Recipes and Reviews

Tender and flavourful meatballs for pasta, soup or meatball sandwiches.

I've been trying to make a few meals a month that are as close to completely homemade/homegrown as possible. This lasagna is one of my most complicated yet. The sauce and veggies are from my garden, the pasta is homemade, and for the first time, I made most of the cheese. Where I didn't go homemade, I did try and buy local. The meats, milk and eggs were from local farms, and even the spelt for the flour was grown a few hundred miles from here. I guess I could have ground the meat myself, but I have to leave a few challenges for next time.

While it was time consuming to make all the different parts, it was also a lot of fun. And there is no arguing with the results, as it was one of the best lasagnas I ever made.

This flavourful soup was created to feed my need for some chiles and salsa on a snowy day.

I already planned on having the smoker going today to make some pulled pork, and decided to try smoking the meat for carnitas, instead of going for the more traditional lard cooked, or the more recent roasting. I'm glad that I did, because it's some of the best and easiest carnitas I've ever had. It wasn't quite as moist as the lard cooked, but the smoke added a lot more flavor.

I really doubt that I will make smoked carnitas if I'm not already planning on smoking something else, but I think that I will pick up a small roast whenever I'm planning on smoking another pork product. It might also work out with some turkey or chicken smokes, since they tend to use similar woods. I don't think It would turn out very good smoking it with beef because of the harsher smoke that comes with mesquite.

I've made variations on this recipe several times in the past, and decided that it would be a good choice to inaugurate my new smoker. On Christmas Eve, with snow all around and the temperatures hovering right at freezing, the thermostatically controlled, insulated smoker did an amazing job. This is a straight forward, simple dry rub recipe that I adapted from the Smoke & Spice cookbook for my slightly spicier tastes. When I make this recipe, I usually make half of it dry, and the other half gets a BBQ sauce mop during the last hour of cooking. Why pick wet or dry when you can have both?