Cooking Monster

2½ cups lukewarm water a couple teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon yeast 4 cup  flour Combine in a non-stick pot, stir with a spatula until gooey dough forms. Put on lid, and proof at room temp for 60-90 minutes. Stir the dough to break the first rise. Put on lid, and…

“Bowl of red,” “Randall,” and “Sikparazzi.” bowl of red n. The fact that a Texas “bowl of red,” as chili is commonly called, has no original relationship with past didn’t matter. Randall n. Wayne decided to attach a bag of NZ Cascade hops to one of his taps- apparently this…

It was one year ago today that this blog was born. In that time, there have been 165 posts, or one post every 2 days, on average. The site has received 77 legitimate comments, and 743 spam comments, all of which were deleted. Cooking Monster has received nearly 54,000 unique…

I just tried a new technique for taking a relatively inexpensive cut of beef (the eye round roast) and turning it into a juicy and flavorful roast beef dinner. As usual for the meals I post about here, it’s not fast, since it takes about 30 hours total, but it’s…

A week or two ago, I posted a link to Gourmet magazine’s website that listed 60+ years worth of cookie recipes, which is really, really great, unless your intent is to make stuff to send to far off relatives. Almost all the cookies on their list rely on you making…

Daily Lunch is a japanese site detailing one obsessive artist’s lunch box, and their artistic creative presentations. How frozen pizzas are made. What’s in a twinkie? (Amazing. Twinkies have been around for 78 years! They’ve been around as long as the Chrysler Building, in New York, and Betty Boop. Here…

post-off pricing n. Washington state requires producers and distributors to post their pricing to a central database maintained by the state’s liquor control board. When these producers and distributors post discounts, that is called “post-off pricing.” bliss point n. Faced with insistent demands to lower the salt, food companies employ…

I bet you could replace the whole sage with fresh thyme in both or either parts of this recipe with good results. And if you don’t want to go to the trouble of making the glaze, I’m thinking that a little chicken stock heated with some orange marmalade or apricot…

So now that the day of stress is over… the long and short of it is this: all the time and trouble I went to to brine the turkey didn’t really amount to much payoff. I can’t know how the turkey would have been had I not gone to the…

(Note : Updated 11/26) I usually don’t have to give much thought to serving Thanksgiving, since we’ve gone to my in-laws for the last decade, without fail. Aside from one year, when I decided to try and mix things up and do a deep fried turkey, my wife’s grandmother usually…

This was one of my granddad’s favorites. It’s very economical. You can probably make it for less than $5 total provided you have all the seasonings on hand. (Especially if you grab your cheddar from the dairy aisle of the grocery store, instead of the specialty cheese or deli section.)…

Brown eggs taste no different from white eggs. Rhode Island Red hens give you brown eggs … the older the hen, the darker the egg. Creamed or plain chipped beef; Crumbled, crisp bacon bits; Strips of thinly sliced ham or bologna (fried); Fried minced onions, scallions, green peppers, pimentos; Creamed…

You’ve probably seen this phrase tossed about a lot lately, what with the holidays approaching. Your choices of what kind of turkey to put on the table seems to be widening, and the confusion mounts. Heritage turkeys are heirloom varieties, the ancestor breeds of the much more common but freak-of-nature,…

Here’s an original recipe for Unstuffed Cabbage. I made it the other night with a few changes (listed below), and it turned out really well. I used a pound of ground lamb instead of the mix of ground pork and beef called for in the original recipe, mostly because it…

(image courtesy Gourmet Magazine) Gourmet Magazine offers up a great site detailing 60 years worth of recipes for cookies. The recipes are presented just as they appeared on the pages of the magazine, so the recipes for the cookies from the 40’s don’t presume you’ll be using modern conveniences like…

6 italian sausage links (hot or sweet) 2 tablespoons butter (or olive oil) 1 small onion, chopped fine 1 clove garlic, minced 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, plus a little more for garnish 2 fresh tomatoes, seeded and chopped 1 pound small shell pasta (conchiglie, maruzze, or lumache) grated Parmesan Prick…

A friend of mine sent me an email specifically asking about what I make when I don’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen — when we’re hungry, and I need to make something quickly, and don’t have time to marinate, macerate, or equivocate. Oddly enough, my…

biscuit belt n. “Well the area of the country that I practice in Gastonia North Carolina is what some physicians refer to euphemistically is the biscuit belt. We have a problem with patients being overweight.” strolling supper n. I “get” the fact that a “strolling supper” is another term for…

On a cool autumn night, nothing tastes better than a hearty bowl of beef stew. I made an awesome stew the other night. Not a lot of ingredients. You can cut your prep time by buying stew meat, but the pieces they give you are usually leftovers and trimmings from…

What I called butterflying in this recipe I posted in July is apparently really called spatchcocking. It’s basically cutting a whole bird down its back, removing the backbone (which I reserve for stock) and flattening it to a relatively even thickness for even, fast cooking. Whether you use a grill,…

This is apparently a classic french dish, because I found many, many versions of it on the net. (Fricassée de Poulet au Vinaigre et à l’Echalote.) It’s a basic, tasty, braised chicken recipe, which yields a really good gravy, and can be made in about an hour and a half.…

Completely decadent, serve this with a salad, as a side, or as a first course. It’ll definitely wow them at the pot-luck dinner. You could really go over the top with this recipe, adding cream to the potatoes, and using a ton of butter, but I tried to keep it…

Cacciatore means “hunter’s style” in italian, and it’s typically a braising method for chicken (or rabbit) with tomatoes and other vegetables, including mushrooms, onions, and herbs. The chicken part of this meal was the simple part to the much more complicated risotto, but even that’s not so bad. I chose…

The other day, I discovered yet another item that takes a long time to cook, and the results aren’t all that much better than the stuff you can buy in a can. Baked beans. While the 16 hours it took to make the beans were by no means labor intensive,…