I recently ate at at Cantina 1511 and was astonished at how yummy their margaritas were. They were honestly the best I've ever tasted.

First, there was not a ton of ice. They sell frozen margaritas, but the ones I had came straight out of a pitcher and were served on the rocks.

Second, it was obvious that it was made with fresh juices. Almost all the margaritas you'll ever have -- unless you're at one of my parties -- are made with mixes. The freshness of the stuff just made my day.

So, I set about figuring out how to duplicate this margarita. I wasn't quite able to duplicate the recipe, but what I ended up with was fan-fucking-tastic.

As the owner of Cantina 1511 will tell you, variations in the sweetness of the fruit play a huge part here, so your mileage may vary if you try this recipe.

Also, you can use any kind of tequila you want, but the Cabo Wabo Reposado I used just took the flavors to a completely new level.

Finally, an important note: though you have likely been led to believe that ripe limes are green and overripe limes are yellow. This is NOT TRUE. Ripe limes are yellow. Overripe limes are brown. Always get the ripest limes you can find.

Bryan's Fresh Juice Margaritas

Yield: About 8 margaritas, depending on the size of your glasses.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups freshly squeezed lime juice
1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1 1/2 cups simple syrup
Cabo Wabo Reposado Tequila

Preparation

Strain the juices through a strainer into a pitcher. We don't want pulp in our margaritas. Gently stir in the simple syrup.

Optional: rim the margarita glass with kosher salt by rubbing a lime around the rim and dipping the rim in salt.

Pour the tequila into the bottom of the margarita glass. Margarita glasses have a small well at the bottom that blossoms up into a large mouth. I fill the bottom well in my glasses. Really, it depends on how much tequila you like and how fast you want to get smashed.

Add a handful of ice to the glass and pour juice mixture over the top until the glass is full.

Serve the result to a delighted audience.

I just made this recipe up tonight. It makes up for the fact that my mahi-mahi was not fresh and was actually pretty gross. This slaw rocked my world when I bit into it:

Bryan's Pepper and Mango Slaw

Ingredients

1 mango, julienned
1 red bell pepper, julienned
1 yellow or orange bell pepper, julienned
1 granny smith apple, julienned
1/2 red onion, julienned
1 jalapeño pepper, minced
Red wine or apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

Put everything in a bowl and toss to combine everything evenly. Add salt and pepper, using a little more pepper than salt. You just need enough salt to give it a little oomph. Add a couple tablespoons of vinegar and toss again. Taste the slaw and add seasoning and vinegar until it's to your liking.

Tonight I was whipping up a batch of Alton Brown's Pantry Friendly Tomato Sauce and, somehow, I absolutely botched it. Too much sugar I think. When I got to the final step and blended it all together, it looked liked it's supposed to...but when I tasted it, it was like eating sugar out of the bag. YUCK!

In vain, I tried to cut my losses by adding some balsamic vinegar, but I was too late. The sauce when from tasting too sweet to tasting like salad dressing. YUCK!

Oh well, it's nights like tonight that pizza delivery was made for.

I was at the grocery store this morning, wondering just what in the heck I was going to make for dinner tonight.

I thought about pasta. And then I started making up a sauce in my head -- cream, eggs, gruyere cheese; all good stuff! -- but it wound up being too complicated. I wanted to enjoy my Saturday, not spend 25% of it in the kitchen.

And then my eyes fell on it: a staple of modern American cuisine, but so often forgotten about.

I refer, of course, to the chicken.

Not a cut-up chicken. Not boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Not wings. But an entire chicken, weighing about 4 pounds.

I had to have it and whisked it off to the cashier.

An entire chicken is an immensely useful thing in the kitchen. Let's see how I'm going to get 3 wonderful meals out of one 4-pound bird.

Tonight, I made roast chicken, one of the simplest things one can prepare. I slathered the skin down with butter, salted and pepper it, stuffed some cut up apples into the cavity (optional), then shoved it into the oven. I roasted it at 500 degrees for 20 minutes (to get the skin brown and crisp) and then lowered the temperature to 350 until my meat thermometer showed that the thigh meat was 175 degrees.

That bird was perfect. Delicious in every way. I made some gravy from the drippings, poured that over some mashed potatoes, and served with some steamed broccoli. And with that, we had an absolutely delightful meal with only three main ingredients (some butter, flour, and cream were secondary players).

