Step 1: Find a Spanish Man.
Step 2: Find a Spanish Ham.
Preferably, a wildly handsome Spanish friend with a hunk of Spanish ham that his mother sent him. Jorge had looks. And he had the ham. What follows is an evening of many, many stages that included overcoming fears of anchovies, quail eggs, and two romantic party members who ate their share, doted on each other, and c...
Gnocchi. No idea. For years this has been the unpronounceable dish on the menu that starred me down and begged to be blurted out to the uproarious laughter of the seasoned waiter. "Did you hear what he just said?" Hell, I didn't have any idea what it was. Was it a type of pasta? Dumpling? Did it have a filling? This feeling of inadequacy kept the recognizable dish on the menu page...
Though egg mayonnaise is essentially the same thing as American egg salad, it doesn't taste like your average pitch-in. The mayonnaise was creamy but it had a lightness to it, which probably has something to do with the proportion of ingredients. Instead of deli-style New York sandwiches where a literal pound of meat is thrown on each sandwich--"It's like a cow with a cracker on either side,...
While our enthusiasm for cooking has grown immensely over the past year, we still feel mostly reluctant to toss our recipe books aside and approach the task with our own original ideas and ingredients. A sense of improvisation comes with confidence, and as the acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavski suggests, cultivating concentration and trusting one's instincts. Instincts. We don't do...
With minds planted firmly in the dirt, we probed the...
With minds planted firmly in the dirt, we probed the starchy tuber for secrets buried within, all in search of the perfect cooked potato. Armed with a bag of $2.99 Idahos, we set aflame preconcieved notions, sexed things up, and tried to find the courage (and stomachs) to eat nothing but potatoes like our poor brethren of the 19t...
With Blake off for the weekend, Nick blew the whole...
With Blake off for the weekend, Nick blew the whole Paupered Chef budget on a $20 Chinatown Bus ticket to Philadelphia in search of the city's quintessential greasy delicacy...the cheesesteak. Armed with locals with serious appetites, he checked out some of their favorite institutions in search of the real thing...Wait, with cheez w...
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 to...
The Paupered Chef ransack their local butcher in search of the fresh meat to one of France's most risky dishes. Will they have time to cook it?
The Paupered Chefs ransack their local butcher in search of fresh meat for one of France's most risky dishes. Will they have time to cook their steak tartare? We did our research, spared no expense, and faced the terrors of salmonella. We sur...
I remember vividly the first time I thumbed through a cookbook with a sense of purpose. I was home on a break during my freshman year of college, and my mom had been relating to me her excitement about a book my sister sent from London. She excitedly exclaimed that “it had even been autographed.” I smiled and nodded approvingly, unaffected. It was a cookbook, after all. My sister w...
One thing I’ve found difficult about cooking is that it’s really hard to start when you’re hungry--you have to plan ahead. Once you get started you get your momentum going, and there’s always ingredients to snack on, but it’s the getting started that proves difficult. The inertia works against you at first. Since I get lazy when I get hungry, I end up heating canned soup.
This evening, with...
