STRAWBERRIES STRAWBERRIES

disclaimer: excuse the horrible photography, i took these pictures before mer's tutorial!!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------

what was that i heard about a sandwich-off? oh yeah. it's on:

STRAWBERRIES. god's gift. the one and only. wayyy better than james dean.


let me tell you what you're looking at. this is potato-bread toast, with strawberry preserves, with motherfucking BASIL topped with a fried egg. on the side? more strawberries. it was the most amazing combo ever - who would have thought basil and strawberries and eggs would be the new black?

and here's another bit for ya with a bad picture to boot:
really bad photo. oh man. no justice. this would be strawberries that i sliced and then smushed with a fork, put over crushed ice (you know, bag o ice meets hammer-time) with a shot of brandy and shredded smushed mint.

i said the same thing when i looked at this dinner as i did that one time i was really drunk and had great cleavage: YOU'RE GODDAMNED RIGHT!

seitan doggie dogs

YES! Seitan Dogs!! As promised, I have created the home made veggie dog that trumps extruded paste dogs from your grocer's freezer. I made a double batch of seitan this time, half of which went to one big log for sandwich slice purposes, and the rest I rolled into mini logs for dog purposes. The seitan dough was much harder to shape than I thought. You can kind of get it into an ellipse, but the rest happens when it gets rolled into the foils.

Dan had a bag of sweet whole wheat dog buns from WW, so I toasted up a dog right out of the oven for added crispiness, along with the bun. I was set to put all kinds of fussy toppings on there, but he said hot dogs should only be topped with mustard and ketchup, which was a good point. I still couldn't completely help myself, and served it in an origami-ed wax paper carriage.

Addendum: I was really proud of this photo. I shot it on a white countertop, lit by the stove light at a very fast film speed and shallow depth of field. It only required a little color correction.

Food Photography for the Home Cook

Here I have some curried rice noodles with bok choy tips, soy bean cake, shiitake mushrooms, garnished with sesame seeds. Note the shallow depth of field, sharp detail on the food, color pallette. Don't you want to eat it?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. If you don't have a light box, food stylist, or a high end digital slr with a macro lens, how do you make your food look good for a blog post? Especially if you actually want to eat the thing before it gets cold? Well.

I like the New York Times food blogs a lot for good food photography, although still a bit profesh for the little guy in the home kitchen. Examples of good food photography can be found anywhere on TasteSpotting. These guys know what they are doing. Their setups aren't too styled and the food looks edible. You know that if you try to reproduce it you will have something that looks similar. It's not intimidating and looks delish.

So here goes:

Framing
When you are shooting your food, you want to concentrate on what is important. Take as tight a shot as possible of the food. This will also make for a more professional looking shot if we can't see what else is on your kitchen counter. There is no need either to show too much plate or bowl in the shot.
If your camera doesn't have a good zoom (do NOT use optical zoom), get in as tightly as possible without losing detail or getting blurry and crop afterwards if necessary.

Depth of Field
All this means is that only the stuff closest to your camera lens will be in sharp focus, while everything else is blurry. This way attention will be focused tightly on the food and the contrast between blurry and focus will make the sharp stuff seem sharper and the food look more interesting. Chances are, you are using a fixed aperture camera if you are using the camera in your cell phone, but even most consumer grade point and shoots have some aperture control. You will want to use the widest aperture (smallest number) possible. If you have a close-up or portrait setting, use that (ie. the flower/lady in a hate vs the mountain/guy running).


Lighting
To me, this is one of the most important factors in good food photography (next to the food obvs). All light has a color. If you shoot under an indoor light, chances are your picture will have a yellowish light to it. If your camera does not have a white balancing feature and you don't have any photo editing software on your computer, you will want to use natural light. This is the most ideal lighting situation. It is brighter than indoor and is closer to plain white light. You will see more detail in the food and have softer shadows. Avoid using a flash at all costs. This is the harshest of lighting and will flatten out the food.
When in doubt, overexpose a little bit. The food should be bright and happy with soft/few shadows.

