Cooking Techniques and Kitchen Gadgets

I am a Toaster Oven Top Chef. I’m by no means a professional like the wunderkinder you see on Bravo’s reality TV cooking showdown. I don’t have a fully stocked kitchen. I only own four knives. And although technically my kitchen has a real oven, it’s so marred with unidentifiable char no amount of Easy Off cleaning products could restore it to a serviceable condition. What I do have is the heart of a champion, and the spirit of a competitor.

My cooking challenges may not be as fancy as Bravo’s “Cook the Last Meal of a Master of the Culinary World” or “Imitate the Delicate Flavors of a Fish Dish from Le Bernardin” (though I did enjoy the episode when the Top Chefs had to cook a holiday meal using only a convection oven—been there) but they are very real. It’s the end of the week and your grocery supply is dwindling. All you have are 3 eggs, wonton wrappers, the stale end of a sourdough baguette, 1/3 cup shredded cheddar, frozen soy sausage, spices, olive oil, and a tomato. Okay. Go.

If your idea of a good time is to peruse a calendar of naked men (and definitely of a certain age) then join the Gentlemen of the Garden at their next outdoor bash in Palm Beach. No? Do it anyway – the party is a hoot!

It’s not every night that one can whoop it up with 100 caring but crazy gentlemen dedicated to maintaining the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach. Count on near naked dress codes among some of them, but also count on a dinner menu not usually found in the best books on Entertaining Lavishly – I rather favor their homemade tamales… but that is another story.

This story revolves around a pair of GoGs that love life, putti, fruit trees, and home cooking! It can’t get better than that!

David Miller and Ray Wakefield have been growing exotic fruit bearing trees for decades, and the line waiting for Ray’s Calamondin Marmalade features some of Palm Beach’s most famous Swans!

So what trees do they have you ask? Over the years – Calamondin, carambola, mango (OMG the Florida mangos are drop dead wonderful this time of year) avocado, kumquat, loquat, Meyer lemon, sapote, guava (which apparently makes divine jam if it weren’t for the thin skin and tedious process) grapefruit, sour orange and perhaps the most exotic of all - monstera deliciosa! (Not sure about you, but I insist all my monstera be deliciosa! No?)

From the LA Times

Meghan and Carter are getting married. Like so many friends of my daughter, they are bright, funny and, sometimes, almost preternaturally serious. A couple of weeks ago, they asked my wife if we would talk to them about how to stay married — and about how to cook.

The first, I'll leave to Kathy; after almost 34 years, it's still a mystery to me. But the cooking part is right up my alley, and, even better, I figured it would give me a chance to try out some of the ideas I've been on a soapbox about for the last couple of years.

A basic knowledge of cooking — not the intricacies of fancy restaurant dishes or the parsing of various ethnic cuisines — seems to me to be fundamental to a happy life, whatever your relationship status. A good meal gives such great joy, why would you want to leave it to the hands of a stranger?

So Sunday night, Meghan and Carter came to the house for a cooking class. But instead of doing the usual thing and walking them through a couple of recipes, I wanted to try something different. I love recipes as much as the next guy, but it does seem to me that they are an imperfect way to learn to cook. Sure, a well-written recipe can teach you how to re-create a specific dish, but that's a different thing from actually knowing how to cook, isn't it?

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I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have fresh garlic in my kitchen ready to smash, mince, chop or slice to use for culinary enjoyment. I’ve got cookbooks devoted to garlic and file folders bulging with recipes that include several bold, pungent cloves of the stinking rose.

When I started buying garlic from local growers at the farmers market several years ago, I realized how much better it tasted than the bulbs I had been bringing home from the grocery store. Four or five years ago I attended the Minnesota Garlic Festival for the first time. That’s when I got the bug to try growing some of my own. It took me a few years to finally take the first step — getting some garlic to plant.

Early last Fall, just in time for garlic planting in northern Minnesota, a box of beautiful heads of garlic arrived at my door. Travel, busy work days and wet weather prevented the small garden plot (really a bed of weeds) that I had selected for my garlic crop from getting tilled and enriched with new soil.