I’m doing Weight Watchers this year. Anybody who knows me knows that there’s probably a little more of me to love than there ought to be, and I could do with better eating habits anyway. This was spurred on by Christine joining a WW competition among photographers; I’m certain I’ll get the details wrong so I’ll let her explain in the comments.

We’ve done WW before, with more success for her than me, as well as a few other programs – we did, for example, South Beach for four or six months a few years ago. (I shudder now to think of that time. I’ve made pizza out of nothing but ground beef and mozzarella. No, really. The meat was the crust. God, I missed bread.) But, nothing like solidarity for support, and me trying to focus on eating classic, from-scratch foods just wasn’t getting the job done on its own.

In a nutshell, the program tries to change your habits both about the makeup of the food on your plate as well as the amount. No surprise there. Points are assigned to foods based on the caloric, fat, and fiber contents of the food (Wikipedia provides some decent background here). Your points allotment takes into account age, gender, weight, and typical daily exertion, as I recall. Track and eat your points every day, and watch the weight disappear at a healthy and safe pace until you reach your goal.

I’ve never been one to do thing by halves. My problem with WW before was that if I had to stay within a certain point range, I made sure to stay WELL within the point range. Overachiever and all that. Problem is, this doesn’t work unless you do eat all your points – you don’t do better by eating less than your points, you just remain heavy and hungry. So, while “diet” to me has meant “eat a bag of carrots for lunch” in the past, I’m having to make sure I eat all of my points each day.

Here’s where my problem comes in. Because I’m fat, reasonably young, and male, I get a good amount of points. Not enough to keep eating like I was, but enough. (39, for those of you keeping score at home.) I am trying to learn better eating habits, so I’m leaving my comfort zone and eating lots more vegetables, less meat, more beans, whole grains, and so forth. I manage to keep my meals to single digit points, occasionally to double digits. This means that, at the end of the day, I find myself playing the game “How much butter does Mike have to eat to cover all his points?”. Oy.

What I’m learning as I track is that by normal behavior, I actually undereat in the day more than I expected. I’m not a big breakfast person on the workdays (caffeine and stress, normally), quick lunch, and dinner. There may have been enough points in those meals to make up the difference, perhaps, but basically I need to pace myself better and start eating more.

Klondike no-sugar-added bars are three points apiece. I’ve got to stop using them to pad my points total for the day.

Expect to see more, healthier foods soon. I’ve been doing whole wheat breads, veggie pizza, and sandwich wraps for lunch. It’s new habits that I’m trying to learn.

Wow. Aspic (or, “flavored gelatin” these days) has so much potential. Consider the following: An entire meal created from gelatin cubes. Mix five parts chicken gelatin cubes (chicken broth set with unflavored gelatin) and one part tarragon gelatin (plain gelatin with dried tarragon added when heating the water, then strained before it sets – not the greatest color, but the flavor is cleanly tarragon). Or, barbecue chicken – mix four parts tomato gelatin (tomato water – squeeze tomatoes and strain out the seeds – and gelatin) with one part spice gelatin (add cayenne, cumin, etc. to unflavored gelatin), then mix with chicken gelatin, et cetera.

The possibilites are endless. It would be an amazing buffet of different cubes of flavor, and everybody can mix their own. I can’t decide if it’d be better to remelt and reset the gelatin once the mixes are done, or just put together a bowl of cubes…

(There is a logical reason for this. Driving down our street, in the span of about four houses, my train of thought was: “I should have leftovers for dinner. I have a leftover pork pie, I could cut up the meat and put it on pizza … I still wish I could have gotten the aspic in the pork pie … I was talking about aspic a few weeks back, when we talked about doing a ‘Mad Men’ view-a-thon … I did manage to make tarragon gelatin … hey, I could do chicken! ooh, and barbecue sauce!” See? Perfectly reasonable.)

I’ve been in all-day workshops at work for the last copule of weeks. This has the effect of COMPLETELY knocking me off of my cooking rhythm, and I haven’t slowed down enough to get back on the wagon.

So, while I was preparing the cure for Homecured Bacon, Round 2 (a gorgeous 3.5lb pork belly from Pete’s Fine Meats), I decided to write down the ideas in my head. Let’s see what sticks.

• The world needs savory muffins. Garlic and herb? Spice and carrot? Mirepoix?
• Another pork belly will become rillettes.
• I really need to make another loaf of brioche.
• The ice cream machine bowl is now ready. Starting with a basic vanilla custard, will I make better chocolate ice cream using cocoa powder or melted milk chocolate?
• I need to branch out fast breakfasts past pancakes and eggs (despite the awesome tower of power below).

And that’s just off the top of my head. I’ll think of more as I drift off to sleep.

