Sorry to take a partisan political moment, but I headed down to NYC for an election party (after voting, of course!) and just had to capture it.

After an anxious hour on the subway without election coverage, my first drink upon arriving at the party was to the decisive calling of Pennsylvania, an event which called for the ever-delicious PA native, Yuengling. The tequila shot is just icing.

For the main event, and speaking of icing, here is the election cake, a little the worse for the bus trip, but still delicious. I passed slices around the bar, and I wish I had made another dozen cakes to share with all the joyful Obama supporters we met celebrating on the streets of Brooklyn. It's a new world, and couldn't be more proud to be part of it.

I was surprised at the beauty of the chopped meat, glistening under a layer of beaten eggs and flour, browned corners of liver jumbled with marbled pink pork belly. The smell of rich liver and sweet shallots, sautéed hours earlier, lingered in the air as I put the meat mixture through the grinder. It rolled out of the die in long curling strands&mdash I was finally making pâté!

I've been wanting to make pâté for a really long time. I bought Rhulman's Charcuterie, and Grigson's Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, and I leafed through their pâté sections over and over. But somehow, whenever I found the time, I didn't have the ingredients, and when I had the ingredients, I couldn't find the time. Finally, last weekend I decided I was going to just dive in. I was going to have to wing it a little, as I didn't have the exact compliment of ingredients for any one recipe.

Following a combination of pâté de campagne recipes from the two books, I started by marinating my meat with a combination of salt, pepper, bay and thyme. I had about three pounds of mixed chopped veal and pork liver, and, in a separate container, about a pound of meat trimmed from a piece of pork belly. I sliced the fatty part of the pork belly into thin strips and used them to line my loaf pan. After all this had had a few hours in the fridge, I browned the liver until it was crispy around the edges. Then I cooked some shallots in the remaining oil and deglazed the pan with a healthy splash of Jim Beam. I added the liquid back to the liver and chilled it again.

When everything (including the mixing bowl and food grinder) was nice and cold, I mixed together the meats, added some chopped parsley and the egg and flour mixture, and then ran it all through the food grinder. The resulting meat paste was mixed a little, then packed into the fat-lined pan and covered with more fat strips and foil. After a long, slow cooking in a roasting pan of water, the pâté was weighted and cooled overnight. The wait for the first taste was long and impatient.

The pâté, at the anxious moment of unveiling, was firm, with a smooth, strong liver flavor. It was sweet and clean, like a mild liverwurst. Unfortunately, I found that the pork fat slices lining the pan did not melt away quite the way I expected. The cooled pork belly fat was dense, chewy and bland. I am pretty sure this is because I didn't slice the fat quite thinly enough or pound it, but whatever the reason, I just removed the limp, cold strips. The resulting loaf of pâté looked lumpy and uneven, so I coated it in a thick layer of freshly-cracked pepper, which had the advantage of adding a spicy kick to the flavor. Greg and I enjoyed it for lunch with toast, chopped red onions and homemade pickles... we were only missing the champagne!

Well, after much discussion, I finally got off my butt and made some honeycomb candy. It's by far the easiest candy I've ever made, and its crunch and chew are absolutely addictive. I chose this recipe on about.com because it used some actual honey, but I swapped the corn syrup for Lyle's Golden Syrup, which I usually use in place of corn syrup for its richer flavor (and to avoid supporting Big Corn). The candy only took about ten minutes to mix and come up to temperature, a process that would have been even easier if my candy thermometer had, y'know, numbers on it.

The only tricky part of this candy is moving quickly enough in the last moments: speedy and efficient whisking is the key to light, crispy candy. Even with Greg's assistance, I felt like I had lost a lot of height by the time I had fully incorporated the baking soda. I also had trouble judging the size of the pan I would need. In my haste, I spread the foaming caramel between two 13x9 baking pans, but one would have been better.

Next time, I'll try a little more baking soda and see if i can get an even foamier candy. I think it would also be fun to experiment with some spices or flavorings&mdash I don't know if that would potentially interfere with the foaming, but a holiday spice honeycomb would be extraordinary. Of course, chocolate is a traditional pairing as well.

School-yard epithets to the contrary, there is nothing derogatory about the word lard. Lard is an excellent cooking fat: along with saturated fat (and I don't happen to think there is anything wrong with saturated fats) there is plenty of monounsaturated fat, vitamin D, and stearic acid (none of which anyone can complain about). Like beef and poultry, pork also has diet-dependent Omega 3:6 ratios. Lard is simply not the demonic force it has been made out to be. In moderation (as with any food) lard supplies many essential nutrients. At least fresh, straight-from-the-pig lard — hydrogenated lard, found on your supermarket shelf and full of trans fats, is a different story.

