Author: DmentD

Roasted Garlic Hummus

DmentD

2 C cooked chickpeas (or canned)
2 TBS tahini
4 TBS olive oil
¼ C chicken stock
1 large head of garlic
1 OZ lemon juice
¼ TSP sea salt

Preheat oven to 375°F Cut off the very top of the garlic clove (about 1/4″) so that the tops of most of the cloves are exposed slightly. Coat with a little olive oil and wrap securely in tin foil. Roast garlic in oven for 1 hour. Remove and allow to cool.

Using your fingers, squeeze the soft, roasted garlic out of each clove into food processor. Rinse and drain cooked or canned chickpeas. Add them, and all other ingredients, to the food processor and blend until completely smooth.

Scrape ingredients off sides of food processor to make sure it blends evenly. If you find that the hummus is too thick, you can add additional olive oil at this time. Add it very slowly, allowing the mixture to combine fully before adding more liquid.

Pickled Beets – Alton Brown

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Roast Beets:

  • 6 MED beets (cleaned with 1-inch stem remaining)
  • 2 large shallots (whole, peeled)
  • 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
  • 2 TSP olive oil

Canning:

  • 1 LG red onion (frenched)
  • 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
  • 12 OZ tarragon wine vinegar
  • 2.25 TSP Kosher salt
  • .75 C sugar
  • 12 OZ cup water

Equipment:

  • Large oven safe pot with lid
  • 2 1-QT mason jars with new lids and rings

Oven: 400° F

    Roast Beets:

    1. In a large bowl toss the beets, shallots and rosemary with the oil to coat well.
    2. Place into a foil pouch or lidded oven-safe pot of sufficient size and roast in the oven for 40 minutes, or until a knife tip can pierce the beets with slight resistance.
    3. Remove the pot/pouch from the oven and allow the beets to cool, covered for ~30 minutes.
    4. Peel the beets. Slice into ⅛” slices and discard the stem.
    5. Discard the rosemary, keep the shallots.
    6. Strain the juice form the pot/pouch and put aside.

    Canning:

    1. If canning, boil jars and lids to sterilize.
    2. Add a sprig of fresh rosemary to the bottom of each jar and distribute the roasted shallots between the jars.
    3. Arrange the beets in 1-QT jars, alternating layers with the onion, packing tightly, filling to within ¼” of the top of the jar.
    4. In a small pot combine the remaining ingredients with the reserved juice from roasting. SBring to a boil, then pour over the beets.
    5. If canning, lid the jars and return to the canning pot and boil for 35 minutes, then rest in the warm pot for 10 minutes to seal. Allow to cool and store appropriately.
    6. If not canning tightly lid the jars and place in the refrigerator.
    7. Allow 3 to 7 days for flavor to develop before serving.

    Yields 2 QT.

    Framed Again!

    DmentD

    I feel as though I use this blog these days for nothing more than cataloging and showing off the stuff that I make…

    I’m ok with that.

    So, to carry on with that theme, here are the two latest pieces I have framed. They are two of the several Discworld maps that have been made available through the years, and they are two of the first items on the ever growing list of things I was going to frame once I had the tools to do so, and walls to hang them on. They are also two of the larger pieces I had as well, making them more of a challenge. They pretty much fill an entire wall.

    Since the maps were designed to look old, and old-world, I wanted to make some very old-world frames. Something a little darker, wider and more ornate than usual. Both prints were also almost too large to get mat-board for, but I eventually made it work. I apologize now for the reflections in the glass on these photos, but no amount of lighting tricks I know — natural or artificial — were going to avoid that.

    The first print is the Streets of Ankh-Morpork, and is my favorite of the two. It’s a nicely detailed layout of the city on the Discworld most frequently used as a setting. It’s practically a character in and of itself. I adore the aging parchment look, and all the embellishments around the border.

    The second map is of the Discworld itself.

    Skin Cups.

    DmentD1 Comment

    Continuing adventures in leathercraft!

    A little background for this project: Steve Jackson Games, an Austin game manufacturer who has been producing well known gamer favorites such as Chez Geek and Munchkin, released a quick, fun, and addictive ‘press your luck’ style dice game a few years back called Zombie Dice. Knowing me, you know I can’t refuse many zombie themed things, and a fun game is always good to have around. I eventually bought two sets of the game (and it’s expansion, Zombie Dice 2) — one for the house, and one to keep in the car for impromptu game sessions.