Styling
You will want to plate your food on something simple with not too much ornamentation, unless it is complementary to the food in design. I would suggest something in either a solid color that complements the color of the food or even just a very clean cutting board. Make sure to wipe off any splatters from the plate. I also like to plate up the food so that all of the important ingredients can be identified in the picture. Another nice touch is a contrasting garnish like seeds or herbs.
Shoot the food against a fairly neutral background. Very few home cooks have an infinity background on hand, so go for something that is either a solid color or will look fairly pleasant and blurred out. Again, if you don't have the ability to control your aperture, you might want to consider a context for the food. Something simple like a clean cutting board or butcher block. Nothing is more appealing in a photograph than fresh veggies. If you need to fill up the fram with something, put something fresh and leafy in there. A great example of some well-styled food is KETTLE CORN. I don't even like popcorn and I would eat that.

Camera Angle
This is worth thinking about. If your kitchen is a mess, consider an overhead shot of the food where you can only see the plate or table that it's on. Do something dynamic. The food is just sitting there, so tilting the camera somewhat can make a bowl of soup much more exciting than if it was shot more head-on. A good example of this, I think, is the Bacon Log. Here is something that, photographed in a more conventional way, maybe you would think "Oh man I can't eat that. Not unless I want to die!" But with a jaunty camera angle, bright natural lighting, and tight cropping, maybe instead you'd say "Look at that friendly, harmless, bacon log. I could eat that."


So basically, you want your food to look appealing and makeable. All of your carefully chosen ingredients should be identifiable and not too much should be in the shot besides the food. Think about the difference between the hamburger in the commercial and the sloppy, flattened out mess that you actually get in person. It's like making your food Myspace-Hot.

Greetings From the Green Grocer

Hello all. As a career grocer I believe that the best way to contribute to this blog is to share some of my grocery knowledge and insight. I have been working in the natural food industry off and on for over a decade and continuously for the past six years. I have worked for big chains and small co-ops. Right now I am working for a certified organic grocery store chain (not target or walmart).

I was asked to explain the difference between a yam and a sweet potato. There is a great deal of confusion out there about the difference and it usually comes to a head around the holiday season (and by holiday season I mean Thanksgiving [the super bowl of food]). So what is the difference. Let me start out by saying that you probably have never actually eaten a yam. True yams are very hard to come by in this country. I have never actually seen one up close. Yams are an African root vegetable. They are big and bumpy. They look similar to a sweet potato, but they are not that closely related. They originated in Africa, but can be found in Asia, and Latin America as well. To prepare a yam you must first peel the tough outer skin, then pound it for a while, then boil the hell out of it. You can also fry them or pound them into a dough called fufu.

Now you may be saying to yourself "what the f is this guy talking about. I've had yams before. They sell them at my local market and they are delicious." Well, I agree that they are delicious, but I disagree that they are yams. What are commonly referred to as yams in this country are actually moist fleshed sweet potatoes. Etymologist are unsure when the mislabeling of sweet potatoes began. There are several theories. The most common is that they the name came over from Africa during the days of slavery. There are several Latin American cultures that call sweet potatoes by names similar to yam, so it is possible that the name came up from one of these nations. The names for both potatoes and sweet potatoes get very confusing in Central and South America. In any event, sweet potatoes are generally colloquially known as yams in the southern part of this country.

So basically, in a New Jersey grocery store, you will most likely find the drier sweet potatoes called sweet potatoes, while moist fleshed varieties are most likely referred to as "yams". That is not a hard and fast rule, but it has been my experience for the most part. The most popular varieties of "yams" are garnet, jewel, and hannah. Hannah have a lighter colored skin. Inside they have slightly yellow flesh. They are moderately sweet with a nutty flavor. Garnet yams have a darker exterior with an electric orange flesh. They are quite moist for a sweet potato and very sweet. Because of their moist flesh they are very versatile and can be prepared in many ways. Jewel yams fall somewhere between hannah and garnet. They have a yellow flesh with a nice nutty and sweet flavor.

