A couple of weeks ago I posted about how to brine and roast a chicken where I wrote how I always assumed that everyone realized that roasting a chicken was easy and how that assumption made an “ass out of u and me.” My second assumption was that people also knew how easy it was to make chicken stock and did not need me to provide that information. Again, I was disabused of this notion.

So, here we are with my easy-peasy recipe for home made chicken stock. You don’t need much more than a big soup pot, the leftover bones from that roasted chicken, and some vegetable odds and ends. There are a couple of options here as to how you make the stock.

Option #1 is the recipe below where the chicken bones are roasted first with onions. This results in a nice rich stock with a dark brown color which is …

Sometimes I assume things which I consider to be easy about cooking, things which are common sense to me, are the same for everyone else. But we all know the platitudes about “assuming” and “common sense.”
There I go, doing it again…
They say if you “assume” you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” They also say, “common sense is anything but common,” but who are these mythical “they” people anyway? I digress…

This concept was brought home to me recently while talking to friends, all of whom enjoy eating, but don’t spend as much time cooking as I do.  I was trying to explain to someone about how easy it was to roast a chicken. They looked at me as if I just suggested they consider making their own bacon.

I said, “All you do is get a whole chicken, throw it in the oven, roast it, and voila! you have dinner.” But …

One of the things I really missed when eating gluten-free for 3 weeks was freshly baked bread. I’m used to baking my own bread a few times a week using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (ABin5) method so of course one of the first things I did when done with the cleanse diet was make a batch of dough. For those of you unfamiliar with the ABin5 method, it is a “no-knead” bread dough, made in a batch large enough for 4 loaves, and stored in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Since discovering this method last year, I have not bought one loaf of french bread because I always have dough ready to go in my refrigerator. Now, I’m starting to make my own wheat sandwich bread too.

I was fortunate to receive a review copy of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (HBin5) a day, …

I was in my favorite market last week in the middle of a produce buying frenzy (I hadn’t cooked for a while) when I had a flashback to college which froze me in my tracks. No, not that kind of flashback. What brought me back to the mid eighties, was a stack of ruby colored fruit and suddenly, there I was with my sophomore college house mate, “L.”, eating pomegranates.

I’m not sure I’d ever eaten a pomegranate before I met L, but I have memories of sitting in the tiny, funky, living area of our on-campus apartment (dubbed “Farenheit 451″ due to our address), making a mess of eating pomegranates, and laughing our asses off. Now, I can’t see this fruit without thinking of her.

Butternut squash soup is one of the easiest and most satisfying fall soups to make. It’s also very adaptable to different flavors and additions. Dress it up with a little truffle and cream, or …

I think the title and the photo speaks for itself, no?

Salami, cheese (soft goat cheese, cave aged Gruyere and a sharp white cheddar), olives, mom’s home smoked salmon and some marinated artichokes. Add to that a loaf of freshly baked bread (buy it or make it yourself) and a good bottle of wine and you have a meal ready in 5 minutes. I love to eat this way.

What do you do make when you don’t feel like cooking?

There are as many recipes for tomato pasta sauce as there are Italian grandmothers. My Sicilian grandmother used to make her sauce every year from the tomatoes in her garden. Much of the time the sauce had meat in it but I don’t think it was ever exactly the same twice.  A child of the depression, my grandmother would throw into the pot whatever she had on hand; scraps of a roast, pieces of cooked pork, sausages, rinds of parmesan cheese. You never knew what you’d find in the sauce, but it was always good.

This is really a base pasta sauce recipe, meant to adapt to whatever you want it to be. Like meat in your sauce? Add a tough cut and let it cook down to make a Bolognese. Want to keep it vegetarian? Enjoy the recipe as it is or add some diced up vegetables. Like Pasta alla Norma? Add red chili flakes and diced …

My very first job in a restaurant kitchen was as the pastry chef for a small mom-and-pop Italian restaurant. How I got that job with no experience is a story for another day. But after working there for about 6 months, I moved to working on the hot line part time. One of my responsibilities was to make the batches of eggplant parmesan and lasagna. I loathed doing the eggplant because this meant I had to stand over a scalding rondo pan of hot oil and fry rounds of eggplant for what felt like days.
Later, when I was a head chef in another resaurant and would somehow end up with an extra case of eggplant, I never forgot how much I hated all that frying and came up with a much healthier version of the dish, grilling the eggplant instead.
I haven’t made this for over a decade, but lately it’s been on my mind, along …

I love my garden, I really do. And I think the fresh tomatoes were quite possibly the best thing about it. But late in the season, due to some insects eating the leaves and the blazing summer sun, I got some really ugly tomatoes. These were not the picture perfect ones seen in previous posts, but rather, they were sunburned and splotched, and a few, were slightly chewed on. But like all children, they are still beautiful on the inside, and perfectly edible (ummm, ok, not like children).
So, what to do with my unattractive fruit? I can’t give them away, I’d be too embarrassed. The answer is to cut away and peel off all the ugliness. Then, they are pretty again and ready to be made into sauce or soup. If you just try and peel a raw tomato you will find yourself participating in an exercise of …

I have another confession.
I don’t love vegetables. Odd, because I have a garden, right? I like them enough, some more than others, but I don’t think I could ever be a vegetarian. And zucchini? Well, let’s just say I’m learning to love it.

But I have this garden, into which I’ve put a lot of time, effort, and expense, and I should probably eat what I’m growing, don’t you think? In general, I only grow what I like and when it comes to zucchini, I think I’ve always liked it as an ingredient more than the focus of the meal.
But my zucchini plant has a way of getting the last laugh on me. Not only has it been generous in its gifts to me, a few of its fruits have hidden themselves among the leaves until they just got too big not to be noticed. I ended up with more …