This posting shows the current way I have been making pie crusts, most recently for blueberry and pecan pies. It is an adaptation of the Easy Pie Dough recipe from Serious Eats, and includes some useful tricks to get a flaky crust. This is the first pie dough I made where I felt that the Read More …
In St. Louis, pork butts are commonly cut into steaks and grilled. In the rest of the country, this is not common, although we were able to get the butcher at Kroger to do this for us. If pork butt steaks are unavailable, the alternatives are to cut a boneless pork butt into steaks, or Read More …
We had a zillion blueberries around the house after some blueberry picking, so Carol suggested I make blueberry ice cream. Here is the result, which was adapted from a recipe for cherry ice cream in The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. The key step to this is to properly make the custard base. ¾ cup Read More …
Since we have quite a lot of blueberries in the house right now, Carol asked me to make a batch of blueberry muffins for breakfast. This version is adapted from Mary Meade’s Country Cookbook, which is a good source for standard mid-20th century Midwestern cuisine, since the author was the longtime food editor of Read More …
After making a batch of Tasso a few days ago, I was looking for a dish to use it in and hit on jambalaya, the Cajun dish of meat, vegetables, and rice. In the true spirit of jambalaya, I used what I had on hand, which were bags of frozen chicken wings and shrimp in Read More …
Tasso is a spiced and smoked ham which is used as an ingredient in a number of Cajun dishes, such as jambalaya. When I bought a pork butt for carnitas, I found that that butts were all about 8 lbs. even though I only wanted 4 lbs. for the carnitas. I ended up Read More …
After reading all the buzz about Instant Pots, I bought one on sale almost a year ago, and it sat in the box in my study while I finally got up the nerve to try to figure out all its controls. My initial use of the Instant Pot was to make Smothered Country Ribs, which Read More …
Fusion cuisine at its finest! We had some left over Skillet Pork Bulgogi, and used it in a bahn mi, which made an excellent lunch. French bread roll Sriracha mayonnaise Skillet Pork Bulgogi Vietnamese Pickled Daikon and Carrot Jalapeno slices Cilantro Hoisin sauce Slice most of the way through the bread roll. Read More …
Since summer is a good time for grilling, here is a salad in which most of the ingredients are grilled, including the corn which is in season and cheap at the supermarket. The idea for this was in Fine Cooking magazine, and this recipe was scaled for 2 people 2 large ears of corn, Read More …
Lately, there have been a number of ideas that the conventional order of steps in cooking can be reversed with good results. A good example of this is cooking meat through and then searing it (the reverse sear) which using sous-vide equipment is now my favorite way of cooking steak. I recently saw an Read More …