When we were in the throes of a Gordon Ramsey YouTube bender a while back we happened across this video:

We don’t eat Beef very often. Mostly we just can’t afford it since really good Beef is significantly more expensive than really good Chicken (and we deserve the best, goldurnit!). Thus, more often than not – and in spite of multi-million dollar ad campaigns to the contrary – its actually Chicken that’s “what’s for dinner” in our house (sorry, Beef). Read more »

As with most of the food ideas we have, this soup started out as something completely different. Originally, it was a recipe from Emeril for Garlic-roasted Asparagus that we were asked to make for Easter. That recipe was deceptively simple: toss the Asparagus with some crushed/minced Garlic, Olive Oil, and Salt & Pepper and roast it until golden brown – about 10 minutes or so. It was very similar in execution to our Rosemary Roasted Asparagus only Emeril finished it with a squeeze of fresh Lemon Juice.

We loved the freshness that the Lemon added to the Asparagus, and since we’d been wanting to make some Asparagus soup for quite a while we decided to borrow heavily from the Easter recipe ala Emeril.

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As a rule, we don’t eat a lot of bread. We like sammiches an such well enough but we’ve sort of mostly just fallen out of the habit. The most glaringly obvious exception to this are these dangerously delicious little Garlic Crostini.

These are crunchy, mildly salty and garlicky perfection. They rock as an appetizer with Aioli, Hummus, or whatever and we love them in pretty much every soup we make. They also make a fun twist on croutons and go great with Caesar Salad. And, to top it all off, they’re the perfect base for Bruschetta. Read more »

The foodie magazine Bon Appetit recently had a great cover shot of a chili made with Beef Brisket and Butternut Squash that looked incredible. We thought it was really inspiring, but we don’t normally keep whole Beef Briskets lying around so we had to come up with something on our own that would round out the dish a bit.

If you like Bon Appetit like we do then you should also check out Cook’s Illustrated which is basically the print version of the PBS show America’s Test Kitchen (or vice versa). They recently had a special issue all about classic soups and stews. Included among them was a recipe for Chili con Carne that had some great instructions for making your own Chile Powder from scratch using those dried, store-bought, pre-bagged Chilis you can find in the Ethnic Foods section of your grocery store. We thought there might be some potential for greatness if we combined aspects of both recipes into one great dish. Read more »

Having never roasted a Chicken before (can you believe it?), we decided that it was high time we gave it a shot. Man oh man, we won’t be waiting very long before we do this again, that’s for sure. It was awesome! Moist and really, really flavorful and way better than we expected for a first try.

Like most things we’ve been slow (ie: too scared) to try, we kind of thought there might be more of a trick to this than there really was. Sister Amy made it sound like something we could probably manage so we summoned up the courage to give it a go.

After poring through about a million recipes on the internet we cobbled one together that sounded to us like a pretty sure thing: slide some Butter and Thyme under the skin, stuff the bird with bunches of fresh Thyme, Lemon wedges, and smashed cloves of Garlic, and then drizzle the whole thing with Olive Oil and Salt & Pepper. Yes, it really was just about that easy… Read more »