Coming soon… Everyone, I’m opening a restaurant. Yes, my retirement plan has turned into a mid-life crisis and I will be opening a brewpub in La Mesa. Over the next weeks you’ll see more information, teasers, and calls for…
Blog Archives
Fourpenny House is Coming
Posted in Baking, Brewing, Events Tagged with: baking, brewing, brewpub, Fourpenny House, restaurant
Rainbow Unicorn Bakery
Kids are nothing if not ambitious, and Child Harbat doubly so. This Saturday she tells me she wants to make her own bakery. “But just like Starbucks, what do they sell there?” We came up with a list of coffee,…
Posted in Baking, Parenting Tagged with: bakery, baking, CH, child harbat, food, meringue, pastry, rainbow unicorns, strawberry pie
Providing Food and Drink
In the earliest days there were creatures around a fire and someone’s job was to keep the food and drink coming. I trace a hairline in my genetics back to that first server. Despite all the other advances in my…
Making Christmas
One of my greatest joys in life is working in the kitchen. I think it takes a man to say that, unafraid of the social mores of ignoring football on Sunday. I don’t give a rat’s ass what the San…
Posted in Baking, Brewing, Parenting Tagged with: baking, Chinese toys, christmas, christmas bread, Confucius, food, golden oat bread, number two, sourdough
Roxaboxin and the Rise of the Glutards
Let’s start with Roxaboxin. Child Harbat is at the perfect age to write fiction. She hears and absorbs enough real-world information to have the good basis for a story but then mixes in her own thoughts and interpretations, sprinkles with…
Posted in Baking, Products, Writing Tagged with: celiac, CH, cruelty-free, diet, fads, free trade, gluten, intolerance, organic, paleo
Now We’re Cooking with Jaggery!
“Can I help you sir?” asked the young man at the Indian/Himalayan market. Big smile, hands wrung together, plastic sandals. Already I was thinking the answer was probably ‘no’. “Do you have any jaggery?” I asked. Now his smile was…
New Bread
It’s time for a new bread, a new way of doing things. I’ve long resisted switching to folding dough instead of kneading because…why exactly? Maybe I thought kneading was a necessary primal step in creating bread, something to do with…
Finally, Pastry
I’ve put this off for far too long, I mumbled to myself eyeing the boxes of frozen butter. Eleventy-one hundred loaves of bread is plenty to make without having once tried the really-not-all-that-difficult laminated dough. To horribly mix my LOTR…
Posted in Baking Tagged with: artery, baking, bread, butter, croissants, food, laminated dough, uncle f-up
Irish Soda Bread Time
What time is it? IRISH SODA BREAD TIME! How easy is it to make? SO EASY! Is it delicious? YES! I can’t hear you! YEEEESSSSSSSSSSS!! Okay, that was too loud. Calmly and quietly proceed to the Irish soda bread recipe…
Making Beer, Part Two
Once you’ve made beer, what do you do with the grains? If you run your own CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) you can use tanker trucks to deliver thousands of tons of spent grain mash to your metropolis of pigs…
