New era!

It has arrived! woho my first kichenaid :)


However, the arrival of this icon also marks a new beginning. I am letting offalboy hibernate and moving my writings to my new blog Pickles & Pork. Mainly because I was feeling like a hypocrite considering that i never really got around to write about offal, but have been getting heavily into pickles lately. I also grew pretty bored with the look of my blog so on i go to start a new one :). Hopefully i will start a new pickle each month and keep my nonexistent readers updated on other culinary exploits :)

Here are some pickle pics :P

First of the mixing of my beet lemon and garlic pickle. I have never really read about this combo before but it seems to make sence;)


This one is the start of a kimchi. ow i must confess i have never eaten the stuff, but it looks and sound really tasty. See Pickles & Pork for recipes!

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Shopping makes the world go round, world go round

I know I know (he says like he actually has readers), not a whole lot going on on the blog lately. This is due, partially to a lot of work, but also that I have been all caught up in the serious business of choosing a color for my fist KitchenAid ever :P. Long have i lusted for one and and now the longing for baking and meat grinding has toppled all economic sense (those things run $450 here in Sweden). Initially i thought as avant-garde as to go with their purple specimen...having scouted it out in real life im glad i did not, the color did not appeal to me at all, and shunning the traditional red (it is not the right kind of red for me) i went with the apple green.

Knowing this to be a somewhat shaky, and wonderfully nerdy, segway, i also decided to splurge on a new chefs knife (anyone out there with the same terrible humor as me will by now know the brand i finally went for). My research led me to oh so tempting specialty knifes from artisan craftsmen in Japan, but considering we are in somewhat of an recession i decided against those sweet Hattori blades. Back on earth i started eying the forged models from Global (the brand, I up until now have used and liked). I must admitt these where purchased more on looks than anything else and although happy with them their sharp ridge is tearing away at my finger. From the internet chatter I discerned that MAC might be the brand for me. The type of "for us in the know" type of knife my not so foodie friends would have never heard of, however, I would never buy a knife without holding it so I went in search of a store who had the MBK-80.

Eventually i did find one after some difficulty (ok they did not have them in the first two stores i checked), as it seem MAC has fallen out of favor with the people catering to the general public. Anyways Lagamati (www.lagamati.se), which is a great store, did have a wide selection of MAC knifes and a handy cuttingboard to try out goods. With knife in hand though i could tell this was not the blade for me. Don't get me wrong it is a superb knife, but it just did not feel right in the hand.

I don't know if it was the distraught look on my face or rehearsed sales tactic but the women working there suggested the more commercial (a redeeming factor is that it is endorsed by my favorite cooking show hos Alton Brown) and more expensive Shun knife. I was quick to dismiss it with my superficial claims of not liking the design, but once pushed in my hand i did not want to let it go. The D-shaped handle, edge and weight all felt tailored to me! (now do you get the segway ;))

Placing the order at work I also went for a Wüsthof Gourmet cleaver and two fermentation bread baskets as well as the all metal meat grinder for the KitchenAid....oh i cant wait until it all gets here!!

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