Tag Archives: recipe

My Time Times Ten

Homeschooled children in the kitchen

It’s Friday and I will start with a food thought this week.  I’m a fan of every cooking magazine on the planet, as you should know by now. One of the things many of them have is some sort of time estimate on recipes – this long to prep, this long to cook. Those estimates are usually pretty far off. The reality is that I can do mise en place for almost any recipe faster than most folks in my home and even the slowest of us around my house can do it faster than a real beginner. Our skills make those estimates inappropriate and incorrect.

We also have a cook top that puts out more BTU‘s than does our furnace, so we can cook at restaurant temps (I won’t bore you with the tale of the 6 weeks it took me to relearn how to cook this way after cooking on an electric cooktop for years). This means that often the cooking times are often off as well.  Fascinating stuff, I know, but what does this have to do with you? Continue reading

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Dark Star

A black-and-white photo of the above symbol wa...

I wrote a piece here in August about how hard it is for the home cook to duplicate the quality of the food in restaurants. At the time I ascribed that to the quality of the ingredients available to professionals vs. to what most of us have access. Last night I had another thought on the matter and of course it was while I was attending a show by the Dark Star Orchestra. Makes total sense, right? Continue reading

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Cookbooks

cookbook shelf 1

It’s Foodie Fun Friday for which I am grateful.  I’m going to give the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah a few days before I write about them, mostly because I have so many thoughts.  Today, we’ll do our usual Friday thing and talk about food a bit, trying to keep it on the light side, if that’s OK with you.

We own lots of cookbooks.  I did a rough count this morning and stopped at 200.  We’ve probably given away another 50 that we didn’t use much.   I know what you’re wondering – why would a guy who fancies himself a decent cook and often cooks without recipes own so many? Continue reading

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Filed under food, Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud