Simple Roast Chicken

Many times I feel that people making cooking much more complicated that it needs to be.  Roast chicken is the perfect example of this phenomenon.  A brief search of roast chicken recipes online and in my cookbooks gives a bewildering array of procedures and complications.  I have seen procedures for turning, basting, trusing, shoving butter [...]

Holiday Party Part 4: Standing Rib Roast

Finally, the main course!  If you have been following along (or want to now), I’ve published all the recipes for a fabulous holiday party: a chicken liver pate appetizer, a potato gratin side dish, and a Meyer lemon tart for dessert.  A traditional (and delicious) main course for Christmas dinner is a big beef rib roast.  Not [...]

Duck Part 3: Duck Breast Salad

So I have to admit that project duck was not a total success…between work, traveling home for the holidays, and hosting a Thanksgiving get together for myself plus about 15 coworkers and friends I didn’t get a chance to use the duck liver.  I was reminded of this because when I returned home after the [...]

Duck Part Two: Duck Confit

That’s right folks, today we’re cooking pieces of duck in a pool of duck fat. At this point you are either revolted or salivating, either way take a moment to regain your composure before proceeding. Just in case anyone was revolted, cooking duck (or other meats) like this does have a (historical) purpose. [...]

Lamb Chops

Mary had a little lamb….then she grew up and realized it was more delicious than it was cute.  The end.  At least that is how the story would go if I was in charge of such things.  Come to think of it, perhaps that is why I’m not in charge of them.  At any rate, [...]

Mini Meatloaves

As far as I can tell, everything is cuter when it is small: babies, puppies, vegetables, etc.  So why not tiny meatloaves?  A sane person might ask why anyone would want a dwarf loaf of meat.  Let’s see…they would cook faster, they would have a higher surface area to volume ratio – thus yielding more [...]

Scary foods #3: Mussels

I firmly believe that any food able to stick out its tongue in search of a meal while sitting in a bowl on my kitchen counter is de facto scary.  Scary and tasty…  Perhaps they aren’t as scary as brussels sprouts or artichokes, but they certainly aren’t benign.  However, I can’t help but notice the delicious irony of [...]

What happens to the ‘long ribs’??

Every time I see beef short ribs in the grocery story, I wonder what happens to all the other ribs?  Are they inedible?  Do the cows used for commercial beef have only tiny ribs?  Is there some conspiracy to keep them from the food-loving public?  Anyway, I recently picked some up and the grocery store [...]

Stuffed Pumpkin

As I admired the handsome, autumnal beauty of the pumpkin adorning my counter for the past week, I asked myself ‘Travie, how much fall goodness can you stuff inside that glorified gourd?’ (how is this for an overwrought beginning??) After a bit of searching around the blogosphere, I came across several wonderful possibilities: [...]

Squash Risotto

Several times today I looked out my window, quickly turned back to my desk, concentrated REALLY hard, looked out again, and was met with nothing but colossal failure.  No matter how hard I tried, no amount of hoping, dreaming, or nose wiggling could restore the sunny 80 degree weather of two days ago.  I was [...]