The Fruge

More and more food. Gournet cheffs allways have nyce refrugerators.

Gournet indeed. Shaoxing wine, always in my pantry, always good for a laugh.

Bamboo in chili oil, best kept in the fruge.

Ch'ava Cafe Hot Chocolate

More food. Something not made by me. From Chava Cafe:

Previous Ch'ava posts: over here and over there

Wintry Dog Mix

I'm going to have to interrupt my line of food posts for now. We were in Michigan this past weekend to relax, celebrate my mom's birthday, and ring in the Chinese New Year with Nickbot where I drank entirely too much scotch while arguing the merits of having a knife over a handgun during a close quarters bear fight, much to the chagrin of our wives. Anyway, when I'm out there I tend to do a lot of wandering around and this time was no different. I've said it before and I'll say it again, winter wandering is great in a lot of ways, particularly because there is usually no one else around. It's a nice respite from the bustling city.

Walking the dogs with pops. At this point he was carrying about five pounds of dog crap in a couple bags.

A pair of cross-country skiers created paths which Kya tended to stick to. I think she thought they were mini-sidewalks or something.

Q running through snowfall as the snow falls. His ears provide lift.

Tea Eggs

Happy Chinese (or Lunar) New Year everyone. It's the year of the tiger, specifically, the metal tiger. I'm not too sure what that means, but it sounds pretty awesome. Anyway, in continuing with my line of recent food photo posts, here is another:


Tea egg. I made these a while ago, but it's a common dish to eat during the Chinese New Year. Although it doesn't take much actual work, it takes at least six hours to finish (preferably twelve). This batch was made on the quicker side, so the resulting flavor and appearance was lighter. Anyway, it pretty much works like this: boil, crack, season, boil, steep, peel, eat. Eggcellent.

Butter

More food! As delicious as it is, I generally substitute out butter when I cook. I can get away with it because cooking usually doesn't require strict adherence to any given recipe. However, baking is more like chemistry, requiring a bit more consistency. I mean you can't just take butter out of a cookie recipe. Anyway, Cathy does a lot of baking. And baking requires a lot of butter.


And this is 25 pounds of butter, which is only about 1/3 of what we actually have on hand right now. I find the sheer volume of it humorous (at least in the context of a two person household), which is why I'm sharing this with you. That is all.

Pasta

One thing about winter is that I spend a bit more time inside than outside. This extra time lends itself well to my cooking hobby, particularly when preparing time consuming foods. One of those foods is homemade pasta, which I make regularly due to my predilection for Italian food. The process is relatively straightforward but fairly it's labor intensive and requires a surplus of time. All worth it though, since store bought pasta just pales in comparison.


Components for a basic pasta. Proportions vary depending on how it will be prepared and how it will be cut. You can also pretty much include reasonable amounts of anything else to make things like spinach pasta, tomato basil pasta, apple pasta, beer pasta...


Post-knead. I knead pasta dough by hand. It's the best way to determine when everything is properly incorporated. Plus it's the only cromulent way to embiggen your dorsal spaghetti muscle. Located directly above your wrist and below your ankle.


Then roll it out, thickness depending again on what the pasta is intended for. Doing this by hand requires some finesse in order to maintain consistent sheet width and thickness from end to end. This is important because the only thing worse than lopsided pasta is racism. What? Anyway, after rolling it out, break out your knife (or chitarra or mixer attachment) and get your cut on.


This is about half the batch. Saporous.