Holidays Are Over!!!

     I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New years! Sorry for not posting anything on my blog these past few weeks. For those who know me. December is the busiest time of year for for my job. Plus trying to to all the holiday things like getting a Christmas tree, shopping, decorating, baking, not to mention i have to be a parent and a husband on top of all that!!! Something had to give... So I chose to put Bakers Meat Shack on the back burner until the holidays blow over. But, that doesn't mean I haven't spent any time in the kitchen through all that. Here's what I have been up to The past few weeks.

   

     The sauerkraut was a complete success!!! I was a bit skeptical because the cabbage kept creeping above the brine, my plastic baggie with water wasn't weighing it down enough. Every few days I had to go and press that sucker right back down! Pushing the cabbage below the brine, causing my fingers to smell like fermented cabbage. Yummy right? So I was worried that this would affect the outcome of the sauerkraut.

     Here you can definitely see that some of the brine had evaporated , but it most defiantly smells like sauerkraut!! So I had to taste it just to be sure my 3 weeks were not in vain.

     

     The flavor was spot on! The cabbage retained a lot of its crunch too!! Plus the caraway seeds were a nice addition. If any of you out there have store bought sauerkraut, I find there are 2 kinds. 1 being the stuff labeled sauerkraut, which to me is your everyday run of the mill stuff that you get at any supermarket, hotdog stand, or ball park. 2 if you go to some specialty market or any german deli, you can find German sauerkraut. This stuff tastes like the german kind!!! So if you ask me was it worth the 3 weeks fermentation? YES! My only regret is that I should of made more, since my family managed to eat it all with in a weeks time.

     I also smoked some ribs for some of my coworkers as a surprise! For the month of December some employees were bringing food to work for the fellow coworkers. So I thought What the heck, Ill make ribs on a sunday, then reheat them monday morning and bring them in to work! 

     I also made some gingerbread. I friggen love gingerbread! Just an FYI, I did frost them, I just was too busy eating them to take a pic! The thing I regret not doing was make a gingerbread house. My youngest daughter and I made one last year and we had lots of fun doing it. But I had been so busy as stated above, I elected not to do it.

     And let us not forget about the Roast Beast!! Every Christmas I make standing rib roast (prime rib). Sadly this pic doesn't do it any justice. It looks Medium well, but trust me, it was very much Pink and juicy in the center! In my next post I will show step be step on how I dry age and cook this beast! Until then, I will try to be more regular on posting to my blog.