I hope this clears up any confusion. Not a day goes by during the holiday season where a customer will ask me if we have sweet potatoes while standing directly in front of the yam display. I've gone through the spiel so many times. Sometimes customers just don't believe me or flat out tell me that I am wrong. I hope that you can help me spread the word about the difference between yams and sweet potatoes.


Yams:

Sweet Potato (Garnet Yam):

So, I made a pretty ok sandwich.

I opened the fridge around lunch time. Opening the fridge reminds me most of the time of cooking plans that didn't materialize. Like that basil that was on its way out because I wasn't getting stoked on the pesto I was supposed to make this week. So I told myself to get off my ass and make good.

Whole wheat bread from the fridge had to do. No time to bake my own, though it's easy enough. I like the No Knead recipe because who has time to really do the whole bread baking thing? It's surprisingly good for how little effort is involved.

I made a pretty standard pesto: basil, pine nuts, salt, pepper, olive oil, garlic.

The day before, I tried a new seitan recipe that requires baking rather than boiling. I really love this concept. I altered the seasoning a little (it is reminiscent of pepperoni) and maybe in the future it would be fun to do a stuffed version. I think there is also potential there for a veggie dog that is not just a bunch of extruded soy paste. (Another shortcut confession: I used vital wheat gluten flour rather than forcing the gluten out of wheat dough which takes 8796984 hours.)

Ugh boiled seitan. Talk about disaster stories. I challenge anyone to tell me that their boiled seitan was anywhere near baked in quality. Or even approached store-bought.
Anyway. Sauteed the seitan with some spinach that was turning in the fridge as well.

Bang. Sandwich. Stacked on some carrot matchsticks and sliced avocado. Then I ate it. It was fine.

In conclusion: Sammich challenge? Stuff turning in the fridge challenge?

Tuna!

Beware, this tuna melt contains awesome. I diced up some celery in that bitch and used some brie. You heard me, brie. Heated that mofo up. Then I done ate it. Had some beer too, ain't no thang. So good I made another later in the week. Check that one out.

Had a pickle too. Damn good. Back up off my sammich 'cuz I'mma eat it right up. Underneath that sammich I got a plate with a penguin on it. Go ahead an' get mad ya jealous ass, you can't have this penguin plate 'cuz I'm makin' another sammich on it.

KETTLE CORN

This one goes out to Matt Keys! The genius cook! The master of the corn!

because he did what i'm not sure i could have done. he kettle-cooked some corn! mmm so good. some of the kernels were cooked a bit too much for me (see the golden brown corns above) but he preferred those, so it worked out quite nicely.

2 parts kettle corn
1 part white sugar
1 part oil (corn, preferably... though matt used olive oil and it seemed to work)
salt

(he cooked this with 1/2 cup corn)

take the oil and put it in a kettle, or for those of us in urban america, a thick-bottomed pot. put the oil on the stove on HIGH. put three kernals in the oil, and when the pop, take them out and stir the sugar in until it dissolves. i assume this was pretty quickly. then throw the rest of the corn in, and shake the pot until all the corn is popped! be careful not to burn the corn, which WILL happen if you dont keep shaking the pot. better to have unpopped kernals then a whole bunch of black and gross ones.

salt to taste. then strip down to movie-watching clothes (underwear, preferably), sit back, and pop in The Matrix and eat that kettle corn. oh yeah. best summer night ever.

vegetarians know how to make crap taste delicious

i've lately been reading this book to enhance my culinary knowledge. lettin' it slap me around a little for my ignorance, you know. like the other day, i was reading about grains. this book has chapters on grains i've never even heard of! frickin quinoa (pronounced keen-wah or something), rye-berries... oh man. it was like walking into Whole Foods for the first time.

So, obviously, i decided to break some of it out. i've been looking for some foods that i can make and freeze, and also eat cold - the kinds of foods i could theoretically take out of the freezer and put in my car and that would be delicious around lunch time. i spend a lot of my time at construction sites and such, and there's not really a whole lot of kitchen areas at places like that, and frankly i'm sick of all fast foods. even wawa (sacraligious, i know). So. Also, i found a large amount of barly in my cupboard! wooo barley! i love some beef and barley soup - so good. but i digress.