I removed all the rest of the meat from the carcass and then put the carcass in a stock pot along with some onions, a bouquet garni, and some peppercorns. Voila: chicken stock. That, plus some noodles, and some of the leftover meat will make meal number 2: chicken noodle soup.

Finally, meal number three will be that pasta with cheese sauce I was dreaming of in the grocery store...only now it will have a the rest of the leftover chicken mixed in.

Three meals consisting of 3-4 ingredients. One bird. Happy tummies. Life is good.

I made duck last night.

It's not something I do often because it's kind of a pain in the butt to do it right.

I decided to do it the Alton Brown way. 100% by the book. No variations.

To sum up the procedure:

1. Remove wings and back from duck.
2. Cut duck into quarters.
3. Soak quarters in brine for 2.5 hours or so.
4. Steam quarters for 45 minutes.
5. Crisp skin in a "NASA Hot" cast-iron skillet in the oven.

A major plus for this technique (steam then sizzle) is that a huge amount of precious duck fat collected on top of the steaming water. I managed to collect about five ounces of fat by boiling off the rest of the water. I'm going to use it to fry up some potatoes later this week.

The meat on my duck was delicious. The skin that touched the hot skillet was delightfully crispy. But the rest of the skin was just plain soggy and nasty. I'm going to have to figure out how to fix that.

On the other hand, my friend Rich ate his part of the duck like he hadn't eaten in weeks. So maybe I'm being overly critical.

Tonight was Turducken night.

For those philistines who don't know, a turducken is a boneless chicken, stuffed inside a boneless duck, stuffed inside a boneless turkey. There's usually some stuffing between each bird.

I've been hearing about these things on Food Network and wanted to give one a try.

Obviously, putting one of these together requires some pretty tricky deboning work. I've attempted this procedure before. I was attempting to make a nifty recipe I found in one of my Jacques Pepin books. The recipe requires three deboned chickens. However, for that recipe, and for turducken, you need to leave the meat completely intact. This involves cutting between the bones and the meat and then gently pulling the bones out. This is pretty easy when removing the breast and back bones; removing the thighs and the leg bones is a massive pain in the ass. When I attempted the Jacques Pepin recipe, I bought 3 practice chickens. The results were so horrifying that I just threw all three into a stock pot and vowed that I would never again bring such torture to poultry.

Knife work is not really my specialty.

Given my past experience, there was absolutely no way I was going to try to make a turducken from scratch. Fortunately Farker bboy steered me in the right direction. Specifically, he steered me to Poche's. Not only does Poche's sell fully assembled turduckens, they have some of the best andouille sausage I've ever tasted.

Poche's alleges that their turduckens feed "15-20 non-Cajuns". I had 7, but those 7 were very determined.

The turducken came out marvelous. I attribute this partly to Poche's expert assembly and partly to my mad roasting skillz. Poche's does the hard part. But their roasting instructions leave a little bit to be desired. The whole of the instructions are "roast at 375 degrees for 4 hours." That's just not going to cut it, especially when I've got an audience that expects great things from me.

I always use a thermometer to ensure that my roasted meats are perfect. But therein lies the problem: where the hell do you stick a thermometer in a turducken? I tried various places, but it was almost impossible to figure out if it was going into stuffing or into meat. Eventually, I just stuck the thermometer where the neck would be and shoved it in horizontally. I roasted the turducken until the thermometer read 175. It took a little less than 3.5 hours. So, if I had left it in for the full 4 hours, the turkey part (the outside layer) would probably have been very dry.

As it turns out, carving a turducken is easy. Just cut out cross section slices. If people are coming to your house to eat turducken, then they probably want the full turducken experience. So I made sure that everybody got some turkey, some duck, some chicken, and some of Poche's awesome cajun stuffing.

I wanted to use some of my Poche's andouille sausage in a side dish, so I made andouille spoonbread. This was an even bigger hit than the turducken. Everybody wanted more of it. Even the picky eaters were clamoring for more.

One unexpected thing was that I got some of the best drippings I've ever gotten from roasted poultry. They were beautiful: dark, fragrant, and full of flavor. Plus, there was a definite "cajunness" to the flavor of the drippings because some juices from the cajun stuffing made their way into the bottom of the pan. My friend Michele told me that there was no way we were not making gravy with those drippings, so I whisked up a roux and made some really awesome gravy in which we dunked many slices of French bread.

All in all, it was a great evening with a lot of great food. I followed the meal up with a Cusano 18 and all was well in the world. There were tons of leftovers, but I really don't mind. I'm looking forward to turducken sandwiches tomorrow!