How To Cook Like Your Grandmother
A Guide to Cooking with Real Food the Way Your Grandma Used to
Most of my recipes that call for pepper will say "fresh ground black pepper". Or maybe "coarse ground black pepper". Sometimes, though, you need cracked black peppercorns. So the handy pepper mill you bought and got hooked on suddenly isn't enough. Oh great, time for more hardware, right? Nope. Time for a neat trick. … [Read more...]
Ever since my wife did the green bean hash au gratin -- yes, it's got a name now -- I've wanted to do something similar. I still had half the sack of potatoes, but didn't have any green beans. And, as it turned out, I was out of cheddar cheese, too. Well, that's going to make it hard. So instead of the beans I did onions, and instead of the cheddar and bacon I did ... well, nothing actually. Just frying everything in the bacon fat made these delicious. I think I'm doing more of the … [Read more...]
No one cooks every night. Sometimes you aren't hungry. Sometimes you eat at a friend's house. And sometimes you're at the amusement park where you have no choice but to eat fair food. You know what I'm talking about. The nutritional value of wallpaper paste and more addictive than nicotine. But something strange has happened since I was a kid. Fair food got better. Like the fresh strawberries and frozen yogurt up top there. That's halfway-good food. Just don't tell yourself frozen yogurt … [Read more...]
I hate following recipes exactly. It's why I'm generally not a good baker. Anything that has to be accurate within an eighth of a teaspoon is too fiddly for me. My wife, on the other hand, is a great baker. She'll start from a recipe, then adjust every time she makes it until she has it perfected. Then that's the exact recipe she'll make each time. So I'm always pleasantly surprised when she goes completely off the map, like she did with this dish. It was a classic example of, "Now let's … [Read more...]
I bought myself a new toy for my birthday. A rotisserie attachment for my grill. The main thing I wanted it for is to do a standing rib roast this coming Christmas. Yup, I'll be huddling in the garage, with the grill set up in the doorway. Hopefully it'll be snowing, that would make for some great pictures. But just to break it in, I did a chicken. I've had the rotisserie chickens you can buy at the grocery store, and they're actually pretty good. But of course I think I can do better. … [Read more...]
