Archive for ‘Food and drink’

Zucchini rigatoni with rapini

Summer time is zucchini time. Unfortunately it’s still cold and rainy some days in Portland, so I’m making pasta. The zucchini is used as the base for a sauce, while broccoli rapini and tomatoes flesh out the dish. This is a hearty, baked, vegetarian rigatoni which can serve as a main course or be paired [...]

How did you spend your Saturday?

Suppose your darling medical-student-wife is away for a conference, and you’ve exhausted all your cocaine and strippers. What do you have for lunch? You will want a large russet potato, some ground beef, a wedge of brie, and some nice rolls – maybe challah. First prepare the potato. Nip off each end, and square up the [...]

Salty

A friend of mine told me about a technique he had heard of for cooking hamburgers. The basic idea is that you cook your burger on a bed of kosher salt to create a salty crust on the outside of the meat. I thought this sounded like something I should try, so one day for [...]

Catering a bridal shower

Recently I admonished the Twitters to fear my salmon log. While perhaps laden with entendre, this does capture a bit of the prep-work I did over the last day and a half catering a friend’s bridal shower. I knocked off of work early to go shopping. I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing food [...]

Sous-vide in a thermos

I’ve wanted to try out sous-vide cooking methods for a while now. Once the technique was written up in the New York Times a few years ago, it has become the next big thing among home chefs. There are now home sous-vide ‘water ovens‘ which are within the price range of your average yuppie, but [...]

Out damned pot

I was recently directed to this article by (national treasure) Roger Ebert: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_use_it.html In it, Mr. Ebert writes about the humble, yet powerful, rice cooker. I had always shunned rice cookers. When people would talk about how great their rice cooker was I would snark “I have a rice cooker. It’s also called a ‘pot’. [...]

Fear my artisan loaf

I’ve been learning about baking bread. This all started by reading (most of) the book Ratio – which is a fantastic book about the fundamentals of cooking. I bought the Kindle version of this book for my iPhone so I could read it on the train – which is great – but it’s also horrible [...]

Tasting notes

Recently a friend of a friend generously invited me (and my friend) to join for a whisky tasting at his place. We each brought a bottle or two and our host took a stab at arranging our whiskies from sweet to peaty – we began with a couple of bourbons, moved to some Irish whiskies, [...]

The Pink Caroline

One tablespoon of raspberry syrup (preferably made the night before for your wife’s dessert), 2 ounces lime juice, 2 ounces of vodka, over ice, fill with soda water and stir. Sip while in sunshine

Bah! Science!

Food Pairing Charts.