Well, I'll be damned.

So Cathy's sister sent me this... thing around Christmastime. It is a roughly three inch square of, I shit you not, CHAIN MAIL. As a D&D nerd who's spent time around SCA as well, I'm very familiar with chain mail. So why did I get a square of it in the mail?

Apparently, to clean my cast-iron pans.

It's still been pretty slow in terms of new, creative meals or dishes. I did make a nice, improvised, brothy creamy white chicken chili this week, but I didn't measure or photograph because I was improvising like mad from start to finish, and I'm not sure it came out the way anyone else would like.

And that post is now. Don't say I never gave you nothin'.

On Saturday, I bought a grill basket from the Home Depot. It is a mighty thing, roughly two thirds the size of my actual grill. I bought it because last weekend, I tried grilling green beans like Ruhlman suggested, except for the part where he suggested using a grill basket, because I didn't have one.

I may not need to build a yakitori grill after all.

We did some banking a couple of weeks ago. The details are irrelevant, the point is, we got a free gift. The gift was a round cooler. And inside that round cooler, a smaller round grill. A tiny grill. An adorably tiny grill. Adoragrill.

Yesterday morning, while filling up my five-spice and sweet curry tins and realizing that I was either out of smoked paprika or somehow lost it in the move, that in all my discussions of spice organization and storage, I never discussed what I do with my bags.

OK, I officially love charcoal. So much that I'm contemplating stalking it.

I spent a lot of time on the grill last weekend, first and foremost because the week prior, I'd bought two lovely racks of baby back ribs fro Costco with the expres attempt at abandoning the Alton Brown indoor braise-and-glaze recipe for a more traditional dry rub, then low and slow over charcoal.

And so, it's basically done. There's a little bit of pantry work to figure out, but when it comes to actually storing all my cooking tools and most of my ingredients, I am fully moved into the new kitchen.

So, as I mentioned, much of last week was spent working on a kitchen project. That project was... The Great Respicening. You see, I have... a lot of spices.

A chest freezer, it... changes a man. Makes him think about his mortality. About how someday, he'll be stored in a cold dark place so his meat doesn't go bad. And it makes him buy ice cream treats.