Cooking Like a TV Chef

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...

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...