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October 5, 2011
Announcing a collaboration for the month of October
We’re happy to announce a new collaboration between The Paupered Chef and some fellow friends and bloggers of ours in Chicago: The Midwestyle. It’s a great blog, and thorough. Ostensibly about dressing well on a budget, it’s really about caring: how you look, how you think, how you act like a young man in this here century of ours. We feel an affinity with their go-get-em energy, the same early-20s stuff that...
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March 15, 2011
A quicker, easier process than the whole brisket
Corned beef is one of the more basic and surprising kitchen experiments. But I think that people still think it's pretty nuts. I'm staying in California for a couple weeks, and had to buy the ingredients, cook, photograph, and eat this project while staying at someone else's house (sorry for the lack of pictures). First of all--it's really tough cooking somewhere you don't have all your familiar tools! But I...
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September 21, 2010
A summer alternative with grated apple and almonds
Oatmeal at Cafe Fanny in Berkeley
I think I've always loved the idea of oatmeal for breakfast: it's simple to make, it sticks to your ribs until lunch, and it's economical. I don't always put a lot of time into breakfast, or much thought, save the occasional calm morning of a slow-fried egg on toast or scrambled eggs with chives from the windowsill garden. Oatmeal seems like a good, honest solution. Though I've...
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Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.
Slow Cooked Salmon with Ginger and Scallion
This simple salmon dish is cooked in a low oven so the flesh stays moist and succulent.
Thick-Cut Pork Chops with Apples and Onion
The classic dish of pork chops and applesauce is spruced up here with thick-cut pork...
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June 3, 2010
One of the best 5 minute meals on the planet--and one of the only meals that literally takes 5 minutes
Eggs in a basket was the first meal I ever cooked. I was in 5th grade, and it was a Sunday morning at my best friend's house after a sleepover. We woke up hungry, and for some reason his parents weren't home. This confused me--my parents would never do that--but more important than confusion was the fact that I was terribly hungry, and I didn't see how that problem was going to be solved, since his house never had any cereal in...
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May 19, 2010
It's my opinion that the secret to great biscuits and gravy is that there is no secret
I know that biscuits and gravy together don't make sense. It's meat, thickened with flour and milk, ladled atop a starchy biscuit. There is no balance, no acid, and no spice. Compared to the dynamic Szechuan food I've been making lately, it can seem safe and boring. But that's not how I think of it. Perhaps it's something that needs to be injected to your blood as a child, because I have a fondness for this dish that...
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May 14, 2010
We need your help
Last night I made the best batch of biscuits and gravy ever. That's not something I ever thought I'd say out loud, but I cannot tell a lie. I started with some homemade breakfast sausage, which formed the base of a sensational gravy. The buttermilk biscuits were baked from scratch. It was nearly perfect.
The problem? The biscuits didn't rise, or at least not enough. I followed a fairly well respected cookbook author, but my...
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Everyone loves bacon, but it's not always the same thing.
British Bacon vs American bacon
If you've been reading the site lately, you may have been following Nick on his rather strange quest to recreate a full English breakfast from scratch (his first project was the British banger sausage). Why, I don't know. But when Nick proposed that I take over the homemade bacon portion of the project, I leapt at the opportunity to contribute. Homemade meat curing has long been a hobby of mine,...
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March 16, 2010
Can you replicate the best English breakfast at home?
To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.
- W. Somerset Maugham
I survived my half a year in England on a diet of boiled potatoes, canned peas, Heinz beans, and 99p egg and cress sandwiches I purchased from a convenient store. The dollar was nearly worthless next to the mighty pound at that time, and I hoarded what little cash I could for bus passes and the odd pint, relegating whatever was left to keeping...
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February 16, 2010
Cereal isn't the option in the morning.
For the past few weeks I've been eating salads for breakfast. I eat huge bowls of mixed greens sprinkled with dried fruits, toasted nuts, and whatever else happens to be on hand. If there is half an avocado in the fridge I'll cut it up and toss it in, same with roasted vegetables, chickpeas, goat cheese, carrots...you get the idea. I eat until I am no longer hungry. It has nothing to do with a diet, nor is it some devious plan my...
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November 11, 2009
Check out a better way to make cinnamon rolls.
Every Christmas, we eat cinnamon rolls. That's just how it is. When I was little, someone would wake up early and drive over to the Cinnabon store and come back with a gooey dozen, and always make sure there was extra frosting. The things were so big and sweet that it would take most of Christmas morning to finish one, plus three or four glasses of milk. The cinnamon rolls tided us over until the Christmas ham.
At some point somebody...
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April 27, 2009
What if French toast could be improved by the Brits?
Eggy bread, a slice of white loaf dipped in egg whisked with milk and fried in butter, is simply French toast without the sweetness. It is a food I've consumed in countless American diners, and on countless Sunday mornings as a kid. But that morning I found eggy bread unrecognizable without its sheen of maple syrup and its fragrant nutmeg and cinnamon spices. Still, there it was, plain and obvious. And it floored...
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December 3, 2008
Start a holiday morning tradition with delicious coffee cake.
Coffee cakes come in two types--leavened by baking powder and/or soda, or by yeast. The first is what most Americans would call a coffee cake, that tender, cakey variety which is often made with sour cream. The other kind is more recognizable as cinnamon rolls.
This is the sour-cream variety and really couldn't be easier. Inexperienced bakers--that's us--should have no trouble with it. The result has a tender crumb...
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July 2, 2008
How to smoke pork belly at home.
First, I needed to find some pork belly with its skin still firmly on. My previous attempt removed it, along with a lot of precious fat directly underneath. My bacon didn't have nearly enough fat on it to fry up, so instead cooking up beautifully in a pan, it burned. My local butcher wouldn't sell me a piece with the skin on unless I bought 10 pounds, a fact I still find ridiculous. A commenter pointed out...
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February 8, 2008
Make your bacon at home.
The bacon most of us know it is made from pork belly, but there are also variations made from other cuts, notably the cheeks and jowl, which makes guanciale--a porkier tasting, fattier cut that's a staple in properly-made Spaghetti alla Carbonara and Bucatinia alla Amatraciana. Hog jowls are difficult to find, though, especially because a butcher would probably need to order an entire head in order to get them for you--and unless you'...
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January 25, 2006
This is what happens when you start cooking before you’ve put in 30 seconds to check if you actually have what you need.
When I can’t decide what I feel like cooking, I’ll often visit epicurious.com and bum around until an ingredient that sounds great pops up--then I’ll start searching for that ingredient and I always find something that sounds tasty. In this case, my ingredient was goat cheese. I was doing a few searches at www.jamieoliver.com--we basically follow him and his British humor around with tongues wagging--and he had...
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