I first fell in love with cooking when I improvised a pasta with cream sauce dinner for my high school girlfriend and my family. In retrospect, it was a mashup of a carbonara and an alfredo sauce, but I had no clear idea of what I was doing. I certainly wasn’t following any recipe. It turned out well! To my shock.
But I really fell down the food rabbit hole during the year I spent working as a network administrator during my year off between high school in college. I confess, it was Iron Chef, the original run. When college rolled around, I went to a small college outside of Philadelphia, and to soothe my rattled nerves, my dad took me to Iron Chef Morimoto’s first U.S. restaurant. I still dream about the wasabi sorbet palate cleanser.
Since then, well, I’ve accumulated cookbooks and knives at an alarming rate. My most prized possession is my grandmother’s oak butcher block (it’s heavy as hell, and I almost certainly pulled some muscle or ligament hauling up to my third story walk-up). My second most prized possession is my Misono UX-10 Gyuto. And I have a Vitamix and an ice cream machine for some reason?
At any rate, I’ve learned in professional kitchens and worked as a whole animal butcher, and I cook to care for the people I care about. This blog is my informal attempt to document some of the techniques I’ve learned (or failed at repeatedly before learning) and recipes I prepare. Welcome to my small, virtual kitchen.
“A northwest wind had driven the thundershower out of the county and left in the air a poignant chill, and when they went out of the piazza after dinner to watch the sun go down, there a hundred clouds in the west—clouds of gold, clouds of silver, clouds like bone and tinder and filth under the bed.”
—”A Summer Farmer,” John Cheever