Until fairly recently, fresh lard and other unprocessed animal fats were an important part of the human diet, sharing the fat stage with oils from olives, nuts and seeds. However, a series of technological and medical advances have given us a strange, fickle relationship with fats. To vastly oversimplify: First we figured out that we could improve the shelf life of fats by hydrogenating them. Then we all came to believe that animal fats were bad and got a big crush on olive oil. Now, we find that trans fats created by hydrogenating are not so hot. All this back and forth is one of the things that has led me to take up this rule of thumb: have humans eaten it for a couple thousand years or more? If so, I am pretty sure our bodies are equipped to handle it. If not, I think twice about making it a staple.

Where am I going with this? Fresh lard is an excellent, and healthy, cooking fat. And if you want fresh lard, you've pretty much got to render it yourself or pay $6 a lb at a fancy greenmarket stand. Guess which I thought would be more fun?

The process for rendering is simple enough: you simply heat the chopped fat slowly, letting it melt, and then strain out the fried solids. You can do it either over the stovetop or in the oven. The temperature will affect the taste, as will the type of fat. Leaf lard, the tender fat between the pig's organs, is best for pastries, while back fat is best for savory cooking. Lower temperatures are supposed to make for a milder-flavored lard. For my lard, I ordered a giant package of pork back fat from my meat CSA, and, after chopping it, put it in a roughly 300 degree oven for about 6 hours. I'm not sure it was entirely done at that point (Did I mention it takes forever?), as only about half the cracklins had sunk. but I needed the oven back. Lastly, since fresh lard needs to be frozen (or refrigerated for shorter periods), I poured the clear golden lard into muffin tins and canning jars to freeze, where it turned a beautiful clean white as it cooled and solidified.

Rendering lard also has the reputation of being very stinky. Very, very stinky. I didn't have that experience, but it being my first try, and having stopped it early, I honestly can't say whether it was a fluke or not. I was so sure that it would start stinking before all the lard was rendered that I later cooked and re-cooked the cracklins, giving them another 4 hours in the oven, fully expecting them to start stinking any minute. Near the end, I did experience a strange but mild nose-stinging sensation somewhat like when you cook a great deal of chilies. That could have just been from sticking my nose in the oven repeatedly. And I only got about a half cup of lard out of the second cooking, so maybe I was pretty close to done the first time around. Or maybe you just can't really render things in two stages. Next time, and there will definitely be a next time, I'll make sure I let it run its course.

Although I have never knowingly tasted preserved lemon, I recently heard a radio segment on KCRW's Good Food, and was instantly convinced to try making them. They are simple enough to make, and although mine have only been fermenting a few days, they already have an incredible scent, like an extra-tangy lemonade.

I'll be sure to let you all know what I do with these when they're ready!

Inspired by these recipes, and overloaded with excess sourdough starter, I decided to make an experimental batch of whole wheat sourdough crackers. I used the first recipe as my template, although I reduced the olive oil by half (a mistake, in retrospect) and added toppings.

My theory was that I would be able to simply substitute starter for an appropriate amount of flour and water. My starter was about a 4:3 ratio of flour to water, so I did some weighing and math (I am a nerd) to find the weight of starter that would contain 1 cup of water and then added the necessary amount of additional flour. This method worked great, and I imagine that after making this a few times, I'd be able to do it by feel, just taking some starter and adding four until the right consistency is reached.

I made two toppings, one of rosemary and black salt, and the other of coarsely ground mixed seeds. I first tried attaching them with just olive oil, but discovered that the egg wash recommended in the second recipe is really the way to make them stick. To cook, I rolled them out thinly and baked them on a pizza tray.

The results? Very tasty, with a sour, nutty flavor that went well with both toppings. I did not pierce the crackers before baking, so they were covered with large, satisfyingly crunchy bubbles.

While the sourdough substitution worked, the recipe could still use a little tweaking; between the bubbles, the crackers were a little too thick and not crunchy enough. I'll be making these again, and refining the recipe. I think next time, in addition to adding more olive oil and rolling more thinly, I will use a regular all-purpose flour starter as the base, and use whole wheat only for the additional flour, aiming for a less dense cracker. I'd also love to try a mix of other flours, like rye.

This article in The Washington Post on homemade cocktail ingredients caught my eye a while ago. I've just been waiting for cherries to show up at the farmers market to make these preserved cherries. (While I am calling them maraschinos, they're not made with Marasca cherries or Maraschino liqueur, but Bings and almond extract. The almond extract gives it that flavor we associate with jarred red marachinos, but that's all they really have in common.)

Pitting the cherries was the most taxing part of the recipe (I don't own a pitter). The ingredients are simple and the procedure is straightforward, with a brief brine that is followed by a soak in almond sugar syrup. The resulting cherries are less sweet and crisp than the neon red maraschino cherries we are used to; although they share the same cloying candied almond allure, they also let more of the original taste and texture of the cherries come through. The process takes two days, and when the cherries were finished, I canned them as if they were pickles.

