The Kitchen Troll

I cooked dinner last night – technically, Christmas Eve dinner – for 27 people…my largest crowd so far.  This is my third year cooking for the family, and my mom makes a superb sous chef.  A standing rib roast is tradition, and we got a huge 18-pounder this year.  I smeared a horseradish-herb-butter crust all [...]

I made Julia’s Boeuf Bourguignon today – the one from MTAOFC.  Five hours in the kitchen and 2 rounds with the dishwasher, using pretty much every dish/bowl/pot/pan I own.  And the constant mess of grease I was cleaning off the stovetop and counters.  But it was SO worth it for the 20 minutes of blissful [...]

I’ve done very little cooking this week – should I feel bad?  And I discovered I am less productive when I have hours of time on my hands.  I had very good intentions of making ‘Julia’s’ Boeuf Bourguignon for dinner today.  I braved the grocery store yesterday with the masses of people shopping like they [...]

There’s a new Cuisinart food processor that I’m just DYING to get!  I have a really nice one now, and I’ve only had it for a couple of years so it’s still in really good condition.  But this new version – the ‘Elite Die-Cast’ – really is the mac daddy, nay, the queen mother of [...]

I really love making different dishes all the time.  I’m not the kind of person who likes to make the same thing over and over again, even if it’s something I like a lot.  Tonight, I tried a soup recipe that I pulled out of one of my Gourmet magazines – Barbecue-Rubbed Scallops and Creamy [...]

The theme this week has been ‘food that goes with rice’.  I made a Cuban ropa vieja tonight – SQ actually liked this one (he doesn’t generally like ‘stews’).  I need to focus more on making dishes that require my complete attention, otherwise I just stand in the kitchen and snack on anything I can [...]

I made the pork tenderloin stir-fry tonight instead of last night, as promised.  Don’t hold me to my promises – my desire to cook on some nights is severely dependent on how much sleep I got the night before.  So, it was what SQ would call ‘meh’.  He DID have a great suggestion to add [...]

The new L’Academie de Cuisine catalog showed up in my mailbox today.  I’m now spending my evening browsing through a yummy set of classes that I won’t be able to sign up for – karma currently has other plans for our money (or lack thereof).  Sigh.  I’ve taken a few classes there over the past [...]

I couldn’t be bothered to do anything more tonight than boil some De Cecco spaghetti and heat up some (expensive) Lucini Tomato Basil sauce, which was actually pretty good.  I didn’t even have a good Pinot Noir to go with it.  SQ was relegated to drinking beer. SQ hates spaghetti, and he begged me to [...]

I love Alton Brown. Really, he’s the biggest food nerd so I can completely relate. I’m not a Food Network fan at all, but I occasionally catch his show ‘Good Eats.’ Less often now that I don’t have cable. I was in Phoenix last week, and on my last night in town I came across [...]