Faux French Toast

One of the best things you cna do is make breakfast for that special someone the morning after, I mean you were a complete gentleman slept on the couch now try to win her over by making her breakfast, one that is super simple and make you look... well like ME!

I think "Absolut" Genius is the right term to be coined for coming up with this! no not breakfast the morning after i stole that from some schmaltzy romantic comedy i was forced to watch one.... this recipe is super simple, and great. No i mean Really, i would put out for myself this recipe is that great!

FAUX FRENCH TOAST
1 loaf of Brioche,
if in Seattle get Macrina Bakeries, get it the day before, and what ever you to SLICE IT BY HAND! thick!
1 Peach, ripe, pitted and and cut into wedges
8 Strawberries, tops off and quartered
1 lime, zest only needed, use a microplane zester if you have one!
1 teaspoon, Sugar
2 pats butter, Soften, really good butter, I like President Salted for this occasion
5 Tablespoons Strawberry Jam, or preserve, if you can find it Strawberry-Rhubarb

Directions:
Slice 2 slices of bread about 3/4 inch thick or just as wide as will fit into your Toaster then place it in the toaster, and Toast the bread (i told you this was going to be easy), i like it a bit on the darker side. While that is being toasted in a bowl, toss Sugar, fruit, and micro planed zest of that lime all together let sit for a min while waiting on that slow toaster( if you have a bit of vodka, or rum throw a splash in, hair of the dog!) Once the bread has finshed up butter it and put the jam on it then place that wonderful fruit salad on it and serve it!

There you go let me know how this goes!

Kitchen Essentials

Think you need a fancy mixer, top-of-the-line cookware, and expensive knives to cook at home? Think again. My grandmother did plenty of cooking in kitchens stocked with a few essential items, and not much else. I have put together a list of the top kitchen essentials. And because i have tested a lot knives, pots, pans, and gadgets over the years, they've found plenty of bargain models that offer superior performance at a reasonable price.
Here are the basic items you need in any kitchen. Best of all, you can buy all of them for less than $150. Perfect for the college grad, the new cook, or the seasoned one looking for a fresh start. So make room in your drawers!

Chef's knife
Why you need it: It's the most useful knife in any cook's arsenal. A must for chopping and slicing vegetables, mincing garlic and herbs, and cutting meat.
What to look for: A gently curved blade facilitates the rocking motion necessary to mince or chop foods. Molded plastic handles are easier to keep clean and more comfortable. Avoid handles with ergonomic bumps or pebbled finishes. I like F.Dick 1905 series and 10 inches is more than enough, but go ahead and try 12 inches if you think you can handle it!

Large skillet
Why you need it: cooking steaks, chops, and cutlets. Good for vegetables, too. The most important pan in your kitchen.
What to look for: For maximum browning (and maximum flavor), you want stainless steel with an aluminum core (known as a clad pan) or an aluminum disk — both improve heat distribution. Look for a pan with flared sides, which speed evaporation and keeps food from steaming in their own juices. Should have heavy bottom and handle that can under the broiler or in the oven.

Cast-iron skillet
Why you need it: For delicate jobs, like frying an egg or cooking fish, or small jobs, like searing a single steak.
What to look for: You could buy a nonstick skillet and be prepared to replace it every few years as the coating wears off, but a pre-seasoned cast-iron pan does just as well and will last a lifetime. In the old days, you needed to season cast-iron pans yourself — a messy process that involves rubbing the pan with oil and heating and cooling it several times. Now, many manufacturers are doing the seasoning for you. This heavy pan creates a great crust on steaks (or cornbread) and with a few uses it will become almost as good as nonstick, so you can scramble or fry eggs with ease. Wash with hot water (no soap or scrubbers), dry thoroughly, and rub with oil to keep rusting at bay.

Saucepan
Why you need it: It's for more than just sauces and gravies. Use this pot to cook rice, boil vegetables, or make a small batch of soup.
What to look for: We like easy-to-clean, nonreactive stainless steel and find that 3 to 4 quarts is the best size. Make sure to buy a pan with an aluminum core or disk (which improves heat distribution). Look for a pan with a long handle that allows you to lift the pot — even when it's full.

