Cooking Up An Ice Storm, Day 1

Given the way the weather is going, perhaps we need a bad weather cooking blog...Here's what I made on the first day of what the Weather Channel calls Winter Storm Pax. Please post comments on what you've been cooking, too.

For breakfast, I pulled some brioche dough and almond paste out of the freezer and made a few pastries. Some of assembled pastries went back in the freezer.

During my last minute run to the grocery store, I snagged some chicken thighs for stock and chicken soup. I will have some of the soup today, the rest went into the pressure canner.

I also made some pizza dough and a pizza, with more than enough dough left for another pizza today. This is the first time I've made pizza since the snowpocalypse. My dough stretching and shaping skills are a little better but I still have a long way to go. I used some of the sauce I canned last summer and fresh organic mushrooms on the pizza.

And at night I made a peach cobbler using some peaches I vacuum packed and froze last summer. I was too tired to make a full-fledged crust, so I used this as an opportunity to work on my cobbler skills. I normally use half cornmeal in the cobbler, but I discovered that I had run out of cornmeal. Too late to do anything about it...

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Eating Around Georgia Tech: Ecco

Our Texas Instruments colleague Cathy Wicks was gracious enough to host several of us at Ecco tonight. This is one of those restaurants that has been on my list for a long time. Even though it is within easy walking distance of Georgia Tech, I hadn't made it there until tonight. The menu is a combination of Italian, Spanish, and French that make use of some local Georgia ingredients. The combination of those three countries is sometimes a little forced, although the georgia ingredients (fruit, cheese) were all great and perfectly appropriate. We started out with a meat and cheese board. This actually reverses the French tradition, where cheese usually follows the main course. Everything was excellent. The Georgia cheese was a big hit, as was the French cow/goat cheese. I thought the sauscisson was very subtle and very good. The waitress said that the roast pork pasta was their signature dish, so I had to try it. It had traditional broad pasta (fresh, of course) ...

DCA: Cava Mezze Grill

Cava is a DC area chain with light Mediterranean food. Saibal encouraged me to try lunch at their airport location and I was very happy with the experience. I ordered falafel on SuperSalad with assorted other toppings. The falafel was tasty. The SuperSalad was light, flavorful, and very easy to eat. Overall, a healthy and enjoyable lunch, something you can't always say about airport eating.

Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...

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