Every once in a while I get really excited about something I've never made before, and before I really have a firm understanding about what I'm getting myself into, I'm in the middle of making it. "Hey, I've never made a whole ham . Let's do it tonight even though we have no guests." This is the thinking that lead me to pull out an apparatus that has never, ever been used in my kitchen...
Sometimes all you can hope for at the end of a long day is a little bit of harmony. Whether through yoga, walking your dog, or blasting Bona Drag , you find it and somehow the day washes away. Often I find this harmony by cooking (sometimes with the Morrissey at the same time)--a chance to relax, create, and then have something delicious to show for it. I have a recipe that, while dec...
Think the world of wine is just sort of confusing? Watch us destroy what little faith you still had, and gain a few tips for your next quick stop at the wine store .
Is there anything my cast iron skillet can't do? Whether it's steaks , peppers , or even pizza , the big hunk of metal is good for most of my high heat needs. But for bread? I'd never really done that before. Neither, for that matter, had I ever really wanted to make cornbread before.
I have no real love of this southern staple. I don't really have any fond memories o...
Maybe you've heard about the Thomas Keller controversy over frozen fries . Well, we tried to make some at home--with mixed but interesting results. Check it out !
It happened again. I'm just minding my own business, slowing making my way through Bill Buford's book Heat , and I get to passage where Alex, a former chef at Babbo, describes how Frankie, his screaming superior, had taught him how to make pasta Carbonara:
You render your guanciale, and make a sauce with and the egg whites, and then, after you've plated it, you add your yolks, uncook...
Got a problem with screw caps on wine? Head on over to Serious Eats , where we'll try to talk some sense into you!
The most well-documented failure on this website was the first time we cooked beef short ribs . Tough, sinewy, and ugly--a big fibrous brick of protein fastened onto a sled of white bone by tendons and mysterious pieces of grizzle. Short ribs are the beef equivalent to a Salman Rushdie novel: willfully difficult, at times indecent and gross, but after an extended period of histrionic o...
I'm not sure why, but it wasn't until last week when my mom handed me a fresh copy of Heat , that I realized I had forgotten to read it. I'd read another Bill Buford book, his manic and terribly disturbing Among the Thugs , along with his New Yorker profile on Batali and a narrative on his experience slaughtering animals in Tuscany, the latter two of which are included in some form in...
No, we're not on spring break baking our pale flesh under the hot sun--though now that I mention that... Instead, Blake's been in Brooklyn. But he did get his hands on some of the first asparagus of the season. Check it out !
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.