that’s not too sweet.
31
Mar 11
Mar 11
Homemade Sausage
The wife was out of town last weekend. The torrential rain kept me inside both days, so I decided to make a bunch of sausage. There’s a bit of a yuck factor involved, and she doesn’t like to be around during the process. I made Chicken-Apple Sausage, Bratwurst, and a hybrid Sweet & Hot Italian Sausage.
23
Mar 11
Mar 11
Homemade Ravioli
I’ve been meaning to make ravioli ever since I got my pasta press. I finally got around to it last night and I was pleased with the results.
18
Mar 11
Mar 11
Mexican Braised Beef
I’ve tried a few times to make a beef variation of Mexican carnitas, which are typically made with pork shoulder. I’ve had some success, but the dish always lacked the depth and richness I had in mind. I found a recipe for Mexican Braised Beef that seemed like a decent starting point. This recipe came out pretty bland as written, so I changed it up a bit to get the kind of Jalisco flavor I was going for.
16
Mar 11
Mar 11
Easy White Bread Recipe
I realized I forgot to buy a loaf of sandwich bread at the store the other day, so I just decided to make my own. I’m glad I did. It came out much firmer and tastier than standard white bread.
14
Mar 11
Mar 11
Wooden Toolbox
As I mentioned before, I’ve been trying to clean up and organize my workshop. As I work on various woodworking projects, I toss the scraps into a bin beneath my workbench. I can pick up the scraps and immediately know if they came from my kitchen island, my coffee table, my guest bedroom furniture, etc. We use this scrap wood when we set up a fire pit in the backyard, but the unseasonably warm weather this year is causing my bin to overflow. So I decided to use some leftover pine and birch to make a travel toolbox.
07
Mar 11
Mar 11
My Workshop
Despite all the furniture I’ve built in my workshop, I never got around to truly organizing it. I built a workbench and hung some tools on the existing pegboard, but I’ve had a huge pile of hardware laying around for years. I could pick up bags and boxes of miscellaneous hardware and tell immediately that it was what I took with me after moving from one apartment in DC to another, or from DC to Greenville.
26
Feb 11
Feb 11
Website Redesign
Most people who read my blog posts subscribe via email or RSS. That means they won’t notice the website redesign unless they make an effort to drop by. I loved the look of the old site, but I’ve been considering moving to a more professional layout as I take on more marketing consulting and web design work. WordPress recently put out another update that conflicted with my old layout. Rather than pore over the update code and tinker with the CSS to fix the error, I decided it was time to embrace 3.0 and make the change. Now if I decide to push the site in a more professional direction in the future, I can hide the blog in the back and build new index and portfolio pages.
I’m going to keep the site as a hobby blog for now, but I wanted to streamline the look, feel and utility of the blog. As I’ve said before, I originally built this website as a personal tool with which to catalogue and sort my various woodworking projects, recipes, travels, etc. You know, automation and all that. I think this new design manages to give me the cleaner feel I’ve been looking for while improving functionality.
26
Feb 11
Feb 11
Roast Beef Hash
It’s funny how, when you’re a kid, you love the most random foods. My mother would spend hours making a nice, expensive meal that I would refuse to touch. We had weekly showdowns where I would opt to go directly to bed rather than eat the food on my plate. Other nights, in what I now recognize as the leaner times, she’d stretch our food budget with traditional recipes that I couldn’t get enough of. Roast Beef Hash was a staple in our house and a favorite dish of my older sister and me. It’s a nice way to turn a few ounces of leftover roast beef into a meal for the entire family. I’ve carried on this tradition and it’s still one of the prized meals in our house.
