Hash Browns – Home fry style – v3

I’ve been working on this recipe for about the last 9 months, until I arrived at the recipe you see below. I’m not going to bother posting any of the earlier versions of the recipe, since they mostly resulted in being complete and utter failures. But some of the low lights from v1 & v2 include bland flavor, soft texture and excruciatingly long cooking times. So with that out of the way, it’s onto the winning recipe listed below. Continue reading

Smoking Homemade Bacon – 05/01/2010

This was one of those projects that should have been completed at least a couple of weeks back. But each free weekend that I had in March & April, would somehow get booked.

So a little bit of back story on this project. Around mid-March I ended up being part of a syndicate that was going to purchase a whole pig from The Slagel Family Farm down in central Illinois. Well something went sideways in the order, and instead of a whole pig (~200lbs, dressed) being delivered to Mado they delivered half a pig (~100lbs, dressed) instead. It was kind of a bummer to get half a pig, since we were splitting this pig four ways. But in the end, half a pig worked out better, since we were struggling just to refrigerate half a pig. So I don’t even know where we would have stored another 100lbs of pork meat and bones. Continue reading

Guacamole Recipe – v4

For some strange reason avocados from Chile were on sale at Wal-Mart for $.50 each. So not being one to stare a gift fish in the mouth and take advantage of a food opportunity. I ended up buying about eight of them, which provided me an excellent opportunity to work on a guacamole recipe on the cheap. Since testing out guacamole recipes at $.99 an avocado really isn’t the best use of my grocery dollars. But at $.50 a piece I’m more then willing to throw a little bit of caution to the wind in trying to develop a usable guacamole recipe. Continue reading

Easy Caprese Salad Recipe – v1

This is kind of a late post, since I made this caprese salad in October. But I guess better late then never.

If you don’t know how to make a salad, then you should have no problem in making a caprese salad since it only has seven ingredients. And those ingredients are fresh mozzarella, a tomato, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil, kosher salt and pepper.

And putting it all together is just as simple as the ingredient list. Slice the tomato and mozzarella into ~1/4″ slices, and arrange on a plate or platter alternating between the tomato and mozzarella. Finally top with the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil, kosher salt and pepper. And that’s it! How much more simple can you get? (Other then getting a bag of mixed salad greens and topping it with bottled salad dressing.)

Side note:
1) Since I didn’t want to get fresh basil from the grocery store. I just used some of the basil that I dried from my garden.
2) If you have some nice salt (black salt, red salt, etc) by all means use it. I just happened to use kosher salt, even though I had some red salt on hand but forgot to use it.
3) For the olive oil, I used some extra virgin olive oil that JRR got for me a while back.