I decided to make a modified version of a summer salad i found in the Book. (yes, i'm capitalizing it - this Book is just THAT GOOD. A TOME OF KNOWLEDGE)

1 cup barley - cooked
1 cup peas - shocked (now, for those of you who are as un-savvy as i am and dont/didnt know what that means, it means dump those peas in some boiling water for like 30 seconds, and then strain em out and dump them in ice water! delicious! no over cooking! and they dont get mushy!)
some lemon juice
some pepper
some olive oil
some herbs from the garden

now the recipe originally called for cucumbers instead of peas, and also threw some yogurt all over the everything once you were ready to serve. i'm not that kind of gal.

you take your barley and toss it with 2 tbsp of EVOO (just like rachel ray says it), some pepper. i used one of those garlic-pepper grinders and i dont regret it one bit. take the peas out of the ice water and shake some salt on em and let them sit for about 5. then throw them in the barley (taste first, if they're too salty, rinse them off prior to tossing). squeeze some lemons all over that mother, and then go out in the garden and get some mint or basil or lemon thyme or golden oregono, or all of the above and dice it all and throw it in the salad. (ed. note - the original recipe calls for basil only. i took some liberties)

take it all, toss it, and then fork it into your hungry, gaping mouth. mmmm. so good. so damned good.



oh, and just a quick post script: to get the most out of your lemons, some people will say to roll them on the counter. this is for suckers. take those little lemons (or limes, or any other citrus fruit that you might want to suck the juice from) and stick em in the microwave for about 15 seconds each. be careful, you want them warm to the touch but not hot - if they get hot, run them under cold water for a minute or so. then cut in half and shield your eyes! these guys will be the juciest fruits you've ever tried to squeeze! the theory is that the microwave makes the juice in each little juice sack boil just enough so that the sacks all burst. this bursting of sacks is essentially what you'd be doing if you rolled the fruit, but our good friend the microwave does a much more thorough and quicker job than my silly hands.

OK, SO. not the best picture. but let me tell you about our cooking skillz. that's right. with a Z because we're THAT gangsta. so gangsta we ate this and watched NOTORIOUS! (I got techniques drippin out my buttcheeks , Sleep on my stomach so I don't fuck up my sheets)

OK, SO. this is what we got goin on: some brie action, surrounded by some deliciousness wrapped up in some fantastical tongue-gasms.

here goes:
1 package puff pastry
1 brie in the round (no wedges! you need those moldy bits to keep all the melty bits together!)
Whatever you have in your baking cupboard.

Actions: Thaw puff pastry. slap that brie in that puff pastry. put stuff on the brie. wrap that brie/stuff combo with pastry. bake until delicious.

we used some crushed pecans mushed with brown sugar/melted butter to make it a paste. spread this on top, then topped off with semi-sweet chocolate chips. DE LICIOUS. TWO WORDS. in retrospect, i wouldnt have put butter in the brown sugar, cause after reheating the brie the next day it got everything all soggy and pulled the oils out of the pastry.

seriously. who would have thought chocolate would mix in a most heavenly way with brie? NOT ME. I'M A CONVERT. YOU SHOULD BE TOO!

Spicy + Chocolate. I don't know why I am thinking about you right now.

Mexican Chocolate Tofu Pudding. Can be adapted as mexican hot chocolate (with soy milk)! The one at Raymond's is the best, with a homemade (cubic) marshmallow in it.

Ask Ben about his green tea chocolate tofu pudding. If you want.

I made these Chile Brownies for a Superbowl party. They were too spicy! But it is fun to watch people's faces when they eat something that they didn't anticipate having a kick.

I'd say if you are going to do a spicy chocolate thing, and you can't get your hands on chile powder (milder than chili powder), go chipotle but don't use too much. It has a smoky flavor that complements the chocolate. I'm putting it in everything these days. Tomato sauce even.