    The game itself is awesome, and my only complaint has less to do with the game, and everything to do with the game’s container. The game comes in a dice cup which is essentially a cardboard tube with a plastic cap at either end. It’s noisy as hell when you shake the dice, and we find ourselves playing in places like coffee houses where that dental-loosening rattle is more than a little obnoxious.  SJ Games sells a soft bag you can use in place of the cup, but there’s something a little sad about pulling dice from a bag. I filed away the desire to find or make something better for another time.

    Fast forward to now. I’ve got a few leather projects under my belt, and it occurred to me that I could make a sturdy leather cup, lined with felt or velvet, and that would look good and muffle a good deal of the rattle. Even better, I can make it themed to the game… why not have the appearance of zombie skin, greenish, brown and mottled. But hey, this a game where you play a zombie — no self respecting zombie would use a cup made from zombie hide, oh no, they’d cobble something together from their victims. Which to choose? Oh, wait, I have two sets of the game, looks like I’m making both! *grins*

    The cups are made from heavy vegetable tanned saddle-grade leather that is nice and stiff. They’re stitched together using artificial sinew for that ‘harvested from a corpse’ look. The cups are very roughly stitched together (that’s a feature, not a reflection of my neophyte status as a leathercrafter, honest!). The insides are lined with a deep red velvet, and the caps are not lined, but instead stained with a very similar shade of red (‘cranberry’ to be precise).

    The zombie skin cup has extra stitching to suggest closing up of tears or wounds to make a solid vessel. If I were to make another of this style, I would either eliminate that altogether, or use the same ‘loop stitch’ I use everywhere else. I particularly like the dirty discolored effect that is a result of staining the leather, then softening it with alcohol to shape and stitch it.

    The cylinder of the human skin cup is assembled from four individual pieces of leather that were stained different shades of skin tone, then stitched together. There is no straight line seam on the cylinder itself such as the other cup has. Again, that may be something I add to v2 of the zombie skin cup.

    Lastly, the Zombie Dice 2 expansion adds three dice to the original game. Sometimes we don’t always feel like playing with the expansion included, so I made little dice pouches out of shaggy black suede to contain the expansion dice to keep us from having to dig them out every time. It fits neatly into the cup for storage.

    They all turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself, and I learned a lot more about working with leather from this project. Isn’t that the goal, after all?

    Leather Pouch.

    DmentD

    After an initial success making a leather case for a Moleskin notebook, I’d been itching to work on something else. I’d been promising myself that I would start making pouches and accessories to go with my Ren Faire outfit, and this season seemed like a good time for it. I had the better part of a large piece of vegetable tanned shoulder, and a few of the basic tools to get started, just needed some buckles, a catch, rivets and a nice rich brown dye.

    Knocked out a few designs in cardstock to get a feel for the size and style, and also to have a cutting template when I was done. Went for a more organic teardrop curved shape, simple but attractive. Finished, it looks well made (if I do say so myself), but not “modern made”, which is important for a period piece. The bag is approximately 6″ wide.

    I have added, since its completion, a fleur de lis embossing which I think may become part of all my costume pieces. It would have been a little nicer and deeper had I done it before I had stained the leather, and if I could have done it in wet leather as well, but it’s not too bad as it is. I am heartily encouraged by this success, and see myself happily making more, and possibly more elaborate pieces before too long.

    Framed, You Hear!

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    Since I’ve been regathering woodworking tools lost to Katrina, I’ve been able to get a start on what is likely to be a very ongoing project… picture frames. Sweets and I have been slowly gathering prints and posters and artwork over the last few years (with no apparent end in sight), and for the smaller ones that fall into a standard size frame that can be bought “off the shelf”, we’re doing just that. Anything larger, or oddly sized — and the majority of what we have falls into this category — requires a custom frame.

