Pickled Ramps - Page 233

Not much to say about making these, they are a pretty basic pickle recipe.
We went with refrigerator rather than the full canning.
They were outstanding to eat, once we waited the week.

Advice: When you find ramps, make a ton of this.  If you're really clever with your jar photo staging, you can get the bay leaf nicely placed for the picture.

You might even consider taking the picture with a better background than your stove ;)

Cured Egg Yolks - Page 234

I struggled with these.  I had some great, really fresh eggs, and didn't want to mess it up.  The recipe seemed like it might be troublesome, and curing has never been my strong suit.

Separating the yolks and setting them in the salt/sugar mixture was obviously the easy part, but I worried about whether they would stay covered, get smushed by too much salt, or get jostled in the fridge.

Then it was brushing the salt/sugar off, which was a little sticky, and made me think I wasn't getting enough off.  Tying and hanging was okay, though I stressed about tying to tightly, too loosely, or having them drip or something in my pantry.

Turns out I'm just a paranoid pansy.  In hindsight, I was sweating too much and should have just rolled with it.  These are easy, take no time at all and are awesome.  They're like egg yolk flavored cheese.  Once they're done curing I just trimmed the rough exterior and had these amazing slivers of eggy pleasure.

And yes, that's Chef Brock's smoked bacon cure in the jar behind the eggs.

Advice: Don't sweat this, just follow the recipe.  Use good, fresh, preferably backyard, bug eating eggs for the best color.

Rendered Fresh Lard - Page 316

Ox and I have both made lard several times, and the recipe from the book is pretty straight forward and easy to use.  The results are excellent both times we've done it.

I don't even have any pictures from making it, but we did stumble upon a really neat trick for making lard quickly, easily and with some pretty cool side benefits.

We were making the Rabbit Andouille Sausage, which called for 1/4 pound of fatback, run through the large die of a meat grinder.  We looked for fatback from the usual sources at the Summerville Farmer's Market, but everyone was out - no big deal, we had lots of options.  Luckily, Russell at Sunny Cedars Farm suggested using leaf fat, which he had at a good price.  We grabbed two pounds and froze the chunks for easy grinding.  We only needed 1/4 pound, so we decided to make lard out of the rest.  Ox had been wanting to try a crock pot instead of the stove top, and then genius hit us!

We were grinding the fat anyway, so why not grind it all!  We figured this might speed things up and increase the yield. It worked!  Less than 45 minutes and we had perfect, easily strain-able lard.  Not only that, the bits of meat that had been in the beautiful fat were not over crisped.  After straining we threw them in a skillet and cooked them for 5 minutes and ended up with AMAZING pork bits.

I don't know if I'll break the grinder out every time I make lard, but if I'm grinding pork anyway...

Grilled Chicken Wings with Burnt Scallion Barbeque Sauce - Page 104

Where the f**k did my picture of the finished product go!
I used the Blogger App and made a draft of it with the picture (we were at a friends house so did not have the camera) now it's gone!
Oh well, the wings were delicious - though a fair amount of effort for wings - but you'll be drinking beer while cooking, so it's okay.

We were planning these for standard Sunday Ox and Brock dinner, but on Saturday got invited to a cookout with friends - so we decided to make them there.  Since we were cooking at someone else's place, and we didn't know how much equipment/space we would have, we decided to do as much ahead as possible.  Since we weren't grilling anything except scallions for prep, I decided to use my tried and true, super fast roasting method that I use for roasting peppers (in fact a roasted a couple jalapenos for Ox to make an Indian chicken dish for our Saturday dinner).  I figure if it works for peppers, it should work for scallions.  Your chimney starter isn't just for starting the charcoal!  Judicious use of a dedicated cooling rack allows for some screamin' high temperature cooking - though the cooking surface is a bit small.  Took about 3 minutes to roast the scallions.  We even roasted a bunch more and ate them right off the "grill".

A couple minutes in the blender and we had the Barbecue Sauce done.  We put the chicken in to marinade, the chips in to soak, and then measured out the rest of the ingredients we needed in easy to travel containers.

Once at the shindig, we cooked the wings as directed on the grill, then smoked for the requisite time.  The only modification we made was to put the barbecue sauce into the bowl we planned on tossing the wings in and allowed it to warm back up to room temperature (actually hot fricken' day temperature).  Finally putting everything together, taking a wonderful picture (now lost into the maze of the interwebs), and serving.  They were a BIG hit.  The roasty/burnty/smoky flavor was delicious with the underlying familiar barbecue awesomeness.

Advice: Follow the recipe.  You don't need my chimney rig if you're doing everything on the same day (except brining and soaking of course).  That said - you should check out the rig for roasting peppers and searing meat at ultra high temperature.