Cooking Like a TV Chef

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...

Wontons folded several different ways and arranged in a bamboo steamer basket Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2012. Do not copy. There are probably as many different wonton recipes as there are cooks in China. Like curries, every cook adds their own flair. Wontons make a great party appetizer or a component of a larger meal. They can also be used to make soup. Although they can be fried, I find that steamed wontons retain more of the flavor of the ingredients. My son was home from college for the holidays and requested that we make some of his favorite meals while he was home as a refresher from college food hall fare. Dad's wontons were on his list, so I took the opportunity to jot down my recipe and take a few photos of the process for this blog. A standard package of wonton wrappers from the grocery store contains about 52 wrappers, this recipe will give you enough filling for an entire package with a little safety margin which can be made into Asian meatballs. Won...

To a large extent, I think our food preferences are dictated by the foods of our childhood. That's not to say we can't learn to love foods that we never tasted until adulthood, but I think when it comes down to comfort food, we hearken back to foods that are associated with comfortable memories of our early years. For me, there are two particular culinary memories that I recall. Both involve my grandmother, who was born in 1911 and lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. She was, let's say, more than a little frugal. One of the first food memories that I have was a coffee can full of used grease, bacon grease mostly, that my grandmother kept. Whenever she fried anything or needed to grease a pan (except for baking, of course), she would take the can out from the storage bin under the stove and spoon out a big portion of grease. Likewise, whenever she cooked bacon or hamburgers or anything that left grease in the pan, it would be poured into the coffee can ...

As the latest season of "The Next Food Network Star" comes to a close, I just wanted to take a minute to highlight the difference between a Food Network Star and the average good home chef. Both of the finalists on the television show are what I would call niche cooks. Jeff is the self-styled "sandwich king" who says you can turn any sandwich into a meal and any meal into a sandwich. Susie's Food Network show concept is "Spice it Up," a show about adding a little extra flare to traditional Mexican cooking.  Those are great concepts for television shows or cookbooks, but each represents only a single facet of what a good cook delivers at home. We all make sandwiches and learning how to turn leftovers into a sandwich for lunch the next day is a skill we'd all love to have. Let's face it though, if we served sandwiches for every meal, we'd face a dining room rebellion before too long. Similarly, Susie brings her Mexican heritage to the kitch...

Basic crème br û l é e, ready to serve Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011, all rights reserved One of the advantages of being a TV chef is that you generally have access to every kitchen appliance and gadget known to man. Most of us who cook at home for friends and family simply don’t have all of the high tech gear we see on shows like Iron Chef .  There are, however, a number of inexpensive gadgets that we can accumulate over time, which can help us to prepare and present our dishes like a TV chef or like a top quality restaurant. For example, if you watch many cooking shows, you’ve undoubtedly seen one or more TV chefs using a torch. Although it is possible with considerable practice to use a blow torch from the tool shed to achieve the same effect. The size and extreme heat of such a large torch makes it unwieldy, dangerous, and difficult to control, especially for delicate dishes like the restaurant dessert classic crème br û l é e. Sifting through the infr...

On the second night, Hell’s Kitchen started with a grilling challenge. Each team was divided into pairs and asked to cook four pieces of meat to different levels of doneness: one each at medium-rare, medium, medium-well, and well-done. In the end, it came down to Will who needed a perfect four for four in order to score the victory for the men’s team. Will was working alone because the men’s team had an odd number of members after losing Steven on the prior episode. Will came through with the perfect score. The women’s team was left to clean the grills used in the challenge and for lunch they were fed pureed beef. The meat cooked in the challenge was thrown in the blender and then served in a glass for lunch. Later they took delivery of a full side of beef to be completely broken down. The winning team, meanwhile, took a private jet to Palm Springs where they had a luxurious lunch with Gordon Ramsay who offered them advice on winning hell’s Kitchen. As most of the women prepared for th...