Fabio Viviani’s Fast Spaghetti, courtesy of Yahoo!
In the Yahoo video I’ve linked (no, WordPress doesn’t allow the embedding of Yahoo videos), chef Fabio Viviani shows the online world how to prepare a 10-minute spaghetti carbonara.
The dish looks great and I bet it tastes amazing, but I have to take issue with the amount of time he says it takes to cook this dish.
I’ve always found recipe cooking times to be unreliable at best and dishonest at worst, especially in videos. Continue reading
I was feeling pretty badass over the weekend, having figured out a way to use up at least some of my excess yeast starter.
Pizza! Continue reading
Remember that yeast starter I had for Amish friendship bread? Well, the baking directions warned that if I kept up with the feeding schedule, I’d end up with a lot of excess — especially since I haven’t been giving any away.
Well, I poured it (them?) out of its (their?) bag and moved it/them into a big bowl of nonreactive glass, where it/they spent the last few weeks sitting on my kitchen table.
(I don’t think I’ll ever get the pronoun right, so maybe I’ll just stick to the singular.) Continue reading
I consider cooking a subtle science and an exact art (thank you, Severus Snape), of which baking fulfills both the “science” and the “exact” portions of the adage.
Let me say up front that I am not a baker — I find the stove top to be more flexible and far more forgiving for my style of cookery, allowing for constant adjustment to dishes as they bubble away. To successfully bake something, you have to get it right before it gets into the oven and there’s no fixing a mistake once a cake sets.
Having said that, I was a little hesitant to pull out the measuring cups when one of my aunts gave me a bag of starter (think of it as liquid yeast) for something called Amish friendship bread. Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I posted a handy brochure about ingredients every kitchen should keep stocked, just in case of a culinary emergency.
That got me thinking about what my friends — many of whom cook — consider essential in their own cuisine. Watch the video to check out their responses and my own!
Hey everyone!
I was going though my news feeds when I came across this story on NPR about people complaining that they’re being overloaded by images of everything their friends, family and random strangers are eating and cooking.
It’s become a habit for my friends and I to pull out our phones and take photos of our food before digging in (Gotta love that built-in 8-megapixel camera!). But it never occurred to me that I night actually be bothering people with my ostentatious displays of gastronomic indulgence. All the comments I’ve received have been uniformly positive, including several demands for me to prepare Dish A or take people to Restaurant B.
On the flip side, having been the recipient of so much food porn myself, I’ll admit there are nights I’ve spent looking at Stir-fried pork tenderloin with Ginger, Lemon, Honey and Five-Spice Powder when I should be doing actual work. And there are days when I haven’t eaten for hours, but instead of going out to re-sample the local flavors (of which I partaken many times), I just sit at my laptop and make myself (and my friends who are doing actual work) even more hungry by gawking at the Silky Creme Caramel with Ripe Berries, Nutella S’mores Bars and Japanese Furikake French Fries on websites like Foodporn.net and Food Porn Daily.
Anyway, check out the story on NPR (same as the link above) and vote in the poll (it closes Wednesday, April 25 at 6 p.m. EST). Let me and NPR know what you think!
Mise en place (MEEZ ahn plahs) is something that virtually every cooking blog and commercial website is obligated to cover, just because it’s so damn useful.
No, this is not me busting out my incredibly limited French just to be pretentious or to indulge my inner snob — “mise en place” (or “mise,” as shortened by the venerable Ming Tsai) is a French term that means to “set/put in place.” It’s about taking a little time to make sure you have all of your ingredients and tools ready to go before you start cooking.
Having everything in place before you commit food to pan means having ingredients measured and cut, oven pre-heated and pans and utensils at hand. You shouldn’t really be mixing or cutting anything at this stage unless it’s absolutely essential. That way, you can focus on the act of cooking — controlling heat levels, timing and seasoning — and it keeps your attention on the stove, reducing the risk of accidents and the chance that something will burn or boil over.
I know chefs and cooks on TV peel vegetables and slice meat in front of the camera, but that’s mostly for demonstration purposes, to show how they handle the ingredients. Look closely and you’ll see that what they’re cutting is a small amount compared to what’s already been prepared and waiting in a bowl.
You see me use this concept in the ingredient snapshots I provide with my recipes — nearly everything I intend to use in a dish has been measured, cut and placed in bowls, ready for me use. The only exceptions are last-second substitutions or omissions that I tell you about anyway in my annotations. Some would extend the idea to measuring and pouring out liquid ingredients, but that takes up so little time that I don’t bother.
For more info, check out the explanations at The Reluctant Gourmet and Molly’s Menu. They’re detailed and easy to read, having been written by cooks with a lot more experience than I do.
I first encountered migas (pronounced MEE-gahs) in Austin, Texas, where I spent about two weeks training for an internship. I didn’t think much of the dish when I saw some of the other trainees ordering it for breakfast at one of the local diners — the colors were nice, but the texture didn’t appeal to my eyes, so I stuck with my scrambled eggs and bacon. Continue reading
Brussels sprouts are vilified among children as one of the ultimate symbols of parental meanness. They’re bitter and mushy and have a sickening green hue that just screams “EAT ME! I’M NUTRITIOUS!”
More often than not, I get serious “WTF?” looks when I say that I actually like Brussels sprouts but I suspect that most detractors of these cruciferous treats have never had them prepared in the right way. Continue reading
In Part I of “Eating Your Own Mistakes” you learned how to deal with the immediate aftermath of a culinary catastrophe.
Now you have to find a way to keep that mistake from happening again. Continue reading
Sugar, Spice and Sometimes Rice 