Category: Experiments

It has been cold and rainy here for more than a week. My spouse has wanted soups for dinner. I made a cream of broccoli cheese one earlier in the week but decided tonight I wanted something without a dairy base. I like both Italian wedding soup and minestrone. However, I didn’t have a complete […]

We often make bacon for breakfast on the weekend. It is one of my son’s favorite things. The problem is that we always have bacon grease leftover. I can put it in with our compost but this seems like a waste. So I’ve been trying to think of other ways to use it. The solution […]

It seems like in the summertime I’ve always got some bits of fruit which is getting ready to go bad sitting on my counter waiting to be eaten or used. Sometime it is peaches, other times apricots, this week it was plums. I’m a big fan of homemade jam, jellies, marmalade and preserves. I’ve posted […]

Like many people I’ve been trying to create a sourdough starter to bake bread from. I started from this recipe/instructions. When I got to my first harvest, the starter didn’t look like it was quite ready. So I tried a sourdough/yeast hybrid instead. I’ve kept feeding my starter and using bits of the discard for […]

Every time we make Spanish rice as a side dish for dinner we always end up with leftovers. Not enough leftovers to use for another dinner. But enough for lunch IF there were some leftover slow cooked meat to put on top of it. But 99% of the time there isJUST have rice left. Which […]

Once again this spring my neighbor’s kumquat tree produced more fruit than any one household could consume. So she shared the bounty with me and I was overrun with kumquats. I’ve made kumquat bundt cake and loads of other recipes last year. This year I was looking for something different. Since I have a sous […]

This past weekend I made a bunch of different appetizers/snacks for my birthday dinner. One of the recipes I decided to make was deviled eggs. The key to making nice deviled eggs is making sure you don’t overcook the hard boiled eggs. To ensure this bring the slightly salted water to a boil then add […]

One of my other recipe experiments for this past weekend was sweet potato croquettes. I had cooked a bunch of sweet potato earlier in the week and had some leftovers that I needed to use up. I’m not a big fan of pureed sweet potato so I wanted to try to make a recipe that […]

I’m a huge fan of risotto and really enjoy trying to make different versions of it. This weekend I decided to make a completely vegetarian version of it. Typically I make risotto using chicken stock because I have it on hand. However, this time I had homemade vegetable stock in my refrigerator. I had made […]

This year for Christmas my brother and sister in-law got me an Anova Sous Vide cooker. I’d been asking for one because sous vide is a cooking methodology which really interested me but I hadn’t tried yet. For those of you not familiar with the concept of “sous vide”, it is a technique that involves […]