Recipes....

Well, my cooking experience has come from recipes. The only thing I learned to make from my parents was tomato sauce and breakfast. I do make a mean bacon and eggs. My fried eggs have hot bacon fat spooned over them before I flip them. It's a delicious ticket to the cath lab, I know, but I don't cook breakfast every day!

My father taught me how to make sauce, and I added a few things from another recipe I found in the Sopranos Family Cookbook. I enjoy making tomato sauce (we never called it "gravy" by the way) and I have enjoyed making pasta dishes. I started branching out after I saw Emeril cook Coq au Vin and Chicken Cacciatore on the Food Network.

I took my first cooking class in New Orleans at the New Orleans School of Cooking. This was a hands on course where we made authentic Cajun dishes. During our first class we made chicken and andouille gumbo, jambalaya, shrimp remoullade and bread pudding with a bourbon sauce. I went back twice more and learned how to make seafood gumbo, barbecue shrimp, grillades and grits and bananas foster. I have all of these recipes and continue to cook cajun food, including a real crawfish boil (in New England).

My next advance in cooking took place after discovering Julia Childs and Michael Schlow. Julia Childs is the renowned French Chef and was the first successful T.V. chef. Her dishes are classic French cuisine made approachable and intuitive. I highly recommend her book "The Way to Cook".

Michael Schlow is the executive chef of Boston's premier restaurant the Radius. It was at the Radius that I truly discovered food and learned about food and wine pairings. He also has a cookbook which explains how to make some great dishes in your own kitchen. It is an incredible accomplishment to reproduce some of the amazing dishes that we enjoy at the Radius.

Jeanine has taught me a lot about cooking. She is an intuitive cook. She doesn't use recipes. I still look at recipes, but I have started to take what I know from recipes and experiment without a net. It's great fun to create something that is a variation of a recipe or an improvement on one, or, in some cases, a major catastrophe.

We will present recipes in this blog, but hopefully some perspective. We are not chefs, but we love cooking at home. We use an old electric range and some budget pots and pans. We shop at Price Choppers, Stew Leonard's and (rarely) at Whole Foods. Hopefully you will see something you like and try it out. Let us know what happens!

-jd