Are you cooking with dog?

http://www.youtube.com/user/cookingwithdog


ok after you're done being amazed watch one of them only paying attention to the dog.

Great Moments in Tofu

I invite everyone who has not seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance to do so. I've had this scene on repeat in my head for the past hour and a half and its making it hard to sleep. This is most likely due to the fact that Meredith and I will be embarking on a tofu challenge in the near future. Inquire within to join us!

Giant artichokes with handmade linguine and steamed clams

Artichokes and steamed clams, especially littlenecks, are two of my favorite late spring/early summer foods. I find giant artichokes to be meatier than the regular sized variety.

The first thing I did was de-choke and trim the choke. All that means is getting rid of all of the things that will prick your fingers or the inside of your mouth when you're trying to eat the thing, like the spines at the tips of the leaves and the little needley things on the inside.

















I braised the halves with some basil, salt, lemon, and a couple of dried porcini mushrooms so that the liquid would be all delicious and usable in the rest of the elements of the dish. When the artichokes were halfway done, I stole some of the braising liquid for the pasta dough instead of just using straight-up water. I usually like to do a combination of semolina and all-purpose (unbleached or whole wheat) flour for the dough.


The pasta dough gets rolled out nice and thin and then rolled up, sliced, unrolled, and laid out to dry. You need to be careful to flour the surface of the rolled out dough well enough so that unrolling it isn't too difficult. When the strands get a little dry they get tossed into salted, oiled up, boiling water.

Last step! Scrub the shit out of those clams so no sand in the teeth. I got some white wine, olive oil, a little reserved braising liquid, and a couple of crunched down garlic cloves going in a lidded pan and tossed the clams in. Let those suckers steam until they pop open, making sure to agitate here and there to help them along the way. Then I plated up with a little clam broth poured over the pasta and clams and served the artichoke with some home-made aioli for dipping.

WE NEED TO GET IN ON THIS WHO IS WITH ME

Cookoffs

Take 1: Grilled Baskets

Usually I attempt a recipe a number of times before finally having the courage to post it but in this case I wasn't following a recipe. I have meant to try making Egg in a Basket for years but never really got around to it except for one horrible failure 2 years ago in which i almost set the Scarlet Pub on fire. I saw a picture of it on the internet the other day and just had to do it. The recipe there had been a variation in which cheese is put on the outsides of one egg basket. I had been contemplating this for a while, thinking about putting grilled cheese around one egg basket and other things. Deciding that would be too much bread, I chose to use two egg baskets as the bread of a grilled cheese. Being myself I chose to add ham to the grilled cheese. So there you have it. Grilled cheese with ham consisting of Egg in a Basket bread. Grilled Baskets.

PS- This will hopefully be my last egg post for a few days. I think that would be the healthiest choice.

My pictures suck but my cakes are awesome.

I made a cake. A fantastic cake. One that I saw on the internet and wanted to make for myself and eat to my heart's content. it was fantastically easy, and something i would recommend for any birthday. or, any day, really.

1 box white cake. prepare according to directions (leave out egg yolks or the batter will be yellowey)

1 box gel food colorings.

Take prepared cake mix and divide into 5 bowls, add a TON of food coloring to each bowl: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. (drat, i should have put some purple in there too!)

take two cake tins, and here's what you're going to do: pour about half of each color into the first cake tin in ROYGBIV order. just pour right into the center of the tin, dont mix, dont smush. just pour. THEN, in the secon tin, pour in opposite order! that way you get a nice swoosh of color in your two-layered cake! woo!

ok, bake.
matt added two little marshmellows just to spice things up.

let em cool, invert, and ice.
fucking delish.

"Needlessly Large Cheetos"

Cheeto size: Economic indicator?

Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!

