Food Hackery

I’m a huge fan of desserts especially custard type desserts. After my stunning success making chocolate mousse in my sous vide, I decided that i should try to make another custard type of dessert in my sous vide. Given that I had loads of little lemons, I thought a lemon flavored custard would be the […]

Several years ago I bought a different variety basil plant from a vendor at the local farmers market. The variety – African Blue basil, is the one I’ve had the greatest success with over the years here in Houston. My first plant grew as a perennial over several winters. It was constantly getting so large […]

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 […]

In my last post I wrote about my struggles with making bread. Proving (aka letting it rise) is my nemesis. It seems like I’m always a bit to anxious to stop the prove and do the next step. So I decided I would use every last minute of proving time the recipe said was POSSIBLE […]

I consider myself to be a fairly good cook and baker but I have a couple of Achilles heels. One is pie crust. I can only make “short crust” aka crust that is made with butter not crisco or lard. Even doing this requires a tremendous effort on my part to get it right. My […]

One of the most common things that my mom would make growing up were Greek meatballs. Keftedes, as they are known, are made from a mixture of ground beef and/or lamb, onion and/or garlic, oregano, bread crumbs, and eggs. My mom made them of lean ground beef. She would not include garlic in her mixture […]

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 […]