Large soup/pasta pot
Why you need it: How else are you going to boil a pound of pasta, cook corn on the cob, or make a big batch of chili.
What to look for: Stainless steel is easy to clean and as long as the pot comes with aluminum core it will distribute heat evenly. Make sure handles tilt upward so they sit well in your hand when you go to pour out the contents. And make sure to buy a pot with a lid — many soup pots are sold without one.

Jellyroll pan, or Good Baking Sheet Pan
Why you need it: This one pan can be used to roast potatoes or a whole chicken or bake a batch of cookies or biscuits. What to look for: A bigger pan (preferably one 18 by 13 inches and at least 1 inch deep) is the most versatile size. Avoid nonstick surfaces — they cause cookies to overbrown and can't be used with roasting racks. A heavy-gauge, light-colored aluminum pan is your best bet.

Cutting board
Why you need it: You can't cut on your countertop!
What to look for:I love Wooden, BOOS Blocks to be exact, but i also like plastic because you can throw the dirty board in the dishwasher. Easy to sanitize and remove odors, such as onion and garlic. Although you can pick up good boards almost anywhere, we really like the counter-gripping feet on a nonskid cutting board. Choose the largest board that will fit in your dishwasher

Mixing Bowls
Why You need it: do i really have to tell you why you need a mixing bowl?
What to look for: Metal, i like to go to restaurant supply store and but a set that have differnt sizes and can be used for mixing batters, using as a double boiler, mixing salads etc just a good thing to have

Cast Iron/ Enammal Braser (le Cruset)
Why you need it: This is a fully functional pot, pan, can cook 100% on the stove, and or just put it straight into the oven, and for hearty winter dishes, stew this is what you want!
What to look for: LE CRUSET! get that brand it is worth the investment!

Chicken With Almonds & Stone Fruits

One doesn’t have to be a gourmet chef, using complex ingredients, to come up with creative dishes. After all, that’s the purpose of this site.
In this recipe chicken breasts are served with apricot, Plums, necterines and almonds, making for a simple but elegant main course.

Difficulty: Easy
Ingredients
4 chicken breasts, skinless, boneless
1/2 cup sliced almonds, raw or roasted
1 each apricot, pitted and cut into 1/8th
1 each plum, pitted and cut into 1/8th
1 each Necterine, pitted and cut into 1/8th
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon fancy mustard
1 tablespoon butter
cooking spray or vegetable oil

Instructions
Lightly oil a casserole or baking dish and put chicken in it. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes. If you bought raw almonds you’ll need to toast them by putting them in a separate baking dish and putting them in the oven, stirring twice, for about 10 minutes (don’t let them burn!)
While the chicken is baking combine the stone fruits, soy sauce, mustard and butter over medium heat until lightly cooked about 5-7 min. Pour this sauce over the chicken and continue to bake the chicken until cooked through, about another 10 minutes.
You can serve the chicken as is or glaze the sauce by putting the sauce-covered chicken under a broiler, basting once, for about 3 minutes. Before serving sprinkle the chicken with the almonds.
Serves 4

Beyond the Recipe
Oven-roasted potatoes with a balsamic vinegar flavoring would be nice.

Cooking and Dating: From the Guys point of view

COOKING GUYS are different from Young Women...

This is a much remarked-upon phenomenon, the Mars-Venus stuff, and one which causes considerable difficulty for Guys, and probably also for Young Women. But what until now has not been fully understood, by this ME, anyway, is how this concept applies to a particularly, and unexpectedly, treacherous area: cuisine.

There are Guys who have reached a state of evolution, at which they are real foodies. We are talking guys who have more knives than the Turkish army, and sharper; keeping the Larousse Gastronomique at hand to check references; settling down in the easy chair of an evening to browse through "The New Professional Chef," the cookbook of the Culinary Institute of America, and owning pots and pans in the exact size and composition for each task (cast iron, enamel-clad cast iron, copper-lined with a combination of zinc and tin, Calphalon, and so on).

Such Guys view food as a celebration of life, an art form, an expression of warm feelings, a precious gift and offering. A fully objective analysis would also disclose what the military calls collateral effect: this could impress babes. Some Young Women, it seems, view food as a hostile entity whose sole intent is to produce fat on their thighs.

