Food Minia

My friend Christine and I took our annual gorgefest stuffing of the faces eat all the things road trip up to Portland, ME on Labor Day and hit all our usual spots.  First was The Holy Donut for their Maine potato donuts.  Here we have the sweet potato ginger glazed, sea salt chocolate, pomegranate, maple bacon, fresh lemon, and triple berry flavors.  I think my favorite was the maple bacon. Then on to Eventide Oysters for their brown butter lobster rolls (which I've tried to recreate) .  We also tried the salmon poke this time, which I thought was prettier than it tasted. Since it was such a beautiful day, and we had some time before dinner, we took the ferry over to Peaks Island to see if there was anything interesting there.  There wasn't.  But Christine did find this awesome piece of sea glass there! After dinner at Duck Fat, we decided to grab some dessert from The Honey Paw, a new fusion restaurant next door to Eventide.  We tried the carameliz...

My church held their second annual Highrocktoberfest last week and asked me if I could provide some snacks again.  Last year there was a competition for best cornbread, which I won with my Elote-Style Cornbread Waffles .  This year there was no such competition; I was just told to make something that would go well with beer.  Since I'm not a big beer drinker I wasn't really sure what that would be, but then I took inspiration from the fact that this was a riff on the German Oktoberfest. What could be more German than sausage and pretzel? I pretty much followed Alton Brown's soft pretzel recipe but decided to skip the salt in the pretzel dough since the sausage would provide enough salt.  I also threw in some diastatic malt powder since I had a lot left over from making croissants .  You can use cocktail weiners for this, but I was able to find mini kielbasa sausages at my grocery store so I went with those.  And instead of buying pretzel salt, I just used ...