The Portly Chef

One of my favorite new flavors is roasted garlic. Though largely the same, there are numerous variations on how to roast garlic, including in a terra cotta cooker, in a foil wrap, and the uncovered-upside-down method. Today I’ll discuss the methods I’ve tried, and provide recipes for both a creamy garlic dressing and a roasted red […]

Yesterday’s lenghty post on my homemade ketchup making has taken the fire out of me. So I thought I would offer up a collection of recent interesting food stories from around the country.

Bill Daley of the Chicago Tribune has followed up the story on Maytag blue cheese (that served as the muse for my post […]

Don’t forget to add your recipes to my SuperBowl Recipe Contest! All entries must be submitted by 1 PM, EST, Thursday Feb. 1. A winner will be announced and their recipe posted on Friday, so that everyone can make the dish for the Big Game!

As you may know, lawyer-turned-food critic Jeffrey Steingarten is my personal hero. So when my wife bought me The Man Who Ate Everything for Christmas, I literally devoured it. The book gave me lots of new ideas for kitchen experiments, one of which involved ketchup.
In one chapter, Steingarten sampled over 30 varieties of ketchup, categorizing them […]

This is a topic which I know nothing about, so I was thrilled to see Khymos’s Ten tips for practical molecular gastronomy.
Thanks for the pointers, Khymos!

As I suspect most Saturdays will be, today will be slow around here. I’m spending the day in the kitchen working on a homemade ketchup. I’ll provide details and results on Monday.

Wrestling with what to write today, I came across this fantastic post over at blog.khymos.org. It provides a simple, at home version of sous vide, which will provide a perfect, consistently cooked piece of meat. I’ve recently noticed a huge increase in sous vide on Iron Chef America, so those of you who are fans […]

I have to admit that I’ve earned the “portly” part of my name. I am, and have always been, on the heavy side. Two weeks ago, at my annual physical, my weight and blood pressure were both at through-the-roof levels, so my doctor put me on a diet.
Key #1 to the diet is portion size. […]

When you click the RSS and Comments RSS link down below on the right, you get a failure page. However, if, from the failed page, you remove the “feed:” precursor from the address, you then see something different.
Any suggestions on what I can do to get a proper feed running?

Until this past Christmas, I was unfamiliar with Maytag blue cheese, despite my self-proclaimed status as a blue cheese expert. While cooking at my in-laws, one family member protested that the cheese was overly powerful. When I later used Maytag as the star of a blue cheese dip, it was suddenly proclaimed “delicious.”
Maytag blue, made at the Maytag […]