Let’s jump straight to the punchline – it was GOOD. Damn good. Very clean, unmasked pork flavor; not surprising since it was unsmoked and the cure didn’t have much in the way of flavorings added, but still outstanding in its simplicity. Because the pork isn’t injected with a wet cure, it isn’t waterlogged, doesn’t shrink nearly as much as supermarket bacon, but also doesn’t tolerate as high a heat as the prepackaged stuff. This is something I’ll be doing again, and probably not in the too-distant future. Now that I have the basics under my belt, I can start to play with flavorings in the cure (garlic and black pepper!), and if I get super-adventurous I can de-pollenize the Weber grill and smoke the next belly. So many options from such a simple thing!

Now let’s back up a bit. When last we left our pork belly, it had been dredged in a basic bacon cure (225g/0.5lb kosher salt, 113g/0.25lb sugar, 25g/1oz Pink Salt #1) and left in a plastic bag in the fridge for a week, flipping every other day to redistribute the cure. About a quarter cup of the cure was enough for a 4lb. pork belly. The pink salt, 6.25% by weight sodium nitrite, is colored pink to keep you from eating it directly. Its purpose in the cure is to allow the belly to be cooked for a long time at a fairly low temperature without risking bacterial spoilage, especially the case if this is to be cold-smoked. I finished mine in a 225 F oven to an internal temperature of 150 F, which would have killed the bacteria anyway, but better safe than sorry. I’m not worried about the small amount of sodium nitrite that might be in the food at this point; in large quantities, it may be unhealthy, but in this case it’s fine.

Right. The pork belly comes out of the fridge and is rinsed of any excess cure, then put into a low oven to slowly cook. (Above: Before and after; sliced.) This helps set the texture and flavor of the bacon. If this were proper American bacon it would be smoked, but I don’t have a smoking setup easily at hand and this was too simple to pass up. Once it comes out of the oven, use a sharp knife to remove the rind, let cool, then chill to allow it to set, and presto! You’re done! Slice it up or cut into lardons (1/4 in sticks) and enjoy some seriously piggy goodness.

I really don’t intend to buy supermarket bacon anymore. This has a reasonable shelf life (from what I’ve gleaned, about two weeks in the fridge or three months in the freezer) if you can keep it that long. The flavor and texture is head and shoulders above anything I’ve eaten, and it worked out to a little over $2 per pound, compared with $3.50-$5 at the supermarket. (This would certainly go up if I were sourcing my pork by mail order from a boutique farm that raised organic, specially-fed pigs, but I’m not there yet, much happier to support a local butcher.)

Try this at home. It’s easy. For more ideas, check out Charcuterie from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

(Oh, and the finished product above? A bacon sandwich on a slighlty malformed homemade onion bagel. Yeah. YUM. But that’s another post.)

I drew these up in the wake of online discussions about why “nobody cooks anymore”. A few disclaimers at the end.

First, I must apologize for a simple French goof; the caption on the first picture should read, “Ceçi n’est pas un poulet”, not “une poulet”. I couldn’t cleanly edit my gaffe out of the picture. (If you don’t know, it’s a play on the most famous of Rene Magritte’s images in “The Treachery Of Images”.)

Second, I have nothing against Rachael Ray. If she’s convinced more people to go out and cook something instead of buying ready-made meals or fast food, then I’m all for it. There’s just something in her style or approach that puts my hackles up, that treats cooking like a paint-by-numbers exercise rather than promoting understanding and confidence. If you don’t understand why you do a certain step, then you’ve got nothing to go in if you deviate from those steps. And if you’ve cooked with enough recipes, you’ve learned that they’re far from foolproof.

Lastly, I mean what I say about throwing how-to dinner parties. Yes, I suppose Christine and I could host, but that’s impractical for a variety of reasons. Have cookbooks, will travel.

Let’s get something straight up front: I am not a morning person. My son’s school and my own job conspire to get me up somewhere around stupid o’clock in the morning. My morning ritual, then, needs to be something simple that my brain can handle on autopilot. Let’s take a peek:

In the center at the back is the scale and a small press pot. I use the press pot to measure out beans, because after a lot of trial and error, I decided that pouring coffee beans into the grinder is very error-prone for me and I need something easy. Forty five grams of coffee – check. (One time, with another grinder that had a clear plastic bowl for the beans, I managed to pour beans onto the lid of the bowl, sending them all over the kitchen. Jason nearly snorted cereal through his nose.)

To the right is the grinder. Yes, I grind my beans by hand – I can get a coarser grind out of this than I do with a normal coffee grinder, and it’s gentler on the beans. We picked this up on a trip to New Orleans years ago, before Katrina, in a little shop across from the Café du Monde. It takes filling the bowl twice to get through forty five grams of coffee. It’s repetitive. Mind numbing. Perfect for the morning.

To the left of the scale is the press pot. I use this to measure out water (plus a bit more) for the kettle, then put that on to boil while I’m grinding the beans. Once the water boils, pull it off the heat and wait thirty seconds – the best temperature for making coffee is around 180-200 degrees Fahrenheit, I believe, just below a boil. Put the grounds in the press pot, pour water over, stir to make sure the grounds are evenly wet, and set a time for four minutes.

