Back in America! Tons of good food and cocktails in Seattle (Steelhead Diner, Zig Zag Cafe, Zoe, etc…) and Portland (Castagna, Le Pigeon, Clyde Common, Tasty n Sons, etc…). We also wine toured through the Willamette Valley and celebrated Nicole’s birthday in Napa Valley (eating at Ubuntu and Redd). Next up is the final leg of our trip: San Francisco, Los Gatos (Manresa), L.A. and more!

We finally made it back home! Ridiculous amounts of fun in Saskatoon, Edmonton, Jasper, and Vancouver. Hurray Western Canada! Next up is the West coast.

I’m not sure if the heat is finally getting to us or what, but for the past year we’ve been totally cocktail obsessed. Slowly building up our liquor cabinet one drink at a time reminds me of collecting hockey/baseball cards as a kid. New spirits are like rookie cards, but you get to drink them instead of just dinging the corners. Looking for all the bottles for a new drink can be like trying to collect every player on a single team. This would of course all be easier if Laredo had a liquor store with a more diverse selection, but unfortunately we’ve been forced to do most of our booze buying on trips out of town. Here are the recipes for a few of the cocktails that we’ve found ourselves drinking the most often this summer. — David

Last Word

I could drink a Last Word every day.  I could drink ten Last Words every day.  Its pretty, it smells like happiness, and it tastes like you’ve been punched in the face with freshness.  I need to stop writing so that I can go make one now. — Nicole

• ¾ oz dry gin
• ¾ oz lime juice
• ¾ oz green Chartreuse
• ¾ oz maraschino liqueur
• Shake well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Shut up and drink. [source]

In order to escape the Texas heat and visit friends/family back home, we once again embarked on a month long road trip up to Canada. On this first leg our main stops were Forth Worth / Dallas (eating at Lonesome Dove, Samar, + more) and Kansas City (Celina Tio’s Julian, Extra Virgin, and Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ). Next up Canada!

When we bought the pig skin we had this wonderful mental picture of crispy chicharrones in a nice puffy gordita with a tangy tomatillo salsa.  We got 66.666666666 percent there.  I’m not going to lie — the skin was super gelatinous and a little weird.  Tasty, but definitely a texture that some would find a wee bit nasty.  The gorditas on the other hand were pure awesomeness and surprisingly easy–even for people who are dough challenged like us!  Go gordita making!  Woot woot!

We’ve been in Texas for two years now, but this was oddly only our second time making the not-so-bad 5.5 hour drive from Laredo to Houston. We extended the drive by an hour or so on the way home, so we could swim in the oil-spill free part of the Gulf. We’ve been really cocktail obsessed as of late, so for me the highlight of the trip was definitely Anvil Bar & Refuge, but we really love all of Houston and can’t wait to go back!

I am honestly completely weirded out that we haven’t made bacon until now. It’s so ridiculously easy! We combined two recipes (one by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and one from Michael Ruhlman) which made the whole thing unnecessarily confusing and it STILL was ridiculously easy. There were some contradictory messages between the two recipes, such was whether or not to drain the nasty meat liquid each night, and curing times. Next time we will cure it less — a little too salty for moi. But it definitely left us with the decision to never buy bacon again, its way too unnecessary. We love making bacon hurray! I’ll admit I was kind of a baby about the mayonnaise ordeal (this recipe worked)… but it was equally delicious, so definitely saying good-bye to Hellmann’s forever.

Homemade Pastrami is one of our favourite things we’ve cooked to date! It’s long three week process of brining, smoking and braising was totally worth it and i’ll be sad when it’s gone. The Pastrami has only become better with time and we’ve been enjoying all sorts of amazing deli sandwiches all week. It’s actually highly addictive and we can’t stop ourselves from cutting slivers of meat anytime we open the fridge.

When I first read Tom Colicchio’s Craft cookbook, around six years ago, I remember thinking who on earth would make their own duck ham? Turns out we would! We combined the Craft recipe with a couple more we spotted on the internets and have ended up with a very tasty result.  Despite my misgivings at its appearance, the duck prosciutto was an unequivocal success and was especially delicious in the Mango and Duck Prosciutto Pizza we made later in the week.  As for the mozzarella, the process is very similar to making ricotta (although quite a bit more complicated).  The recipe we used, from Gourmet Magazine, gave us some pretty lame directions so we had to follow our instincts (and some youtube videos) along the way.  I know next time we won’t run into any of those hijinks and it will keep getting easier and easier and yummier and yummier.

Every city has special dishes to call it’s own; in Cincinnati Goetta and Cincinnati Chili top the list. We weren’t the biggest fans of the latter, but Goetta was a frequent part of our diet during the two years we lived in Cincinnati. So feeling nostalgic, we attempted to re-create our favourite breakfast in hopes it would match up to the version we fell in love with from Cincinnati’s Eckerlin Meats.