Vietnamese-Style Chicken Meatballs With Ginger and Mint

I was running a bit late the night I had planned to do this, so instead of making the meatballs I combined these into little patties for mini pretzel buns. It was pretty good like that. This was delicious.

Chicken Taco Casserole

When it describes it as backwards nachos, it’s not kidding. It really was like that. With the addition of black beans it was a bit better, but I suspect the salt level was quite a bit more then I should probably intake at any point in time.

Brats (Crooked Gap)

Good time, good tastes, good stuff.

Sloppy Goats

So I saw a vague website suggested doing this, after a bit of a discussion I supplemented it with beef to make it 50/50, then made a sloppy Joe as I normally would (semi-random mix of herbs and spices, tomato sauce / chunks, sometimes yellow mustard). Pretty good. Kind of a waste of goat if I must say so. I’ll probably make some curry.

Eggs and Bacon

I had some sugar cured bacon sitting in the freezer. Lucky George via the Story City Locker. It was a nice bacon. I guess it wouldn’t be may favorite preparation of pork belly, but still quite good. Scrambled eggs, a bagel, and a quick dinner in the bag.

Peruvian-American Pork Adobo (Sunday)

The problem with many recipes is the size associated with produce. Small, medium, or large onions. With no indication as to the end product and how much, by weight, the onions should be, you can’t tell if that mammoth set of onions you have actually are what they indicate by large. So that being said, there was a lot of onions in this. Like a whole lot. an entirely excessive amount. I enjoyed it, the house did have a lingering onion smell, and it wasn’t near as good the second time around, especially as I ran out of decent bread for dipping.

So, Ham.

I was really worried that I was going to mess this up. After a taxing day of waiting (at the barbershop, at the grocery store), I’m not quite sure how much smoke flavor got added to the the “cold smoke” because I didn’t really see a lot of smoke, but I did let it go from around 6:30 am to around 8:PM. Then I was worried that the smoke would go way to long, so the book recommended two temperatures, so I took the 250 over the 225. I swapped the wood chips completely once. The first round was a mixture of mostly apple wood and a touch of mesquite and cherry. Second round was a handful of cherry, jack Daniels barrels chips, and the rest apple wood. I was a bit surprised as to how quickly it got to temperature, because I guess I’m used to the stall that happens for BBQ. I tested in a few places and found that yes it was actually done. I cut into it and found that pink color. I was pretty excited. Now to figure out what to do with all that ham…

Deep in the meat, close to the bone, it does get a bit less pink from the curing salt, but it still tastes pretty good. I discovered this as cut the pieces apart and off the bone. That being said, not a bad first try. Luckily I’ll have a whole other ham to try again on, make some adjustments and try to refine.

I also made Cowboy Cookies, to bring to Easter dinner tomorrow.