Pizza is best with fresh ingredients and the ONLY way to guarantee that you're not going to waste your money on something with rubber mushrooms on it is to make it your damn self. For the past 5 months I've been making a pizza every few weeks. Pizza dough is easy and cheap to make. All you really need that might be hard to come by is a couple of hours to let the dough rise. There are a ton of recipes for pizza dough online, but almost every one I saw was basically the same, so I just use the one in the good ol' Joy of Cooking with a few minor adjustments. First, I half the recipe because it is for two pizzas (you can freeze half of it or whatever but I'm not really into that scene). A strange feature of Joy's recipe is that it lists "1 tsp of sugar" in parentheses. I suppose that means that it's optional? I've tried it with and without, but lately I've been using honey instead and it may or may not have made all the difference. Not everyone keeps honey around because it's a little pricey, but most recently I've been "borrowing" a teaspoon here and there from my roommate who is never home. That tends to keep the price a bit more reasonable for me. Joy wants us to let this dough rise for about 1.5 hours, but I leave it for 2 full hours and it's kind of amazing how much more it rises in that last half hour. Finally, Joy suggests that we set the oven at 450. Screw that. You have to crank your oven as hot as it will go. When you open the oven door you should feel a blast of heat in your face as you watch the anti-glare coating melt off your glasses. But first comes the fun part: toppings. This part is so fun that even your girlfriend will help. For this pizza I grilled some chicken while the dough was rising. Then Sara and I cut up onions, mushrooms, green peppers, a little broccoli, and minced some garlic. Sara's more of a fan of peppers and broccoli on pizza than I am, so I just stuck with chicken, onions, and mushrooms.

I think that we can all learn a lot from asparagus.

To snap or to trim? Enter: the curious cook.

that's right. alf. you know him, you love him. and someone's gonna eat the hell out of him.

while this may not be as unique as an egg-cooked-in-a-tomato (or the tomegg as i called it when it totally tipped over and spilled all over everything, as in "GODDAMN THAT TOMEGG IT WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME"), i would definitely say that this cake is the single-most amazing cake i've ever made. and i was a pastry chef's assistant for years!

the cake was the easy part. cake in a box. (i'm usually really scrupulous about making my own cake from scratch, as evidenced by my year-long love affair with oddball cupcakes (that's a different post) but since this was about alf, i figured spend more time on icing and less on cakeing)

the idea behind icing a cake with multiple colors and getting a good gradation between them is using really soft icing - the best bet for this is to heat up the icing you've got, spread while it's warm, and when it cools it will harden again, rather than using an icing that will stay soft, which may slide around the cake during normal transport. To get the color gradation, we started with 6 teacups, put white icing in one, dark chocolate icing in another and mixed different gradations in the middle four. put them in the microwave for a few seconds each and BAM - ICED THAT MOTHER.

details were piped on using our ever-so-fancy icing in a ziplock baggie technique. put icing in a baggie, snip a tiny hole in one end and pipe to your heart's content.

My only advice to future alf-cake-makers is to not work in a kitchen where the average temperature is 50 degrees. The icing kept setting before we were done smooshing it into proper place, which caused some minor lifting of the icing which kept it from looking quite as perfect as i was hoping for.

go alf!

Kyler and John spin burritos

Kyler and I made some burritos the other night (for Cinco de Mayo) and were out of rice. Working with what we had, we turned to potatoes instead as the starch to hold these veggies together.

Pick your favorite veggies out of the drawer and start frying, starting with the most dense ones. Ex: Potatoes, then carrots, then onions, peppers, then beans and spinach. Of course this is open to interpretation. Mix in some ground chipotle pepper and salt. Serve with lettuce, cheddar cheese, salsa, and sour cream fix’ins.

Make bad jokes while you’re at it:

K: What do pirates eat to get their carbohydrates while out at sea?

J: I dunno, what?

K: Starrrrches!

K: Where do fortunate pirate families get to send their kids in urban areas?

J: Charrrrter schools?

K: Seeeeck!

Challenge #1: If you're serious, then you don't care what's in it.

