Thursday Night Smackdown: Holy cheese-filled beef, Batman!

It’s Thursday, I’m in love.
Tonight, from Susan Spicer’s Crescent City Cooking: herb cheese-stuffed beef filets with bordelaise sauce, simple roast potatoes and carrots, and green salad with cider dressing, apple, comte and hazelnut. This is the ultimate over the top need-to-impress-someone meal, and though it takes a little time to pull it all together [...]

Hardly even a recipe.

Anyone who would like to donate a Nikon D70 is free to do so at any time.
Shrimp + garlic + good butter + red pepper + pasta = tasty and satisfying homemade dinner suitable for the I-don’t-feel-like-cooking-but-I-can’t-order-
any-more-Pad-Thai-takeout nights. You say you don’t have those nights? You’re never too tired or stressed to whip [...]

Sometimes you feel like a nut.

And sometimes you *really* feel like a nut.
Today was supposed to be leftovers for lunch day, as there is a container of blackened tilapia with poblano rajas and cream with my name on it in the fridge. Unfortunately (1) I woke up feeling like my head was being slowly crushed in a powerful, needle-lined [...]

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

It was a dark and stormy night.
Waiter, there something in my… thing that was meant to be a terrine, but is, as we will soon see, not. Many thanks to The Passionate Cook for inspiring my first Abject Failure Blogging.
Although this blog has been savory-focused until now, among my circle of ravenous office-mates I’ve [...]

Thursday Night Smackdown: Veni, Vidi, Vici, Ate

Oh baby, baby; how was I supposed to know?
Tonight, live at the civic center: soy-glazed duck with portobellos, and soba noodles, spinach and radishes with ponzu sauce, all courtesy of Charlie Palmer’s Practical Guide to the New American Kitchen.
This week was my pick, and I went with this because I *love* duck, and I’ve [...]

Oat Odes.

Irish steel-cut oats
The breakfast of champions
With maple syrup.
Oats from a packet
With fake apple-cinammon
A food-like product.

Leftovers for Lunch

People who need ribs are the luckiest people in the world.

The only thing better than beer-braised short ribs are more beer-braised short ribs.
We had lots of rib parts from Saturday night’s ribstravaganza.* Rather than hunching over the kitchen counter and gnawing at the bones like starved vultures, I decided to try and turn them [...]

January Monthly Mingle: Comfort Foods

This is where the ingredients picture would have gone if I had remembered to take it. Have some onions instead.
My favorite mid-winter dish to prepare on a cold, lazy weekend day: Belgian beer-braised short ribs. For this edition, I went with Asian-inflected short ribs with a hoisin-beer reduction, a blue cheese potato-parsnip puree, and some [...]

Misshapen Friday Brunch Blogging

I’ll take Potent Potables for $600.
A quick and tasty brunch, once again taking advantage of leftovers to make something much fancy-schmancier than I normally would with a couple of eggs.
Although my attempt at making a precious little omelette failed, as you’ll soon see, these flavors did not: Herbed goat cheese and balsamic-glazed caramelized onions [...]

Thursday Night Smackdown: Qui est votre papa?

Voulez-vouz couche avec moi ce soir?
Tonight, from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food: Lamb meatballs with eggplant sauce served over bulgar pilaf with pine nuts.
I’m going to admit it right up front: this was not my week to pick the Smackdown battle, and I was not overly psyched about these [...]