The Cure To All Life's Problems

I cured these wonderful pig products last week and boy did they turn out well. The bacon was dry cured and then hot smoked until it became the beautiful, and tasty, masterpiece that you see before you.

And the ham was brined with herbs for eight days and then very slowly hot smoked for sixteen hours. I could barely keep it in one piece when I cared it, it was so tender and juicy.

Sausagefest

These are some lovely Italian sausages, hand made by me of course or they wouldn't be here. I served them with a sweet cranberry relish that made them absolutely sing.

At Long Last, Actual Food

And it happens to be quite appropriate that we will be starting with some hors d'oeuvres.

These are shrimp and rice deep fried wantons with a sweet orange glaze and a tiny sprig of chervil for a nice anise flavor. For this event I played with spoons that had a small amount of fried rice at the bottom to stabilize them and also add a soft texture to balance out the crispy wantons
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I made these wonderful apple/mint gelee oyster shooters with a spicy horseradish mignonette as a garnish. It goes down smooth with a sweet yet salty kick that refreshes your palate, but after a moment you'll receive a very brief moment of spicy from the mignonette and then immediately be returned to the flavors of the cool apple gelee.

Pictures and blog posts should be relatively regular from now on as i'll be producing almost constantly.

Menu Design Project

Ironic how these first few posts don't even have food in them. But industry professionals should notice immediately the importance of this entry. Without going into details this is the menu I designed for my final project in my Menu Development class. It's 100% original, I designed everything. If you couldn't tell, my business model was a tea shop.

Do not use this image, design, or restaurant name. I plan to develop it further.

Grant Achatz

Just to restate, this blog is mostly about dishes I make, however I will be sharing special events like this from time to time. Today Grant Achatz came to visit my school, and I was able to sit in on a great lecture. If you want to know more about Grant Achatz check out his new book Life On The Line

Blog Start

This is going to be simple and painless for everyone. If I make something, work on something, or participate in something interesting then you get to see it. If you want to start a conversation about it that's great, but you don't have to work your way through a mountain of text to know what's going on here if you don't want to.

I'm also not going to post things i've done in the past. It's a shame, i've had some amazing experiences and they are what's pushing me to create this blog. But everything here is going to be fresh, current, and hopefully exciting. If my day is a whirlwind of activity then be ready for a lot of posts, but if nothing absolutely great happens then you're not going to have to hear about less important things. These are going to be short, quick, and fun.

I hope you enjoy it.

-Daniel