    The few pieces I’ve had framed in the past, while being done well, are fairly expensive… especially considering our tastes and preferences. At this rate, we’d likely only get one or two pieces done a year and we’d never catch up. Even the cost of just getting a mat cut is stupidly out of proportion considering a typical full-size sheet of acid-free mat board costs ~$15 for a 32″x40″ sheet and it takes all of 15 minutes to cut it. Add to this the fact that you’re limited to the frame styles the shop has in stock — to be fair, while not a minuscule selection they do tend toward a variation on a small number of themes. Additionally, if I wanted something more stylized or thematic I’m pretty much out of luck. The materials the frames are made of is rarely ever solid wood (composite materials mostly), and far too many of them are hideously garish.

    So, I decided to do my own framing… quite in the tradition of my grandfather who framed all of his own artwork. I have a full-size mat cutter, I have the tools at my disposal to cut, fit and assemble frames, I have the skills and know-how, and I can do it all for a fraction of the cost that a frame shop would charge me. This also affords me the opportunity to do many more pieces in a shorter span of time and not break my budget. I can also get faaaaancy.

    Two recent pieces that I finished were prints by Terrance Osborne: Post Katrina Blues, and Hurricane Solution #3. Both purchased over two years during my annual pilgrimages back to the motherland. I wanted to do something special for these, but hadn’t any specific ideas.

    While foraging around the local architectural salvage companies for materials for another framing project (that’s another post) I came across an old wooden white painted window screen. I mean old, and poorly repainted over the years — never scraped, so the scaly ‘gator skinned peeling paint from previous generations created a prominent texture, and of an old hand-made style not seen any more. I was instantly transported back to NOLA, and the ancient white houses with the hunter green trim that is still found in older neighborhoods today (I lived in one myself), painted and repainted over the years. This screen was worn, weather-beaten and a perfect representation of a home — both physical and spiritual — lost to tragedy. It was mine for all of $4.

    I disassembled that screen, carefully so as to not dislodge too much of the flaking paint, and lovingly cut and assembled it into a frame. I lightly dusted the worst of the dirt from it and sealed the rest in with satin Polycrylic. I paired the frame with a hunter green mat, the entire assembly representative of the loss depicted in Post Katrina Blues. The funky weathered appearance may not be for everyone, but it strikes me profoundly. You can even see a white house with green trim to the right in the print.

    The next frame is another find from my architectural salvage hunts. It’s pieces of chair-rail moulding, reclaimed from an old house that was obviously decked out in quite a bit of fancy millwork when it was built (the pieces I used came from a huge bundle apparently from the same salvage project). The moulding was painted with a high-gloss white oil paint originally — those old oil paints just had a way of sitting on wood that is unmistakable — but the paint had lost some of it’s luster and has faded to a slightly ivory off-white color over the years. At $1 per linear foot, I had more than I needed for a measly $25.

    The trim was in fairly good shape (compared to the screen from the last frame) with just a few chips and scrapes in the finish to show its age. It reminded me of the loving restoration that is done in the very old houses in NOLA, where the original millwork, filigrees and fancy flourishes are painstakingly preserved, showing the wear of the years but still holding up — mostly — the the test of time. It spoke to me of hope, history, and carrying on even in the wake of destruction. That fancy, scrolly moulding was cut and assembled into a frame, and left as-is with no additional finish… warts and all. Paired with a goldenrod colored mat, it evokes the stubbornness, ingenuity and spirit of preservation in Hurricane Solution #3.

    My intention hasn’t been to salvage materials for all of my frames, that style just happened to fit the prints I was working on. Going forward… who knows what I’ll be using, but I have the freedom and flexibility to do what I like. Just you try to get a frame shop to make one from an old window screen. *grins*

    Smoked Ribs

    DmentD

    This is for 2 racks of ribs. Baby back ribs, while smaller, are more tender and are best suited to this recipe. Larger rib varieties will require more smoke/braising time.

    Wash ribs thoroughly and pat dry with paper towels.  Remove membrane from the back of the ribs. Brine overnight.

    Prepare a double recipe of Dry Rub.  Brush the ribs lightly with oil on all sides.  Sprinkle each side generously with the rub.  Pat the dry rub into the meat.  Refrigerate the ribs for a minimum of 1 hour.

    Heat smoker to ~250° and add wood chips.  Place a drip pan under the ribs and fill with approximately ½” of water or beer (add fresh herbs if desired).  Place ribs on a v-rack over indirect heat and close the lid to the smoker.  Allow to smoke at ~250° for two hours.

