Good Eats: Pretzel Logic

In case you missed it, Pretzel Logic will air again this Friday night at 11pm EST. I only caught a few minutes of it while working on a house project, so I've been waiting for it to re-air. Alton Brown will cover both soft and hard pretzels along with preparing your own mustard. All you need is a good, dark beer and you have yourself a meal!

Good Eats: Milk Made and Blueberry Preserves

Oh man! I missed a flippin' new episode! Looks like the kickoff for season 11 was Milk Made. I'll have to try to catch it on Friday evening if I'm home. I really need to invest in a DVD recorder one of these days.

On a positive note: my blueberry preserves turned out really well thanks to Alton Brown. I decided that, living in the country, I should learn the age old art of canning. I bought the basics to get me started and made two batches of jam to get some practice before the harvest comes in. My first two were Alton's blueberry preserves and the stock recipe from Ball's canning book for strawberry rhubarb.
I managed to get a couple stalks of rhubarb from a farmer's stash of the first crop and had a quart-bag of blueberries in the freezer from last year to get me started.

The strawberry rhubarb was decent, but too sugary for my taste. The rhubarb kick helped out though. On the other hand, Alton's blueberry recipe was awesome. I'm going to make a huge batch when the blueberries are in season this year.

Today I made a batch of starberry jam from Michigan's first crop of strawberry's. I love being able to go half a mile down the road and pick up, or pick for myself, fresh fruits and vegtables. We'll see how this batch turns out.

Alton Brown Midland Performance Review

Well, I'm still a bit bumbed that I couldn't go to see Alton up in Midland the other week. I would have been able to just make it in time, but would have been dead tired after being at work all day and then driving a couple of hours. It's bad enough that I spend two or three hours per day driving to and from work. One of these days I'll see him in person, but for now I'll just have to watch Good Eats!

Here's an article for those of you who, like me, could go or just want to read about one of his shows.