Category: Tips and Techniques

One thing a lot of working friends tell me that they struggle with making home cooked meals is the time required. If one looks at the majority of recipes the preparation time is 50 percent or more of the total time it takes to make the recipe. It most “simple/quick” meals the cook time is […]

This year I made roasted leg of lamb for Thanksgiving dinner. It was super tasty and we found many delicious leftovers, like gyros, for the slices of lamb. However, I was left with a leg of lamb bone with quite a bit of meat on it which I wanted to use. My family would typically […]

One of the items that often goes to waste in my house is vegetables. Mostly because I tend to over purchase and my spouse doesn’t like eating anything that is slightly off. I often feel really bad about this but haven’t really been able to consistently solve the problem. This past weekend I was cleaning […]

I’m the kind of cook who really likes to collect recipes. I’m extremely grateful I live in the modern era where I can do this digitally rather than physically clipping stuff and sticking scraps of paper into the cookbook like my grandmother. However, the process is still pretty imperfect. I have a recipe program that […]

Last weekend after discovering via an internet search a place close enough to pick peaches, the family and I went on a peach picking excursion. We came home with 2 pecks of peaches. 1 peck of yellow peach and 1 of white peaches. Knowing that they would only last so long and that I had […]

I really like fried breaded chicken breasts, zucchini and eggplant paired with pasta. But, I always feel kind of guilty when I pan fry these in oil. I keep trying to come up with alternatives. The typical approach would be to grill all of these things. However, in my opinion the finished texture just isn’t […]

One of my favorite ways to make meat when I’m in a hurry and/or have a cheap cut is to braise it. For most recipes, the meat gets seasoned then browned in a pan. Then it’s transferred to a crock pot and liquid added for slow cooking. Alternatively, one can simmer on low on the […]

Every time I buy, spatchcock and roast a chicken, I have giblets, neck and the backbone left to use. For me, it seems like a waste to just throw these items out. So I almost always make chicken broth with these leftover parts. To do this I put all the left over parts into pot […]

Nothing is more frustrating to a cook tyhan when the meal you planned goes sideways. This can happen for several reasons. Someone unintentionally eats one of your ingredients. WTF chocolate chips aren’t a snack! The dish itself fails. It tastes awful or burns or something truly awful You forget to thaw your meat The third […]

One thing we often do during the fall is roast pumpkin for pies, soup or pumpkin bread. Since Saturday was such a terribly rainy, nasty day, I decide it would be a good day to roast pumpkin. For those of you who have never roasted a pumpkin before, you can’t just go get a jack […]