Holy Guacamole

A belated wedding present showed up on our door step late last summer, a lava stone mortar and pestle. In traditional Tim Martyn style, Marie carefully assembled a magnificent guacamole. For now here's the picture, if you're lucky she'll tell you how to make it.

Dumplings

We tried our hand at some pork dumplings last night. Click here for the full instructions, they're great and really worth the effort. Our new kitchen aid food grinder attachment made mincing the ingredients for the filling really easy. We used unbleached whole wheat flour for the shells. Not bad for our first attempt. The dipping sauce is important, ours was 2:1 soy to red wine vinegar with some Sambal Olek (Chili Garlic Sauce) to taste.

Yogurt

We got a yogurt maker last week, so far i've made 1 batch and ruined 1 batch. Latter today I will make another that I hope will work. It's not rocket science really, bring your milk to a near boil in a pot on the stove and then cool to 95 degree's Fahrenheit.

Next mix in some yogurt from a previous batch or use a starter pack of bacteria and then pour into individual jars and leave it in the yogurt maker for 8-10 hours, follow this with a few hours of refrigeration and you've got some great tangy yogurt.

If you're even thriftier than us you could probably use your Ronco style food dehydrator to heat the yogurt for the necessary 8-10 hours. I like the individual 6oz. jars ours came with, and it was only $30. Seeing as how we tend to run our dehydrators fairly constantly (although not so much lately) it's nice to have the separate yogurt maker unit. Other's i've read about online use ice chest or coolers filled with jugs of hot water, whatever works for you.

Hot stuff

Ok, so it's been a long time since we wrote anything on this blog but it turns out people are actually looking at it, I'm impressed!

I consider myself spoiled to be able to live so close to the farmers market and over the last 2 years we've spent plenty of time shopping there. In the last year or so Peppahead has showed up at the market. Do yourself a favor and get some of his chili powders, or at the very least check his website out and try some recipes.

http://www.peppahead.com/

This guy grows all his own peppers in his back yard in sunny San Rafael (hey that's where we live!). And he's not fooling around, to quote Troy McLure "that's flavor country". It's not all hot stuff either, lots of rich smokey tastes.