What we have here is a hidden discontinuity.

In large part, this is due to the fact that Guys approach food as they do most things. Like, for example, sports. When a Guy starts cooking, he wants to be the Joe Montana of mousse, the Michael Jordan of julienne, the Cal Ripken Jr. of roasting. I mean, this is serious stuff.

Consider the following.

I am having dinner with a Young Woman, nice place. She is suspiciously poking a fork at the goo on her pan-roasted free-range chicken with garlic and rosemary. What he is not noticing is that she is herding it into concealment under a radicchio leaf.

"It's not bad for something based on a roux," I note. "Personally, I would prefer to do it as a reduction sauce."

Reduction, what, the Young Woman is thinking. The gravy is on sale?

So, now having craftily insinuated that he can cook, I am very pleased when the Young Woman innocently suggests that perhaps, sometime, I might like to make dinner for her. I am saying to myself, "Heh, heh." Indeed, as the great M. F. K. Fisher noted of bachelors, in "An Alphabet for Gourmets," "The wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining room aplomb and kitchen chaos" demonstrate that "their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual."

YES SEXUAL! Cooking is a lot more than what we are cooking, and or eating, it is about the expeiance, who we are cooking for, and eating with, we as guys love the one night stand but hell the chance to do it over and over again, bring it on!

Making a dinner for that Young Woman, going to the market with her, is like fore play. "What's that?" the Young Woman asks in alarm. "That thing is ugly."

"Celery root, what the French call celeriac," I say, while grabbing a bunch of containers of heavy cream and a brick of unsalted butter.

I am cooking duck, and you hear her mind churn, and shrills "F-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-T," It was truly amazing, I would reflect later, how many syllables could fit into a three-letter word, particularly when spread over six octaves.

The duck is working. I deglaze the pan with the cassis vinegar and then throws in berries. A big glob of butter into a frying pan with the fresh rosemary to finish a 1-minute, 37-second boil. O.K., the celeriac, in the food processor. Celery root, some turnip, touch of mustard, big pour of cream for the texture. Yeah, cream; throw in some more.
"What are you doing?" the Young Woman asks.
Dimly, somewhere back in the far reaches of my brain, there is a tingling. These are the old synapses, the innate instincts that over the eons have warned Guys of the approach of saber-toothed tigers, bosses and ex-girlfriends. Danger lurks.

"Celery, this is celery," I explain. "Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, that's all they eat, celery."

"Not like that," the Young Woman replies, with considerable accuracy.

So, O.K. I get obsessive. But be fair; there are two sides to this.

The other side is the ambivalence with which the modern Young Woman views food. Above all, there is the question of appearances, and we're not just talking about thighs. There are actual documented cases in which Young Women have delicately picked at a perfectly good meal in public, then sneaked home to gorge on junk food. This ambiguity almost always manifests itself when a Young Woman tells me that her favorite foods come from something called "The Moosewood Cookbook," which strangely appeals to many admirable women. This is not a book about food. It is about vegetables.

Mentioning "Moosewood" is the culinary equivalent of a Young Woman giving Me the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel "A Hundred Years of Solitude" so that I can really get in touch with my emotions. Again, a well-meaning gesture, but one that is fundamentally misinformed. If Guys were truly in touch with their emotions, particularly those whose nature is to be nasty, brutish and short, they would go around punching people out. It has taken centuries of being repressed to get this far. Don't mess with something when it's just starting to work. I really have nothing against vegetables. Vegetables have their place. It is right next to the meat. So there is a dilemma, I am a cooking man, and she is a young woman, what are these mars and venus to do when dealing with the dilemma....?

There is a way out of this dilemma, expressed in an old Irish proverb: Call out for Chinese.

Bachelor in the Kitchen

I know there are a lot of guys out there, and hell for that matter a lot of women as well who have trouble boiling water! so what is a better way to spend my time and help the novice in the kitchen. so after a few basics, know what to look for you to will be making meals that are not only taste great, be good for you, and well maybe even help you out.....

Cooking is really simple, really if you are reading this BLOG you can cook. So best of luck in your kitchen and please feel free to ask me any quesitons you may have!

Brian