(reblogged from Ben)
Meredith and I have a challenge going. We try to find the instant ramen bowl with the least possible english. If you’re really into it then you don’t care what’s in it. The running competition has been going for a number of years. I guess we just have a thing for Japan. This one is the best I’ve found so far. I have no clue what’s in it. The brand “Master Tong” is in english so not a complete shut out, but the best I’ve found so far. Extra points always go for how many packets are inside the actual bowl itself. If the noodles, vegetables, sauce, oil, powder, and quick assembly spoon are all self packaged, you win. Try to find some of your own, let us know.

Quiche is maybe not for everyone

(reblogged from Ben)
I made a quiche. Not a hard thing to do. Smoked salmon, green onion, orange bell peppers, and cheese. As usual it was quite excellent. Kyler and I enjoyed it. Brought it to work. Nobody really wanted any of it. I guess you don’t give cops quiche. Its probably not the sort of thing you serve to anyone whose culinary experience hasn’t moved beyond the omelette. It was, however, Steph’s first taste of quiche and she enjoyed it so i guess that’s a bump.

Recipe Compression

Twittered recipes for people who get it already. Reviewed.

Family Bowl

(reblogged from Ben)
I do believe its time for some Monkey-Fighting Family Bowl. God knows I love making the Family Bowl. What? You inquire as to the name? I’ll tell you why I call its the Family Bowl. I cook the chicken in egg. What’s this bull about not cooking the calf in its mothers milk? I flipped that shit on its head. Wonderful fresh veggies cooked in dashi broth. Yeah, I got that. Top it with toasted sesame seeds and teriyaki sauce? Sure thing, broseph. Serve it all on top of some grade-A udon noodles sitting in rice vinegar and you got yourself a meal that would make Jesus come back for a bite. Yeah, I know what I’m doing in the kitchen. Maybe I’ll let you come by some time and check it out.

Ben chicken

(reblogged from Ben)
Braised chicken and vegetables with yukon gold garlic mashed potatos. Generous helping of cream sauce.

Engineering and Cooking

In case you were wondering what the difference is between all of those different eggplants (there isn't any).

Math and cooking

A fast soup

Swiss chard, shiitake mushrooms, tofu, and bean threads in a red curry coconut broth, garnished with lime and dark tamari. Brown the tofu in some sesame oil first and use dried mushrooms so that you can add a little of the rehydrating broth to the coconut milk mixture. Then crack an egg in the whole mess and let it poach for a little while in the soup. Sub brown rice for bean threads and sprinkle on some chopped cilantro. Not a bad weeknight dinner.

Grilling in the park

Top: Asparagus, marinated in olive oil, red wine vinegar, lemon, coarse sea salt, fresh black pepper. Orange juice can be subbed for lemon and is equally delish.

Bottom: Plantains at 1.5 turns. Great with some brown sugar and vanilla icecream

Concept Jello

I wonder if they're hiring interns?

Tomato-Egg/Egg-Tomato

(reblogged from Ben)

I hollow out a tomato and fill it with beaten egg, onion, garlic, and ham. Once the filling sets, I melt cheese over the top. If the tomato is too ripe (as shown) the structural integrity of the tomato will be too weak. Thus it is necessary to remove the tomato from the oven and wet it as needed (causing it to cook in time with the egg) or the tomato’s hull will break and egg will be sucked out into the vacuum of space. I’ve been watching too much Star Trek.

In short, I baked an egg inside a tomato. What did you do today?

Smore in the spirit of grilled cheese

(reblogged from Ben)
Its like grilled cheese, but a cinnamon toast smore. Oh, btw, I covered in syrup and served it in bed. What now?

The Log of Truth

(reblogged from Ben)

The Log of Truth: weave bacon into mat, cover in beaten egg, bake, cover in cheese, melt, roll, slice, skewer, eat, have coronary.

Benedict in stereo

Poached eggs, smoked tofu, sautéed baby spinach, on top of whole wheat toast with a smear of earth balance. Replace eggs with avocado (you know, same idea) for the house vegan.

Why we have a blog

These guys drank Ben's milkshake.

We're moving from tumblr...it's just better this way...