One of my favorite hot sauces this year is CaJohn’s Frostbite. It’s a semi-clear concoction that’s opened up a whole new frontier of possibilities when it comes to upgunning the kick on foods I’d never add heat to with a conventional tomato or green sauce. Cocktails were an obvious choice but this weekend, I tried it with something very different: lemon/orange sorbet.
Playing with Fire: My Microfarm Experiment
If you’re a home gardener, you’ve probably experienced the dreaded Zucchini Syndrome. Over-producing squash plants make the zukes faster than your family can eat them. You try to give them away, but no one wants them because they’re now larger than your cat. Well, the same thing can happen to chile plants, which is why I wrote Too Many Chiles with Nancy and Jeff Gerlach. But at least you can dry the chile pods to preserve them—something you can’t do easily with zucchinis and large tomatoes.
Frankenburger: Our In Vitro Burger Recipe
Dutch scientist Mark Post and his team are all set to fry up and serve the world’s first stem cell-grown hamburger for two lucky taste testers to try. While everyone else is wondering how it will taste, I think the bigger question is, how long is it before Frankenburger turns bad, kills a villager, and gets its creators killed by a mob wielding pitchforks and torches? It’s thoughts like this that keep me up late at night.
Barbecue Styles Explained
I expect a lot of services from an insurance company–motorcycle, car, house, boat, Sharknado, just to name a few. I don’t ask them for barbecue advice, well, ever. My insurance agent could be the best rib smoker on the West Coast but I’d never know because our worlds don’t intersect that way. Still, Titan Insurance took it on themselves to put out this handy graphic guide to ‘cue styles around the country. Check it out.
A Pellet Smoker Simplifies Barbecue
I gave up smoking meat a few years ago because it was getting to be too much trouble. First I had to locate the wood, which meant calling firewood lots and asking if they had any pecan or fruit woods around. And then, during the smoking process, was the constant adding of the wood to the firebox, which interrupted anything else I was trying to do. The best time to smoke was during a football game when I could add wood during the timeouts for commercial breaks. But football isn’t on during the summer, which is the traditional time for smoking. Finally, I gave it up and just went to the Pork and Brew Cookoff and bought a year’s supply of pulled pork and brisket from my friends, the Texas Rib Rangers.
Liquid Heat: Catching Fire in a Glass
You can’t catch lightning in a bottle. You can, however, gain the ability to shake uncontrollably as you lie on the ground after running around holding a metal rod and a pickle jar in a thunderstorm. But enough about my childhood. Let’s catch fire in a glass.
Mad Mixology
I’m not quite sure what this kit is supposed to do but Molecule-R sure is amped about it. It’s the company that makes the R-Evolution mixology kit and hopefully it kicks us one of these little chemistry sets to play with in my home lab.
