The Basics

My basic premise is that cooking a great meal shouldn’t be hard to do.  The whole “foodie” movement and the desire to emulate celebrity chefs has driven some sort of one-upmanship in the kitchen with people striving to use exotic ingredients and complicated preparations.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the outputs, but I don’t have time for it.

This blog is simply about the techniques, the shortcuts and the approaches I’ve learned making some pretty awesome meals.

General Assumptions Behind All Recipes

If you’re new to this blog, you may notice most of my entries seem lightly documented around the actual recipes themselves.  I won’t tell you to “salt and pepper to taste” or remind you to preheat your oven.  There are a number of assumptions behind all of my recipes

Building a Great Kitchen Bookshelf

I sure didn’t figure all of this out on my own.  I’ve read a ton of books and have included links to the ones that are most helpful to me and that I still reference on a regular basis.  Several of them, like Charlie Trotter’s Gourmet Cooking for Dummies, really get down to the basics of making great dishes and explain it really well.  They aren’t just books of recipes by celebrity chefs.

My Core Cooking Tenets

If you want even more detail into what I’m thinking, this is the philosophy behind what I do in the kitchen.  These are the tenets behind keeping it simple, but still making it awesome.

Food Photography Tips

I think my pictures are getting better all the time with more and more practice.  They’ve improved a ton from when I started.  Here are some highlights of what I’ve learned – and a great resource for reading more about improving your food photography