day 1

A week in my kitchen - day 1

Just for the hell of it I am going to tell you all that goes on in my kitchen for a week. It won't be accompanied by a lot of photos or in-depth explanation - I don't have time to full-time-blog all of it, it's more of a log. This isn't an unusual week, though it's not necessarily a typical week either - partly because it's summer, partly because I just went to Trader Joe's last week and have a couple things in the house I don't ordinarily.

Last night, preparatory to this morning - pitcher of iced coffee - three batches of French press coffee (two medium-to-dark roast, one light roast, though this is not a magic formula or anything), a little cinnamon, a few pecans that I fished out after the coffee cooled, half a cup of sugar

Watermelon - I cut the rind off of one and chopped it up, and then:

1) Sprinkled Tropical Punch Kool Aid on some and put it in the fridge;

2) Smoked some for a few hours - curious to see if smoked and chilled watermelon is interesting in a salad;

3) Covered some in salt. Chamoy is usually made with stone fruit, not melon, and watermelon has considerably more liquid than any stone fruit - but I figure, what the hell. Chamoy starts with fruit that's been pickled in salt or a brine - I add a little citric acid in addition to the salt in this case - and when the fruit is "dry" (the salt has leeched most of the water out), you combine that brine with red chiles and soak other fruit in it, like apples or pineapple or whatnot. This is intriguing, so why not. If it doesn't work out, I'm out fifty cents of watermelon and twenty cents of salt.

Reheated some sausage pizza from Regina's.

Macerated some halved strawberries in sugar, to turn into preserves.

Soaked dried tart cherries from Trader Joes in chartreuse, to add to the strawberry preserves.

Pimento cheese: cheddar, Stone Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale, jarred pimentos, a little bit of diced pickled hot pepper, Vidalia onion, mustard

Pimento cheese sandwich - the above, on white sandwich bread.

Smoked a pork picnic.

Dinner - homemade pizza arrabbita - part of a Trader Joe's pizza dough for the crust (I had used the rest of the dough last week); sauce of diced pickled hot pepper/roasted red and yellow peppers/Vidalia onion/Trader Joe's canned tomato puree; buffalo mozzarella/fontina/cheddar; roasted red and yellow peppers, fennel

Tonic water, Zucca Rarbarbaro amaro, lemon juice

Watermelon-cardamom limeade (leftover from last week)