cooking

Gluten-Free Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo

And here it is, one of my most treasured and well-known recipes (at least to my family and friends). I’ve been making Fettuccine Alfredo in this same manner since I first learned how to make it nearly fifteen years ago.

While pasta dishes tossed with butter and cheese have been around for a long time, the term “Fettuccine Alfredo” is based on the signature dish of Alfredo Di Lelio’s restaurant (aptly named “Alfredo”) which opened in Rome, Italy in 1914. American tourists grew to love the dish and bring it back here to the US; while we Americans often add ingredients like chicken, shrimp, mushrooms, or broccoli to the dish, it’s commonly served without add-ins elsewhere in the world.

Read Full Article

Shrimp Scampi

It may sound funny, but “scampi” is actually the culinary name for Nephrops Norvegicus, commonly known as the Norway lobster or Dublin Bay prawn. In Europe (Britain and Italy especially) “scampi” refers to the tail meat of this small lobster. Here in the US the word “scampi” most often refers to a style of preparation involving butter, garlic, and white wine used mainly with shrimp. However, I’ve seen “chicken scampi” in several restaurant menus, which often incites a chuckle.

I love making this dish because it’s both easy and decadent; it’s not often you can make something so delicious in just 20 minutes using ingredients you probably mostly have at home already.

Read Full Article

Product Review: Cappello’s Gluten-Free, Grain-Free Pasta

I was recently asked by the fine folks at Cappello’s to try out their unique line of fresh gluten-free, grain-free pasta, and I was excited to get my hands on their product. First of all, I have a special place in my heart for Italian dishes; I started to realize that I was pretty good at this whole “cooking” thing when I first started to focus on and perfect a few Italian meals, many years ago. Secondly, while we do eat dishes using boxed rice noodles from time to time, nothing beats fresh pasta.

The pasta is made using mainly egg and almond flour, and has a taste and consistency that is the best I’ve experienced from a non-wheat product. Read on for some more pictures and details, and I will have the recipes for each of these products up on the site over the next two weeks.

Read Full Article

Simple Basil Pesto

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

Pesto has an interesting history. Its name comes from a Genoese (Northern Italy) word that means to crush or pound, implying the use of mortar and pestle. In fact, the English word “pestle” has the same root. While pastes have been used in Italy since the Ancient Roman times, basil wasn’t introduced until later, from Africa (via India), and the modern interpretation of basil pesto dates back only to the 19th century. In fact, pesto didn’t even gain popularity in the United States until the latter half of the 20th century.

Basil pesto is great because it is a fool-proof way to spice up many pasta dish, or even sautéed vegetables. I often add a spoonful of it to many sauces, including alfredo or spaghetti sauce (blasphemy, right?) for a subtle extra kick.

Read Full Article

Bangers and “Mash” (Colcannon)

Bangers and mash is a traditional English dish and the quintessential “pub food”; it can be made for large groups of people at once with relative ease. This isn’t your standard bangers and mash dish since it’s typically served with beef or pork sausage and mashed potatoes, and I’m being crazy and using lamb sausage and colcannon. Regardless, this dish still has the same desired effect: it’s a hearty, savory dish that really hits the spot on a rainy day.

A perfect sausage for this dish was Lava Lake Lamb’s Rosemary and Garlic Sausage, which had a rich sausage flavor but was only slightly “lamby” in taste – in the end it was an excellent pairing of this savory sausage and the mild, buttery colcannon.

Read Full Article

Colcannon

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

Although there are variations of potato/kale combos found all over Europe, I’m inclined to believe that the Irish variation, colcannon, is grandaddy of them all. First of all, the Irish basically own the creative rights to cabbage. The Romans introduced cabbage to most of Europe back in the day, except that when they got to Ireland it was already there! By tracing the word for cabbage linguistically, it appears that cabbage has been a part of the Irish (well, Celt at the time) diet since the Iron age. Potatoes weren’t introduced to Europe until the 16th Century, with the Irish and French being the first to really embrace them, and so colcannon came about sometime thereafter.

Although colcannon is treated as a St. Patrick’s Day dish here in the US, it’s traditionally a Halloween dish in Ireland. Some families would put a plate of colcannon outside their front door with a large chunk of butter in the middle to feed ghosts/fairies that were passing by. It also was closely related to marriage divination, in that trinkets (wedding rings, coins) would be hidden in the colcannon and the girl that found the trinket would be the next to marry.

Read Full Article

Lettuce Chips

It might sound crazy, but you can totally make lettuce chips. Google it. It’s a thing!

Lettuce chips have a distinct taste to them – they retain a hint of bitterness, and just about melt in your mouth. They’re impossibly delicate so you’ll probably end up eating them all in one sitting instead of trying to store them without crushing everything. My technique for cooking them involved a quick bake in the oven, but I bet you could get the same effect with a food dehydrator for a longer period of time.

Read Full Article

Roasted Pork Sirloin

I have a confession to make: it’s not often that I invent a recipe out of thin air. Usually I tend to re-create tried-and-true traditional dishes using a wide array of sources. However, with today’s recipe – a roasted pork sirloin – I made the whole thing up, mostly out of necessity. Although there are a lot of recipes out there for how to cook pork sirloin, many of them looked less than great, and there didn’t seem to be a universal approach to cooking this cut of pig.

I chose to tackle this dish for another reason, as well: it’s a fairly affordable cut of pork. That seems like a tragedy – to have an affordable, readily-available selection of meat available but no tasty method of preparation – and I wanted to fill that vacuum. Luckily, US Wellness Meats agreed with me, and let me try out one of their 4-lb. Pork Sirloin Roasts.

Read Full Article

Homemade, Sugar-Free Barbecue Rub

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

If you’ve taken a look at the ingredients list of your favorite barbecue rub, you may have been surprised to see that many commercially-available rubs have some form of sugar in them. There are definitely sugar-free rubs to be found, but wouldn’t it be better to just make some of your own?

This recipe is courtesy of my friend Jeremy, who has his own Kansas City Barbeque Society competition team, SeaDog BBQ. This rub has a nice, even taste with a hint of spice thanks to its use of chipotle powder.

Yields about 3/4 cup.

Read Full Article

Gluten-Free, Homemade Gyro Meat (γύρος)

Gyro meat, often referred to as doner or shawarma meat, is simply meat roasted on a rotating vertical spit and shaved off. Most Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern countries have some variation of this dish as a common street food. Depending on where you’re getting it, the meat can be made of lamb, beef, goat, chicken or a combination of meats. It’s one of my favorite meats of all time, and one that’s not easily replicated at home without a rotisserie setup. Lava Lake Lamb was gracious enough to send me some ground lamb recently, so I thought it was time to try and figure out how to make it on my own.

I spent a lot of time researching how to make authentic gyro meat at home, and in the end I found that Alton Brown’s approach was just about perfect. It involves processing the meat to make a thick paste, which is then stored for a couple hours before being cooked on the grill using a rotisserie or in the oven using a meatloaf pan. I went with the meatloaf pan variation with just a few adjustments, and it was awesome.

Read Full Article