If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that I’ve started watching America’s Test Kitchen in the early afternoons. Or, more accurately, Cooks Country, which is the latest season. I love it. After America’s Test Kitchen comes Lidia’s Italy, which is a great cooking show, and one that sometimes gives me some great ideas. One day last week, I saw Lidia make this lovely shrimp dish, which she suggested sopping up with bread, but in the notes said could also work well with a pasta. So I tried it a day or so later, using the pasta variation. My verdict? So-so. Just not enough flavor. But it seemed like…

I definitely have a fondness for Mexican food.   Chiles Rellenoes (as long as they’re not the ultra cheesy kind), tacos, burritos, fajitas, chili, enchiladas, I love them all.   And while I enjoy cheese enchiladas with red sauce, I love the verdes sauce.  Love.  If I weren’t already married, I’d marry it. Well, maybe that’s overstating it a bit…but it’s great on black bean enchiladas, as from the Greens Cookbook.  It’s good on chicken and cheese using a canned sauce.  Easy and good. Well, one advantage of unemployment is that after I look for work, I can watch TV, read a book, or take a nap.  Lately I’ve been watching America’s…

Since I’ve been enjoying watching America’s Test Kitchen lately, and we really enjoyed the juicy and delicious French Chicken in a Pot, I thought I would snoop around and see if I couldn’t find an ATK recipe for a roast chicken with crispy skin that also stays juicy.  The only problem is that ATK only gives their recipes away for free for the current season.  For past seasons, you have to pay for a registration, which I’m not really interested in doing right now.  Thankfully, there are plenty of people on the internet who post recipes, so I was able to find this one, and we had it for dinner…

A week or so ago, Maya and I were watching Giada at Home, and she made a delicious and simple looking pasta recipe that we had to try. With the tomatoes and breadcrumbs going in the oven first, it reminded me of this recipe. But it was different enough that it looked like it would be worth a try…melty Romano cheese, capers, parsley…OK, I’m in. So we tried it for dinner the other night, and it was delicious. Really, truly good. Choosing between the two recipes? Nope. I would just say if you’re in a basil and Parm mood, make the spaghetti. If you’re in a melty Romano mood, make…

(cartoon found here) There’s a show I like on our local PBS station, America’s Test Kitchen.  The premise is that they get some talented cooks, and they take recipes that we might already know, and they figure out what works and what doesn’t, and they try to perfect them.  So you might see them working on the perfect chocolate chip cookie, or the perfect macaroni and cheese, etc.  They’ll tell you a few of the options that they tried, and what worked vs. what didn’t.  Well, I recently saw an episode where they said they were trying to duplicate a chicken dish one of the people had in Paris.  He…

(I totally forgot to take a picture, but this one was found here) We used to have a wonderful cookbook…I think it was by Sunset Magazine, that had a recipe in it for One Pot Jambalaya, that we really liked. Unfortunately, it was ruined when our microwave started leaking water* and ruined about 1/3 of my cookbooks. Dang. Anyway, we found ourselves in need of a new recipe, so I went searching on the trusty internets, and like always, they didn’t fail me. This was actually even better than the recipe we used to eat and enjoy. Give it a try. Mmmm. Recipe found here. Smoked Sausage and Shrimp Jambalaya…

For our Easter brunch, I decided to make this quiche/frittata type dish. It’s mostly cheese, with some chilies for flavor and eggs to bind and solidify the casserole. I have no idea where I got this recipe…I have it in a binder of recipes that I’ve gathered from other places. It looks like it came from a cookbook of appetizers, and the name at the bottom of the recipe is Marcia Kirchbaum. I know that ‘rellanoes’ is spelled wrong here, but if you use this spelling in an internet search, you pretty much come up with this recipe, over and over again. Chili Rellanoes 2 cans (4 oz.) each green…

I recently found myself at one of our local grocery stores, Nob Hill.  Nob Hill has sister stores, which are Raleys and BelAir, and they put out a complimentary quarterly magazine which highlights dishes which can be made from ingredients found in their stores.  While I wasn’t there looking for recipes per se, I came home with my magazine, and found myself looking through the pages and thinking that some of them looked pretty good.  This was one of them, though I confess I’ve never tried chard before, because it looks a lot like rhubarb, which doesn’t seem to me to be good for much besides jams and pies (hence…

Many years ago, my mom gave me this cookbook for Christmas, and it’s been one of my favorites ever since.  I love pasta.  I could probably eat it every day, without getting tired of it.  Not everyone in my household feels this way (in fact, I suspect I’m the only one), so I limit our pasta dinners to once or twice a week. When I decided to make Penne with Sausage this week, Pasta Fresca was the first cookbook I pulled from the shelf.  It didn’t disappoint, though they chose thin rigatoni rather than penne for their sausage sauce. Gnocchetti Rigati con Salsicce aka, Thin Rigatoni with Sausage Sauce 1/4…

(Gorgeous photo along with a pretty cool recipe project along the lines of ‘Julie and Julia’, found here) I was looking through my cooking magazines the other day, trying to find a recipe that calls for chicken breasts, and I came across this recipe in Cooking Light. We tried it for dinner last night, and it was a hit. It didn’t look as gorgeous as the picture above, but I forgot to take a picture, so we’ll just pretend mine looked as awesome as KC’s, OK? Really quite yummy. Persian Pomegranate Walnut Chicken Based on the Persian dish fesenjan, this streamlined entrée features a sweet-tart sauce of pomegranate juice thickened…

If you’ve ever had Thanh Long/Crustacean roast crab and garlic noodles, you know that they are heaven on a plate, totally yummy, artery clogging, butter and garlic and crab deliciousness.  Amazing. The problem is that the crab is upwards of $40, and the noodles another $10 or so, so dinner here isn’t cheap at the best of times.  For Valentine’s day, we decided we would try to make some Thanh Long inspired crab and noodles at home.  We found this recipe (also the source for the beautiful and drool inspiring photo, above) online.  This is not the official restaurant recipe, but the recipe of someone trying to duplicate the ‘super…

(my final picture came out very blurry, so I took this one from the Williams-Sonoma website, here) One of our Christmas gifts was this cool ebelskiver pan from Williams-Sonoma (click the link and watch a video of how to make them!).  Ebelskiver are light, fluffy, filled pancakes, originating in Denmark.   I was a little bit afraid that they would be difficult, and they were more difficult than regular pancakes, but they were very good, and I’d like to try some different fillings to see what’s what.  We used it for the first time this morning, using a Williams-Sonoma pancake mix, strawberry and raspberry jams, and powdered sugar. Mix your favorite…

One of my gifts at Christmas was this cookbook, which promises to provide us with many yummy meals, though they do seem to have a lot of ingredients, and may not be terribly simple. I know many people love Jamie Oliver, think he’s cute and sexy and so on…me, his mouth bugs me too much. I guess I’m like a Seinfeld character, in that any lame thing can be enough to keep my amorous feelings at bay. I mean, I can barely love Curtis Stone, with his heavy breathing while he cooks…Thankfully, my real life love isn’t a heavy breather, and has a completely normal mouth, that doesn’t look like…