Cooking Like a TV Chef

The Larousse Gastronomique is a valuable addition to your kitchen library and, incidentally, makes a great gift for anyone who takes cooking seriously. Cooking, like any art-form or highly technical pursuit, comes with its own jargon, or terms which may be unfamiliar to those not formally trained.  Can you cook well without knowing these specialized words? Of course, but understanding the language used by the great chefs can make following and creating recipes much easier. The Gastronomique gives easy to understand explanations for thousands upon thousands of specialized cooking words. For example, if you go to a restaurant and have a dish called estouffade of beef and decide that you'd like to try to recreate it at home, it is helpful to know that "estouffade" means that the dish is stewed for along time. Armed with that knowledge, you'd plan for several hours of cooking time for this dish instead of getting caught short of time and going to plan B. The Larou...

Summer in the United States is barbecue season. Millions of home cooks fire up the grill, invite friends over, and cook outdoors. Whether it's a charcoal grill or a gas grill, the main point is to make a great show of putting some kind of meat over some kind of fire and proving one's outdoor skills to a gathering of family and friends. This recipe for barbecued shrimp is sure to delight your guests while offering something just a little more out of the ordinary than hamburgers and hot dogs. By placing the shrimp on skewers, you can bring the presentation level up a notch, but even without the skewers, they are sure to be a big hit. The sauce described below is my personal favorite basic sweet teriyaki. It is also great for beef or chicken. Yield: Four pounds of colossal shrimp makes 15-18 skewers with four shrimp per skewer. Your mileage may vary depending upon the size of the shrimp you use and the number of shrimp that you place on each skewer. Preparation: about 30 ...

In many of the television cooking competition reality shows, prospective chefs are tested on basic skills or made to perform repetitive tasks demonstrating that they are proficient at certain tasks. This could be something as simple as dicing an onion or something like shucking an oyster. Shucking oysters, in particular, has even been used as a team punishment for a team that lost the service on Hell's Kitchen. If you're not familiar with oysters, this can be a difficult task. Oysters have evolved for millions of years to prevent predators from getting their shells open. That protection is often quite effective against a novice chef. Fortunately, even novices are smarter than oysters and can learn to quickly shuck an oyster (remove it from the shell). First, oysters should be securely shut without broken shells. That's because they are still alive when you get them and should be holding the shell tightly closed with their abductor muscle. If the shell is open, the oys...

Great wines start with great grapes, but a serviceable wine can be made with grocery store ingredients and without special equipment. Photo by Brad Sylvester, all rights reserved. While many great dishes take a great deal of preparation and skill, some of the best home-cooking is relatively simple and made from simple ingredients. Home-made wine can be just as easy and can be made from common every day ingredients without any special equipment. We're not talking connoisseur level wine, but the end result is very drinkable and quite potent. Homemade wine is something many people want to try, but may seem too intimidating  to try on your own. This recipe is easy, cheap and nearly fool-proof. The best part is that like the little pop-up buttons on store bought turkeys, there's a nearly fool-proof indicator to let you know when that it's brewing properly and when the wine is complete and ready to taste. This recipe yields one gallon of a sweet white wine Equi...

Fiddlehead Ferns Photo by Brad Sylvester. Copyright 2012, all rights reserved. When one orders pesto in a restaurant, one expects the flavor of fresh basil. After all the classic basil pesto recipe is simply fresh basil, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, a little garlic, pine nuts, salt and pepper. Pesto, however, doesn't have to be made with basil. Parsley, cilantro, and a variety of fresh, flavorful greens can be used instead to provide twists on the classic pesto. Pesto, of course, is a thick sauce often used in place of tomato sauce on pasta, but also appropriate for many other dishes. It's great with chicken, with gnocchi, in place of mayo in a sandwich, with pork chops, in place of horseradish with beef, with fish or in almost any dish that can be enhanced by the addition of fresh garden flavors. Since it is springtime in New England, it is the only time of year that we can get fresh fiddlehead ferns. These are often available in the produce department of good grocery...

This is as close to canned mushroom soup as it gets in my kitchen. Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2012. Someone pointed me to a recipe for Egg Foo Yung sauce that consisted of mixing one can of mushroom soup with 3 tablespoons of soy sauce and then heating the mixture. I was appalled. In my kitchen, that doesn't qualify as a recipe, as cooking, or as egg foo yung sauce. I took it as a personal challenge, and came up with the following egg foo yung sauce recipe. First, let's get the spelling out of the way. I've seen this dish referred to as egg foo yung, egg fu yong, egg foo young and all possible permutations of fu, foo, yong, yung, and young. You can use whichever you prefer since it is simply someone's best judgment as to which sounds more like the original Chinese words from which the name is derived. For consistency, I'll use egg foo yung, throughout this blog. Egg foo yung is traditionally an egg dish containing vegetables and meats and fried in...