meat grinder

Grinding Your Own Ground Beef

Store bought ground beef is convenient.  However, for not much more cost and effort you can grind your own beef.  If you like hamburgers cooked to medium or less, you should definitely look into do-it-yourself ground beef.  From that point you can upgrade to a dedicated meat grinder and look at expanding into sausage-making. Why…

habanero vodka

Cole Cooks: Habanero Vodka

As our children have gotten older, they have come to appreciate spicy food.  Habanero peppers have a great flavor but can be extremely hot.  I learned a method for taming the heat of habanero peppers by soaking in alcohol.  This recipe not only tames the peppers but it makes a habanero vodka. We have done…

Prime rib

Cole Cooks: Prime Rib Roast

Our traditional Christmas family dinner is a prime rib roast.  Over the years I have experimented with multiple ways to cook prime rib.  For Christmas 2019 I decided to cook the prime rib two ways: sous vide and a traditional oven method. When estimating how big a roast you need the general rule of thumb…