Well, two weeks of ukelele spring break has been great for my sleep, sanity, and productivity at work. For cooking, not so much: Getting home at a sane time means that I've only got 45 minutes to throw something together (later than that means that V gets tired and loses patience before I get dinner on the table ( Read more... )

Yesterday I noted the absence of my usual drumbeat of failed recipes. Naturally, then, today's dinner was overcooked steelhead under a balsemic reduction, served with the wrong salad and some pesto pasta.

Yeah, I overcooked the fish. Fish and I have serious differences vís-a-vís broiling times. Broiling fish is my personal kryptonite ( Read more... )

Recipe here. I used equal parts chicken stock and cider vinegar for the liquid, as I was embarrassingly caught short of the others ( Read more... )

My new guru, Cook's Illustrated, had wisdom concerning roasts. I've always been terrible at roasts, so I was intrigued ( Read more... )

McKinnon's had hanger steak for $3/lb. Mmmm, cheap eats ( Read more... )

I cannot easily describe this recipe, which I got from the incomparable Cook's Illustrated, nor is it on their website. Suffice it to say: Shrimp, plus sixteen cloves of garlic prepared three different ways. Tasty tasty tasty ( Read more... )

The January Cook's Illustrated had a page on stew theory. The things it had to say -- mostly about the order in which stew components should be added -- was something of a revelation to me. I'm an avid stewer, so it gets harder and harder to learn anything new even as I still suffer the alarmingly regular failures of any regular amateur stewer.

( We'll go with unusually much detail this time, as this was a bit of a variation from (at least, from my) conventional approach. Please pretend not to feel patronized. )

Too tired to do proper meal-planning, so I picked up some boneless chicken thighs on the theory that I've always got something lying around to do with them ( Read more... )

So I have this chapati flour, and I'm still having fun, let's turn things up a notch on the difficulty scale and see if I can't get a horrible recipe failure ( Read more... )

Red lentil pancakes. That is all ( Read more... )