We enjoyed Old Fashioneds (bourbon with a splash each of Angostura bitters and sugar syrup, garnished with cherries and twists) made with the resulting cherries and syrup. The leftover syrup is also excellent over fresh fruit, yogurt, or ice cream.

The variety meat of the week is beef heart.

One advantage of beef heart is that since the heart is a muscle, the meat is closest in character to a slice of steak. It is also quite lean and full of nutrients, and can be very tender. The disadvantages are that there is a distinctive, although not unpleasant, flavor, slightly sweet with a hint of liver, and that it is a bit of a chore to trim the various arteries and whatnot away. I also found that I had difficulty finding the sweet spot for doneness and tenderness. I tried to pound out the slices somewhat, and I think that if I owned an actual meat mallet, this would have been a great help. As it was, I had uneven thicknesses and managed to overcook some slices and undercook others, getting only a couple at a nice, tender medium rare.

I cut the heart into slices and pounded them a little with my trusty pyrex measuring cup, then dredged them with flour and fried them in a little butter. I used the pan drippings to make a very good gravy with white wine and thyme, probably the high point of the dish. Next time, I will try the heart meat braised or in a stew, which I think would play to the strengths of the cut, both in texture and flavor.

I had been wanting to create some sourdough starter from wild yeasts for some time now, but a lot of descriptions make it seem difficult, finicky, or tedious. I am sure that it can be, but I think I managed to stumble upon a particularly simple and pain-free process for getting a starter going.

When planning to start my own wild yeast sourdough starter, I read a number of recipes that called for rye flour, particularly fresh organic rye flour. Apparently, wild yeasts grow on the surface of a number of grains and fruits, perhaps most famously rye and grapes (you know that dusty white coating on grapes straight from the vine? It's yeast, and it makes the origins of wine a little less mysterious.) When freshly ground, rye flour still contains a lot of living yeast.

At my local health food store, I easily found whole organic rye berries, but the store was not equipped to mill them, and neither was I. I could have whipped out my coffee-grinder at this point, but I realized... if the yeast is on the surface, did I really need to grind them at all?

I created a mix of all-purpose flour, water, and about a quarter-cup of whole rye berries, and followed the The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion's feeding instructions: half a cup of warm water and a cup of flour once in the morning and once in the evening. This creates an awful lot of throw-away starter, (which I saved for things like fry-bread and pizza crust - more on those later), but it also creates a happily bubbling little starter in about a week. Over the course of the feedings, the rye berries worked their way out in batches of discarded starter, and now there are no more. They make such a tasty addition to bread, however, that you might want to add them back in!

The starter can be used for no-knead bread, as well as the more traditional (and time consuming) pain au levain and other sourdough breads. You can leave it in the fridge and skip feeding it any time you aren't planning on using it for a while, although it will eventually languish away and your fridge will start to look like my mothers: a ten-year-old unused sourdough starter in one corner, a bag of fifteen-year-old undeveloped film (my childhood!) in the crisper, and a three year old jug of vinegar that used to be mead a friend gave you taking up half the bottom shelf. (j/k, Mom, I know you threw out that mead! ; )

With my first try at making homemade pasta, one thing was immediately clear: pasta-making is the epitome of "easy to learn, hard to master." I used the instructions from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, a book I highly recommend for its meticulous discussion of pasta-making and other Italian cooking techniques. She painstakingly describes, down to the curve of your palm and the turn of the rolling pin, the movements used to knead, roll and shape the pasta dough.

Dough doesn't get much simpler than this: two eggs per cup of flour. Methods, on the other hand, don't get much more nuanced. While I attempted the motions Hazan describes, I felt like I was simultaneously rubbing my tummy and patting my head - while riding a unicycle. But I bumbled through, in the end producing something roughly akin to fettuccine.

I am glad I did, because the resulting pasta was, without an iota of exaggeration, sublime. Despite its uneven shape and the many places it stuck to itself, this pasta had a life and a vibrancy that made it addictive. It sprung up, on the tongue and the palate; its firm, smooth bite matched by a fresh, rich flavor. I'm a long-time fan of a little neighborhood shop that turns out fresh pasta in a variety of shapes and flavors, but I might be converted to doing this by hand. (But Capone's is still the next best to doing it yourself!)

To be honest, I think I owe the amazing texture and flavor of this pasta to the use of fresh eggs from local pastured chickens. These eggs have an excellent flavor, and are generally only a day or two old when they reach my fridge, meaning that they still have a very firm white. I haven't tried this with conventional eggs, though, so I can't be sure.