Remember that “plus a bit more” water? That’s what you see in the coffee mug at the left. Pre-warming the mug with a little of the boiling water is a bit of gilding the lily, but I swear it actually does make a difference. So, while the coffee is brewing, I pour the last of the water in the mug and dump it out when the coffee is ready.

Plunge, pour, adulterate if necessary – a little cream, a little simple syrup – and enjoy. I can handle this in the morning.

(or, “I’d better write a second post this year.”)

Well, on this day in 2000, I started blogging. Rather, I started a group blog, that would become my own brand. For the curious, go back to the beginning here [opens in a new window], courtesy of the Wayback Machine Internet Archive at archive.org. That remains some of my best CSS work to date, sadly.

Since then, my blog and I have seen:

• Internet game shows come and go (hello, Survivorblog!);
• me moving to London for two years, meeting some very dear friends along the way;
• me moving home and meeting my wife-to-be through those friends and through our blogs;
• the growing market of blogging tools, in which I accuse adopters of Movable Type of being “sheep” (or was it “lemmings”?);
• the birth of the cool (or, at least, the birth of WordPress);
• a whole lot of friends spring up across the globe, which means we’ll never travel someplace and not already know someone there;
• some prolific blogging progeny, including Laurence at Is Full Of Crap and Charles at Off The Kuff – karmically, I think this is a zero sum;
• the dawn of Twitter, where you’ll find me somewhat more frequently here (it’s easier to have 140-character ideas);
• and lately, a whole lot of food.

Yeah, it’s been a good ride so far. Thanks to everybody who has been a part of this journey, and welcome to the folks to come.

Of course, I can’t leave without talking about food. I’ve got to give a shout out to Michael Ruhlman’s new book, Ratio, for changing the way I cook in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Michael is an amazingly talented food writer, who has managed to explain in a relatively thin tome some of the basic principles behind all recipes. For example, I’ve been doing a lot of bread baking lately, with the goal of never buying a loaf of store-bought sandwich bread again. Bread, in Ruhlman’s terms, is 5:3 – five parts flour, three parts water, by weight. A bit of yeast, a bit of salt, and you’ve got the essence of bread. From there, you can do anything – add some flavoring ingredients, change up the flour with some rye, whole wheat, or semolina, make it into shapes – but the basic recipe is simply 5:3. (That’s part of why I have so few recipes to write up anymore. They all come down to things like that.)

Between a good cheat sheet of ratios, a decent understanding of technique, and a reference or two on cooking science, that’s the core of what I need to cook, well, anything. And it’s a lot simpler than pulling out all the recipe books and looking over half a dozen or more recipes for meatloaf before deciding on a mélange of them all.

More to come. There’s a lot to say.

Sometimes, real life just gets in the way. I’ve left you all hanging in suspense about the outcome of the pizza dough for six months (answer: it was fantastic, freezes well, and I’m slowly starting to roll out round pizzas instead of odd oval/square shapes) while I tended to day job, home, and all sorts of other things that needed me.

I have recently completed a project, the Twitter Cookbook. This was a short exercise (10 days) to see how many people I could reach out to, and what sorts of new food ideas I could put together. The outcome has been fantastic – I’ve enjoyed reading everybody’s submissions, and hope to keep this going in the new year.
Go check it out at twittercookbook.net.

I’ll be back with more cooking writing this year – the cooking part comes easier than the writing part for me.

Happy Eating!

Testing out the new WordPress app for the iPhone. Since y’all are so nice, I’ll give you this quick fix tea:

CHAI
Makes 5 cups

4 C water
1 C milk
5 black peppercorns
10 cloves
5 cardamom seeds
1 stick cinnamon
1 star anise… star? pod? thing.
5 bags of black tea (or 5 spoonfuls of loose tea)
5 big (soup) spoons of sugar

Lightly crush the spices. Add water and spice to a pot and bring to a boil. Remove from heat, cover, and steep for 10 minutes.
Bring back to a boil, remove from heat, and add tea. Steep for 5 minutes.
Strain and discard spices/tea leaves. Add milk and sugar to taste – the sugar helps bring out the spice in the tea.
Enjoy!

I’ve got a lot to say, I really do. I also have no time to organize my thoughts and say it. Writing doesn’t come so easily to me that I can kick out effective posts quickly. Plus, work is eating my shorts. If I were to write about food, this would be as much a restaurant review as it would be a food blog. That said, I do have a few things up my sleeves to tell you about – all in good time. Right now, I’m just testing Windows Live Writer as a blogging tool.

And happy belated 8th birthday to my blog (born 25 June 2000). I’ll pull links from the internet archive to show just how far it’s come.

Cheers!