    After two hours on the smoker, individually place the rib racks on a sheet of heavy duty foil and create a “pouch” of foil around each.  If desired, pour approximately ¼ C of Braising Liquid into each foil packet.  Wrap tightly and place the ribs back on the smoker or in an oven and allow to braise for at least one hour (two is better) at 200° – 250°.

    Once cooked through remove the ribs and allow to rest, wrapped in a towel, in an insulated cooler for a minimum of one hour. If desired, you can finish them on the grill with BBQ Sauce.  Coat the ribs with sauce and cook them over direct high-heat (grill or broiler) until the sauce is thoroughly cooked in to the meat.

    Crawfish Table Number Deux.

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    In 1994 my brothers an I designed and built a crawfish table (well… adapted a picnic table design, to be honest) — a table made for the intent of standing at and eating crawfish.  Once a pot of bugs was done boiling, it was hoisted up and dumped out onto the table, an inner and outer rail keeping them corralled onto the table-top. Folks bellied up to the table and ate their fill without the need to grab a pile and go find somewhere else to settle in.  While eating, the shells were pitched through a hole in the center directly into a garbage can, rather than making a pile of them to be dealt with later.

    Like all of the outdoor furniture we built, it was a heavy, solid, sturdy, beastly monstrosity — anything worth building, was worth overbuilding. Made from pressure treated 2x lumber, it would withstand the elements and insects. It was coated with more than five layers of outdoor polyurethane to help protect it from the crawfish, and us from the chemicals used to treat the wood. Our little furniture “company” was known as Hurricane Furniture (prophetic, I know!), on the premise that come a hurricane or tornado, you should abandon your home and seatbelt yourself into our outdoor furniture — you’d be safer (“tornadoes just bounce right off of our shit”).  It was branded with our signature logo — literally branded — burnt right into the wood.

    This table saw eleven years of life in the sun, rain, heat, humidity and cold. Eleven crawfish seasons this table was put to use, occasionally hauled from house to house as needed. It stood the test of time. It was damn near indestructible.

    Damn near.

    It didn’t give up without a fight.  Oh no. When I evacuated for Katrina, I put it in front of my garage door to ensure the wind wouldn’t blow it open. It was a silent sentinel, a guardian of my tools. The storm hit and I was the lucky recipient of 9′ of water on my street. That foul, acidic water didn’t recede for more than a week, and the table was beneath it the whole time. Upon my return I found it, just about where I left it in front of my garage door and still holding it closed, only it had tipped over onto it’s side and turned 90 degrees. It was still intact, but the table-top had warped and twisted and it was fouled with dirt, the borderline bulletproof polyurethane coating eroding away from the wood. Sadly, the table was ruined beyond future use.

    After the storm I moved to Austin, carting my meager surviving possessions with me. Among them was my crawfish boiling pot and burner… they were in the garage attic, and had survived high and dry. I vowed to return to my duties as boil-master some day, but unfortunately that was hard to do in an apartment.

    It took a few years, but eventually I got back into the groove — there are live crawfish to be had in Austin, the best ones being trucked in from Lake Charles for pickup on Saturdays during the season. I host a boil a year now, and generally act as boil-master for at least one other hosted by friends, sometimes two. I missed it, dearly. It’s a lot of work, but it’s in my very bones. It calls to me. It reminds me of home, family, and good times. It allows me to make more good times, and carry on healing bits and pieces of my soul.

    But, there has been a big, overbuilt table-shaped hole these last seven years. The absence of the crawfish table has not gone unnoticed, or unlamented. I’ve had a yard of my own for it to live in for many years, but hadn’t had the opportunity to build a new table.

    Until now.

    I knuckled down, and made a new one this year. It took a little digging to find the original designs I had, and some CSI-like action — oh yes, I was a clever motherfucker, for the original designs were done in CorelDraw v3, and nothing opens those any more, not even CorelDraw. Using a hex editor I was able to extract the shopping list and some basic notes I had jotted down. I was also able to see the postage-stamp sized preview to determine that I used five boards for the table-top, giving me the overall dimensions — 3’x5”.

