Posted on March 30th, 2008 by iamnotachef
I have worked on my barbecue dry-rub recipe for several years, and finally arrived at a mixture of the usual suspects (sugar, paprika, cayenne, and uh, some other stuff) that was pleasing to my palate and that of most of my guests. So what did I do? Screwed around with it! Pretty clever, huh? I [...]
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Posted on March 20th, 2008 by iamnotachef
If you don’t know what a slider is, please, just go away. This post is for real eaters, and besides, a life without sliders is a life not worth living. Here is an interesting blog about…well, you’ll have to guess from the name. But the guy has obviously made a careful study of how to [...]
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Posted on March 20th, 2008 by iamnotachef
Ah, diet food! Well, not actually low in calories, but it is a relatively light meal, at least in comparison to a large bone-in rib steak. I went to the store with the expectation of returning with some large chunk of gilled (no, I have never tried whale) pelagic predator, otherwise known as tuna or [...]
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Posted on March 15th, 2008 by iamnotachef
If the past several years of the pontifications of many food writers are to be believed, the best foods are also the leanest. And if you can’t get beautiful, uniform, pristine, fatless pork, you are in some way unworthy of being considered a real cook. But fat is flavor, and don’t let anyone tell you [...]
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Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by iamnotachef
I bought this silly looking, and even sillier named, kitchen gadget because I chop a lot of garlic and this seemed to be just the thing for the garlic junkie in me. It works pretty well, but I use it only when I need more than one clove. It’s easy to use, although I find [...]
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Posted on February 8th, 2008 by iamnotachef
As I may have mentioned, I like steak. And pulled pork. And sausage. And roasted beef marrow. And cheese. And butter. Oh, I’ll admit it; I like fat. But as many of us must eventually admit, my waistline and coronary arteries are less enamored than my taste buds of those luscious lipids. Besides, there are [...]
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Posted on February 5th, 2008 by iamnotachef
I am a fan of big, bold flavors in my food and grand gestures in the kitchen to match. A blazing hot pan, a 3-inch ribeye, big lobsters, 500-degree ovens, triple-cream cheeses…I could go on and on. There is something exciting about seeing a huge hunk of meat, not too many cuts removed from primal, [...]
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Posted on January 23rd, 2008 by iamnotachef
One of the things that frustrates me when I try new recipes is the almost universal inability on the part of most cooking editors to gauge correctly the time it takes to complete certain steps in a recipe. I’m not talking about baking a cake, or roasting a chicken; they seem to be able to [...]
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Posted on January 15th, 2008 by iamnotachef
As you no doubt know by now — and probably are sick to death of hearing — I like duck. But my attempts at brining the little critters did not do them justice, so I decided to try just once more. The problem with brining is that there are many variations, most of which will [...]
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Posted on January 13th, 2008 by iamnotachef
No, I’m not running out of things to write; I just really like duck, and I roasted one today. But a few weeks ago, I left the whole brining question with a vague sense that I hadn’t quite beaten it to death. So, with apologies to William Shakespeare, once more into the brine, dear friends. [...]
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