conversations with the husband

I gush over Adeline so much, I feel like I'm forgetting the marvelous man in my life. So here are a few random conversations off the top of my head with my husband that keep that spark alive, or something like that. Starting with Brian speaking, the source of all amusing conversations:

“Do you want a cucumber salad? Because if you want some too, I’ll go to Safeway and get the stuff.”
“Yeah, I do. That sounds really good.”
“Okay. Uh, but I don’t have any underwear on.”
“Why do you need underwear on to run to Safeway? It’s 9pm.”
“Have you been to Safeway lately? It gets crazy up in there.”

“Were you going to close the refrigerator door?”
“Well, yeah, after I finished putting ketchup on my burger.”
“But you could have closed the fridge door first and then opened it again to put the ketchup back.”
*silence* “Are you kidding me?”

“Can we have a serious conversation? You’re going to think I’m kidding, but I’m not.”
“Okay, yeah. Go for it.”
“If you buy cheap toilet paper one more time, we’re going to have problems. If the toilet paper belongs in a public bathroom do not buy it. Some of us poop more than others, and I don’t want to wipe my @ss with sandpaper anymore.
“What? The toilet paper is fine! What kind of toilet paper do you want?”
“I want Charmin triple quilted with lotion toilet paper.”
*pause* “Oh my gawd.”
“No, okay, you know what, I’m buying the toilet paper from now on.”

“So I have this great idea. For Christmas, instead of getting one of the guys to dress up as Santa, I found a website that rents our real Santas. Like with real beards and bellies and…”
“The second graders don’t care who’s dressed as Santa.”
“Sarah, they do care.”
“They’re just excited to see anyone who looks like Santa handing out presents, I didn’t care when I was in second grade.”
*silence* *mad* Way to poop on my idea. They do care.
“Oh. Oh sorry. Well it’s a good idea babe…”
“No. I’m mad now.”

And with that last one, Happy Holidays!

Duck Fat

Even though it isn't healthy, if I really want to make a dish taste rich and delicious, I'll cook with butter.  In Anthony Bourdain's book, he talks about why the dish you get in the fancy restaurant is better than what you make at home.  He says its because at the end of every dish, a good chef will "ajouter le beurre," or "add butter."  Most of the time when I cook, I use EVOO instead of butter, since it's healthier, but since I've started on the snout to tail journey of cooking, I've decided to try and render my own duck fat.

This last week, I purchased two ducks, because I wanted to try my hand a deboning a whole duck.  This left me with some delicious meat, which I've already eaten, but also a small pile of duck fat.

Duck fat is very easy to render.  First you chop the duck fat up into small pieces.  Place it in a pan, slightly covered in water and let it simmer over medium heat until the water has completely evaporated.  Filter the fat of the small chunks, and let it cool.  Now you have a healthier alternative to butter.  I stole the following table from Fete & Feast.  It shows how duck fat compares to some of the other common cooking fats.  It's not as healthy as EVOO, but it has more good fats, and less bad fats than butter.

Fat (1 Tbsp)	Monounsaturated Fat (Good Fat)	Polyunsaturated Fat (Good Fat)	Saturated Fat (Bad Fat)	Trans Fat (Really Bad Fat)
Olive Oil	10 grams	1.2 grams	1.8 grams	0 grams
Canola Oil	8.2 grams	4.1 grams	.9 grams	0 grams
Duck Fat	6.3 grams	1.6 grams	4.2 grams	0 grams
Lard	5.8 grams	1.4 grams	5 grams	0 grams
Butter	3.3 grams	0.5 grams	7.2 grams	0 grams

Many people try to avoid fats at all costs, but if you read about the French paradox, not all fats are created equal.  The Italians can keep their EVOO.  I'll use some duck fat, thank you very much.

Sausage Fest!

About a month or two back, I was having a conversation with our friends Kate and Mark about the 1/2 pig that they purchased.  Mark mentioned that they tried to make their own bacon but that it didn't taste bacon-y.  Enjoying cooking as much as I do, I decided to do some investigating and see how bacon is made.  After bouncing around the internet for a while, I found two websites that I really enjoy and that talked about home-made bacon.  They are Michael Ruhlman's Blog as well as Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook.  For anyone interested in fine cooking, they are fantastic blogs.

After reading the blogs for a few weeks, and going out and purchasing Michael's book "Charcuterie," my confidence was high enough to attempt some meat-works.

My first effort was to make bacon.  They key ingredient to making bacon (other than pork belly) is pink curing salt.  It's just regular salt with some nitrites in it, but it is what gives bacon it's flavor.  Without the nitrites, bacon just tastes like pork.  In addition to the salt, I added some crushed bay leaves, lots of fresh ground black pepper, and 5 cloves of smashed garlic.  After making the dry rub, you cover the pork belly, throw it in the fridge for a week, rinse it off, and voila, bacon!  Mine came out really good, with a fantastic savory flavor from the garlic and bay.  It's a tad on the salty side so my next attempt will cure for less time.

Anyways, onto the reason for the title of this post.  The book got me interested in making my own sausage.  Since this sounded like a lot of work for one person, I enlisted Doug and Liz Blocksma to help me as well.  We picked out a recipe for a sausage made with fresh sage, ginger, and garlic.

The process actually was a lot easier than I thought.  After cutting up 5 pounds of pork shoulder, we fed it through the Kitchen Aid grinder.  From there we threw it in the mixer with the dry spices and let it mix for a few minutes.  Then it was into the sausage stuffer.  The stuffing of the sausage is the most labor intensive part and is probably the only part that actually requires two people.  But after a slow start, we we making sausage like some seasoned pros.

The sausage turned out fantastic.  The flavor reminds you of something you might buy in the store, except 100 times better.  I'm sure store sausage uses garlic powder, ginger powder, and dried sage, but when you use all fresh ingredients, the results are fantastic.

After the success of the first batch I'm excited to make another.  Right now I have 5 lbs of pork ready to be made into chorizo and two ducks that I need to de-bone to turn into a duck sausage.  And since you don't want all that duck fat going to waste, I'm going to try my hand at rendering it down into cooking oil.  Should be fun :)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone.  Another year has come and (almost) gone, and the Bishop's had another good year.  Of course the big news this year was the addition of Adeline to the family, and it has been an amazing journey so far. She's currently 7 months old, and growing every day.  Luckily she got my laid back personality so she's been an easy baby so far :)

We traveled a bunch again this year.  We visited Ohio, Louisiana, California and New Mexico, all for weddings.  Our big vacation for the year was our two week trip to Switzerland which was completely amazing, and now we're looking forward to playing in our Colorado snow (if we ever get any in Denver).

Not much has changed on the job front.  I'm still working SBIRS, and Sarah is running her wind-farm at RES Americas.  I found out I didn't get the school slot I applied for, so it looks like we'll be in Denver through at least 2012 (yay!)  Other than that, not much has changed.  We're loving life, and loving Colorado.

We hope everyone has a happy holiday, a wonderful New Year, and hopefully we see you all soon.

Here is our Christmas Video for 2010