One of the themes of my personal blog is food. Since this is my first post on the subject, I will say that my intent is to both write about what I cook, as well my experiences dining out in San Diego and other locations.  I am not, nor have I ever been a professional chef, though as a young man I spent plenty of time working in restaurants and have lots of fond memories.  I fell in love with cooking as an adult a little more than ten years ago and have been working on my skills since then.

Since, undoubtedly, these recipes are copyrighted by the forward thinking women, I will not provide them here and merely suggest that you pick up a copy of their book. I will describe my experience cooking them and provide some pictures as “food porn”.

The main dish was Aurochs Roasted with Leeks. I wasted a lot of time going to my favorite butcher in town (Iowa Meat Farms) as well as Whole Foods looking for a top round cut of Bison and ended up settling on a nice cut of beef from Costco.  I grow rosemary and sage at the house and always keep bay leaves on hand, so used them as the recipe describes. I’ve made a ton of roux’s and thickened many pan gravies with flour, but here I found that using burnt bread as the thickener for a sauce to be a totally unique twist (around since the middle ages) and loved the strong flavor of the Black Pepper Sauce it produced. The roasted, caramelized vegetables were as fantastic and flavorful as the tender mouth watering beef which was accented nicely by the sauce.


My interest in cooking started with a bread machine. My wife had one before we started dating which she had only used once or twice. I took it out of storage and started playing with it while recovering from a back surgery in 2002. I quickly graduated from the machine to the oven, and now bake fresh bread with nearly every Sunday meal. There’s nothing like the smell of baking bread in the house. After reading the recipe for the Black Bread, it was an easy choice. It came out exactly as described, aromatic, with a hard crust and soft interior. It carried the flavor of the Stone Smoked Porter I used and rounded out the bitterness with a hint of sweetness from the honey. Too strong for most of the family, but I loved it.