De Baking Psychopath

When you combine Gus, bacon fat, and caramelized onions, there can only be one outcome: triple happiness. I needed to feed Gus this weekend, and feeling lazy to make bread, I decided to give these sourdough biscuits a try. I got the recipe from the King Arthur Flour catalog awhile back because they were very intriguing (cue in imaginary beard stroking). The sourdough starter is not used for leavening, it's just for flavor. Then to "kick it up a notch" (a la Emeril), I substituted most of the butter out with rendered bacon fat I've been saving in the freezer for biscuits one day.  And finally that day had come! These biscuits came out completely fabulous. Smoky bacon flavor, sweet caramelized onions, flaky/tender biscuit. There was a hint of sourdough flavor at the end, but nothing too overt. We just ate them straight, but they would be great as an accompaniment to soup or eggs as well! You can find the recipe here:  http://www.kingarthurflour.com...

Another year has come and gone, and we've once again convened to eat and chat our way through a weekend! We were pretty lazy as a group to take pictures this time (we were probably eating too fast), so the best one I have is the group picture shown above. We were exploring the Cathedral of Learning and found these cool fold down desks that were inlaid in the seat backs of these benches. I believe it was the Syrian room.  So there was a quick rundown of our weekend: Saturday morning--meet up at my apartment. Dara arrived earlier so we took a trip to La Gourmandine bakery in Lawrenceville to get a bunch of tasty French pastries Saturday afternoon--we met up with some Pittsburgh friends and had a BBQ, including burgers, roasted veggies, salads, and brownies.  Saturday evening--took a breather after returning from the BBQ, and then late evening we got takeout from Spice Island, a Burmese restaurant in Oakland. Pad Thai, mohinga (fish stew with noodles), mango pork stew,...