Peanut pretzel chocolate.

Lewisburg.



Good, old-fashioned flavors. Nothing particularly complicated, though since this is a first draft, I know that a lot could use some tweaking.

Peanut butter shortbread. Might be nice with chopped peanuts next time, and perhaps in a thinner layer. Need to consider how to increase the peanut flavor without making it too dry.

Sweetened condensed milk, with 1% salt and 2% citric acid. Stir it all together, and nothing happens. Fold it, and within seconds you have a firm, spreadable, creamy icing. Orange juice would be a fine addition, though I didn't have any.

Ground toffee. Sugar, butter, corn syrup, water: cook to hard crack. Cool and grind in food processor. Would be stellar on ice cream.

Chocolate ganache. Didn't have cream, so 2 parts dark chocolate chips, 1 part butter.

Pretzel crunch. From Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi. Mini pretzels, brown sugar, sugar, malt powder, milk powder, butter. Rich, sweet, salty, and almost impossible not to snack on while you're making everything else.

Lime, blueberry, and malt.

Lewisburg.



Key lime curd, with 1% gelatin added. Makes it sliceable. I strongly recommend a garlic press for juicing the key limes.

Cooked blueberries. Essentially a blueberry cobbler filling, with extra lime zest.

Oat and brown sugar crisp.

Burnt malt foam. Saccharified pale 2-row barley malt at 65°C for 90 minutes. Whipped into a foam with 1.5% Versawhip 600K and 0.15% xanthan gum. Caramelized surface sugars with torch. Interesting, but not compelling, on its own. With a bit in every bite, though, it lets the burnt malt flavor through.

If I hadn't foamed it, I'm not certain how I'd achieve that caramelized flavor. Sure would have been a lot more work.

Turkey (dismemberment) day.

Lewisburg.

It's turkey (pickup) day. Behold, forty pounds of turkey, dismembered:



They were live turkeys as of this morning. I picked them up from a farm just north of Orangeville, came home, and tore them into boneless bits, a la Jacques Pepin. (Worth noting - it's significantly more taxing to debone a twenty-two pound turkey than a four-pound chicken.) A few more trims, and we've got:

• Breasts for roasting - to become sandwich fillings - or for taco and pizza chorizo.
  
• Tenderloins for stir-fries.
  
• Thighs for stews and sausages.
  
• Drumsticks for soups and braises.
  
• Wings for soup.
  
• Liver for dog treats. If we weren't hosting Thanksgiving - and cooking 95% of it - I might make pate. But there ain't time enough for that.
  
• Wishbones for Thanksgiving fun.
  
• Extraneous bits for tonight's stir-fry dinner. Specifically, the muscles beneath the shoulder, that came off with the wings.
  
• Carcasses, wing tips, gizzards, and hearts for stock. With a handful of aromatics, they've given us about two gallons of rich stock for Thursday's feast.

The rest of the bird, sans what we've eaten tonight, is already in the freezer. This, of course, because I picked up our Thanksgiving bird from another farm, just to hedge my bets.

And to give us enough to eat throughout the year.

And, no, I don't roast a whole bird. Dry-brine - as stupid as that sounds - the breasts for gentle roasting. Cure and braise the leg quarters. Let the family deal with it.

Pork and pretzels.

Lewisburg.

Sharon's out of town, but here's proof for her that I'm still eating well:



Pork chop, low-temped in apple cider at 60°C, and seared for a good crust. A lovely pink inside, as a good pork chop should be. Pumpkin spätzle with sage. Mustard greens and chard with garlic and chilli. Butter-fried apples. A nice schwartzbier to accompany.

Meanwhile, I prepped an education example for tomorrow's baking class:



Pretzels and pretzel-shaped objects. The same batch, split in half. Those on the left enjoyed a bath in a sodium carbonate solution. On the right, a dip in plain water.

I'll bet you can guess which side smells of pretzel, and which of fresh bread.

Pumpkin cavatelli.

Lewisburg. Pumpkin season is here, and in full force. Given that repeated, heavy rains have done in much of the garden, I'm lucky that I have any at all, but eleven cheese pumpkins is still plenty. It would have been more, but only a few were harvestable after Irene, and anything still ripening by the time Lee arrived were on the way to rot.

Yes, we've already had pumpkin pie. I think some sort of soup is a strong contender for tonight. And last night, before I had to run off to teach class, we had pumpkin cavatelli:



Just pumpkin puree and flour, run through the cavatelli maker. The texture ended up a bit springy, not unlike udon, so I'll try them next with durum semolina. Sizable quantities of pumpkin gnocchi are also in our future, since they freeze - and cook from frozen - so well.

The pumpkin flavor and color were hard to miss; once boiled, their orange hue intensified. We tossed them with oyster mushrooms, garlic, and fresh sage, and I'm already looking forward to more.

Short ribs.

Lewisburg.

Sometimes, a new kitchen toy isn't cheap, so it had better be worth it. That Polyscience 7306c immersion circulator? 100% worth it. For example, the otherwise-impossible medium short rib:



Forty-eight hours - two days - at 60°C, with pre- and post-searing, for flavor, color, and bacteria-killing before the circulator bath. The end result is tender, juicy, and nothing like the (admittedly still pretty lovely) results of braising. Makes for a damn fine sandwich.

The same technique has been a real boon for other cuts, too. Juiciest pork chops and veal chops imaginable. Tender, moist chicken that makes the finest chicken salad I've ever had. (Yup, I'm not above using high-tech lab equipment for a better chicken salad.) Sausages, especially in large quantities, are juicy because they're properly poached, not just because of the pork fat.

Making twenty pounds of sausage for my brother's Oktoberfest suddenly required far less focus and split-second timing.

Also: amazingly precise eggs; confit without the need for pounds of lard and/or duck fat; fun tricks for gelatinizing and retrograding starch in rice, potatoes, etc. One of these days I'll see what kind if fun I can get into with malted barley and alpha- and beta-amylase at different temperatures. Probably carefully curdling milk into cheese, since I've really got to start making my own fresh mozzarella. There are more options than time, for now.

And, unrelated to circulator fun: bacon. It's been a while since I put up photos of the smoker, but since I forgot a finished bacon picture, here it is:



Four hours of hickory smoke, plus a gentle oven heating to give the proper hot-smoke effect. Lovely. Weeks upon weeks of flood-inducing rains have really limited smoking opportunities, so it's been nothing more than a garage obstacle since bacon time. Oh, well.