    I redesigned the table digitally (in a format that is more universal and likely to stand the test of time). I kept the same basic design and expanded the table-top to 4’x6′. I tweaked the height a bit. I also changed the way the inside rail fastens to the table — from pegs in holes, to a routed recessed area. I’ve also added a removable second tier table made of PVC that can be used to put drinks, paper towels, etc, replacing the paper towel rods drilled into the outside rail, and the car-window drink holders as well.

    All the while I was cutting and assembling the lumber, my brain kept whiplashing back to 1994, and building the original table with my brothers. It made me smile for the connection to the past and to my family, and a little melancholy to think of the distance between us now, both physical and emotional — one more thing to thank Katrina for. All the while I was sitting underneath the giant wooden hulk, brushing on polyurethane, I was reminded of how much I despised getting that lovely crick in my neck the last time, and how much — after five days — I was getting damned tired of the smell of it.

    But most of all, through all of the table construction, the thoughts looming largest in my mind were: I hope I do this justice, I hope this lives up to what we had created before… I hope I do my brothers proud.

    They taught me well, those knuckleheads did. We didn’t always get along, and we never quite knew how to show healthy affection for one another other than through incessant teasing and verbal sparring, but they knew how to create, and they passed that on to me. When there was sawdust in the air, all was right with the world.

    Here are the fruits of my labors, and I can’t wait to put it to the test in a few weeks time. I was even sent our brand so that I could properly mark anything I build, proclaiming it properly built in the finest tradition of Hurricane Furniture.

    And here are three of the jackasses that helped make me the jackass that I am today. Love you all.

    Chicken Paprikash

    DmentD
    • 2 LBS boneless, skinless chicken thighs
    • 1 LG onion (diced)
    • 8 cloves garlic (minced)
    • 8 OZ carrots (sliced into coins)
    • 8 OZ mushrooms (sliced)
    • 1 C sweet corn (optional)
    • 3 TBS paprika
    • Salt and pepper
    • 3 C chicken stock
    • Cornstarch slurry
    • 1 C sour cream (or full-fat plain yogurt)
    1. To make the chicken paprikash, season (generously) the chicken with salt, pepper, and the paprika.
    2. Brown the chicken over medium heat on all sides then remove from pan.
    3. Add the onions and carrots and allow onions to soften and go translucent.
    4. Add the garlic and saute until fragrant – 1 to 2 minutes.
    5. Add a little of the chicken stock and deglaze the pan.
    6. Return the chicken to the pot. Add chicken stock to just cover the chicken and vegetables. Add the mushrooms.
    7. Bring to a simmer and reduce the heat to low. Cover, and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the chicken is tender.
      • Slow Cooker: cook covered over low for 6 to 8 hours instead.
    8. Remove the chicken from the pot. Return to a simmer and add cornstarch slurry in small amounts while stirring until the desired consistency is obtained.
    9. Add the sour cream (or yogurt) and mix well.
    10. Once the chicken has cooled a bit, shred or chop coarsely then return to the pot.
    11. Serve over pasta or rice.
    12. Sprinkle with paprika and enjoy.

    Yields 8 servings.

    Another option is to add dumplings to the gravy after adding the sour cream and returning the chicken to the pot. Serve over the dumplings.

    Calories: 241 kcal | Total Fat: 11 gr | Saturated Fat: 6.1 gr | Cholesterol: 218 mg | Sodium: 232 mg | Carbs: 7.9 gr | Fiber: 1.6 gr | Sugars: 3.4 gr | Protien: 27.6 gr

    Green Pea Pesto

    DmentD

    1½ C (~1½ LB peas in pods) fresh peas or a 10 OZ package standard frozen peas (defrosted)
    4 garlic cloves
    2 TBS pine nuts (toasted and cooled)
    ⅓ C finely grated parmesan cheese
    ¼ TSP salt
    Pepper to taste
    ⅓ C olive oil

    Prepare an ice bath in a large bowl filled with ice water. Bring a small saucepan of lightly salted water to a boil. Add peas and cook for ~2 minutes (this leaves them with a bit of structure). Drain peas then add them to the ice bath and allow to cool, then drain again.

    Whirl the peas in a food processor with garlic, pine nuts, parmesan, salt and pepper until smooth — ~2 to 3 minutes — scraping down the bowl as necessary. With the processor running, drizzle in olive oil and blend until consistently creamy.