Wiener Schnitzel With Spaetzle
This weekend, the wife and I decided to make some Austrian-style food. I was craving some veal and she wanted to make her grandmother’s spaetzle (fried dumplings). To make spaetzle, you mix 2 cups all-purpose flour with 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/8 teaspoon of nutmeg. In a separate bowl, beat two eggs with 3/4 cup milk. Slowly drizzle the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir until it forms a smooth batter: Next, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. This is where it gets a little complicated – and messy. Since you’re working over a pot of boiling water,...
Read MoreEggplant Parmesan
Eggplant Parmesan is one of the cheapest meals you can make. Assuming that you already have oil, flour, eggs and bread crumbs in your kitchen, all you need is a jar of marinara sauce and an eggplant. I consider it a cleaner recipe, meaning I make it when I need to clean out the fridge. I also do this with pastas and casseroles sometimes. I usually make Eggplant Parmesan whenever we have several bags with only an ounce or two of cheese left in them, or whenever we have homemade spaghetti sauce left over because *someone picked out all the meatballs. You start by slicing your eggplant into...
Read MoreFresh Cayenne Peppers
Our garden didn’t produce very much this year. The combination of heavy rain in June followed immediately by a heat wave kept most of our plants from maturing. The vegetables we did produce were mostly eaten by the squirrels. For whatever reason, our cayenne plants produced like machines. And as you might expect, the pests left them alone. We were left scratching our heads, wondering what to do with so many peppers. Despite the multitude of cayenne recipes on the internet, there are only a few ways to really use them. Unless you grew up in the Szechuan province of China and are...
Read MoreChicken Prosciutto
Every weekend, my wife and I like to make a big meal that we can use for lunches throughout the work week. Usually it’s something like spaghetti or lasagna, or sometimes a big pot of soup. This weekend, we decided to make some chicken prosciutto and roast some scallop squash we bought at a roadside stand on Friday afternoon. This recipe is like a hybrid between chicken saltimbocca and cordon bleu. I got the chicken recipe from Simply Recipes, who got it from The Dean and DeLuca Cookbook. I thought the egg wash was a little strange, so we made three breasts with the egg wash and three...
Read MoreCaprese Salad
The wife and I are nuts for Insalata Caprese. We’ll make a large platter and munch on it for days. This time, we used the last of our green tomatoes to make an extra crispy version: We served it with some sopressata. The fresh mozzarella will only get better as it soaks up more of the balsamic vinegar. We’ve made this dish with our homemade mozzarella before, but we just can’t seem to make cheese that tastes as creamy as the expensive stuff. I think it’s because the milk we buy isn’t very sweet. Does anyone have any experience with...
Read MoreFried Green Tomatoes
We hoped that by this time of year, we’d be drowning in fresh produce. Sadly, the excessive heat and rain in June stunted our garden growth. Most of our squash, zucchini and onions are dead. We’re awash in banana and cayenne peppers, and our leeks are looking pretty good. Still, I’ve been salivating over fried green tomatoes since we planted the garden, but our plants just don’t seem to be producing very much. I was pleasantly surprised when I went to a farmer’s market in the Mount Laurel neighborhood near Birmingham, AL, this past weekend, and picked up a...
Read MoreOrganic Foods Have No Health Benefits
True believers will no doubt find it difficult to accept that they’ve been paying a premium for Food A over Food B even though the only difference between the two is...
Read MoreSpice Rack
As any avid cook knows, there’s no good place to store your herbs and spices. It seems like we’re limited to fumbling through a lazy susan or wasting good cabinet space on bottles that are only three inches high. I’ve always kept my spices on a shelf above the stove, but steam makes some of them clump. After we remodeled our kitchen, we tried to come up with a better way to organize and store our essential flavorings. Since this is where we do the cooking, we thought this should be where we keep the herbs and spices: Our new kitchen is all about utility. If something...
Read MoreOn the Topic of Erudite Eaters
This piece from Bon Appetit reads more like a parody of the emoted eating habits of the chattering class than a serious guide to getting your children more involved in the kitchen: We started our kids on organic pureed butternut squash baby food and now they’re chopping summer squash for succotash with a butter knife. They started by eating string cheese and they’re now savoring Stilton. We avoided ancho chiles, but they unexpectedly taught us that they love anchovies. The moral of the story is: don’t cook down to your kids. Cook with them. The writer is trying a little hard...
Read MoreHomemade Mayonnaise
Encouraged by our recent experiments with butter and mozzarella, we decided to make some homemade mayonnaise. I’ve never been a huge fan of mayonnaise, but I’ve been enjoying it a little more than I used to. I’ve mixed all kinds of ingredients with it to balance out various sandwiches and burgers, and I started wondering if I’d like mayonnaise more if I could adjust the flavor, as was suggested in this Bon Appetit column. Well, we rolled up our sleeves and decided to try our hand at making a better mayonnaise than Mr. Hellman and Mrs. Duke. We based our recipe on...
Read MoreShrimp Boil
After visiting Historic Charleston and Jekyll Island, the wife and I spent a few days on the Florida coast. You’d think the seafood would be a lot cheaper there, but it’s not that different from my local grocery store. I live at the opposite end of a coastal state, but it’s a coastal state nonetheless. We bought some amberjack steaks for our ‘nice dinner’ night. For another night, we bought some shrimp: When you factor in time, money and level of difficulty, is there any meal better than a shrimp boil? You just throw everything into a pot of seasoned,...
Read MoreMargherita Pizza
We figured the best way to use our homemade mozzarella cheese was to make Margherita pizza. My wife decided to make pizza dough to keep with the ‘fresh’ theme. We used this pizza dough recipe. Here she is manually dissolving the yeast: Getting your hands dirty is the key to good dough. The recipe makes a very sticky dough that was hard to manage. But after a while it came together: Here she is stretching the dough. Next time we'll probably cut it to make two crusts: And here's our pizza with homemade crust, fresh mozzarella, puréed tomato, and dried...
Read MoreHomemade Mozzarella
A few weeks ago, my wife and I tried our hand at making mozzarella cheese. This kit from Leeners.com cost $25 and will make 6 pounds of cheese: The kit cost over $30 after shipping and handling, and we'll have to buy six gallons of fresh milk. That might sound like a lot of effort and money for so little product, but it would cost us over $90 to buy that much fresh mozzarella from the grocery store. So we think it's a good deal — if the cheese tastes good. You add calcium chloride, citric acid and lipase powder to whole milk. It might sound unhealthy to add a bunch of...
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As an experienced marketer and an avid social media user, I keep a hobby blog. It mostly exists as a public scrapbook for my out-of-state family. Feel free to take a look around and see what you like.
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