If there is one thing that annoys me it’s when I’m in the process of preparing a meal that includes a rice dish and I promptly boil the rice over on the stove. Not only does it mess up the rice but it also means I have to stop what I’m doing and clean things up before they bake onto the stove top and I’ll never get it off. If I do a good enough job of not watching it, I’ll have to completely start the rice over or if I watch it too much, I can’t do other things. It is enough to drive me crazy.

So, in the course of my research I’ve discovered that you can make rice by baking it. One of the beauties of this method is that it doesn’t boil over. It also means that you are free to do other things because you can just shove it in the oven and forget about it until the timer goes off. The down side to this method is that it takes over an hour to bake the rice. To me, that is a small price to pay to make sure that my dinner is ready when I want it to be without additional cleanup.

More...

Shrimp is one of my favorite things to cook. Not only do they have a wonderful flavor but they also cook in an incredibly short amount of time. I usually spend more time prepping them than I do actually cooking them and this recipe is no different. Peeling, deveining and skewering the shrimp will take more time than they will spend on the grill. As always, try to buy American shrimp or if you can’t, get them from a country that requires sustainable and healthy farming practices.

More...

I’ve mentioned before that my culinary heritage is that of New England. The regional cuisine is based largely upon seafood and local vegetables. While somewhat experimental with the spicing, it’s not like other regions where hot, spicy flavors dominate the cooking. My mom was a very typical cook with New England sensibilities. Every once in a while she would break out a new recipe, but the old standards were always there. Meatloaf, home made spaghetti sauce, fresh pan seared trout (my dad and I used to do a lot of fishing when I was younger), and of course, the clam cakes and chowder (it’s spelled chowder but it is pronounced chowdah. No kidding.) that made up part of our Fourth of July celebrations.

Somewhere along the line and I’m not really sure where, I developed a penchant for spicy. I mean hurt you, melt your tongue with chemical burns, spicy. I’ve since taken a step back from that precipice, but I still like a bit of kick to my food. That desire has led me to explore the culinary traditions of the American Southwest and Cajun cultures, both of which are noted for their use of hot peppers and spice.

At this point, you must be asking yourself exactly what does one have to do with another? Well, I’ll get there, just be patient a little while longer.

More...

Paul Prudhomme is going to be the death of me. Not because of his recipes, mind you. He is without a doubt the master of finding a way to sneak additional fat into a recipe. You can almost feel your arteries clogging just by reading the damn thing, never mind actually eating it. No, the reason he is going to be the death of me is because of his cooking techniques. He has this thing about cooking just about everything over insanely high amounts of heat. This leaves these incredible thick and gooey compounds bubbling like mad on my stove, spitting blobs searing pain through the air at me. There is no doubt a very good reason that he calls his roux "cajun napalm". I'm sure that incidents in his kitchen have been well documented.

That all being said, he does have a penchant for coming up with some amazingly tasty recipes. A while back, I made his seafood stuffed flounder from his Lousiana Kitchen cook book. Ms Cocktail has a couple of family members that are fishermen by trade and every once in a while we get some amazing delights. Well, we had been given some rockfish (otherwise known as striped bass) filets and I thought that I could substitute this fish for the flounder in Chef Paul's recipe. It did work out OK, except that I had left over stuffing I needed to figure out what to do with. As my grill is always the first place I look for inspiration, I thought about filling some portobello mushroom caps with the the left over stuffing and grilling them. Let me tell you, it was one of the better ideas I've ever had. I think that this combination is even better than Chef Paul's original and that's saying a lot.

More...

Back in 2001, Ms Cocktail and I went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It really was the experience of a lifetime. Aside from the flat out foot stomped on the accelerator type action that seems to happen everywhere in the French Quarter, there are little moments of quiet solitude that can be stolen if one looks hard enough. One of the things that we took away from this trip was a love for the Cajun and Creole food traditions of this great city. One of the most famous eateries there is K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, the restaurant started by Chef Paul Prudhomme.

One of the things about Ms Cocktail is that she doesn't eat beef or pork. So sometimes if I'm cooking for just the two of us, I've got to modify recipes to account for her tastes. Here are two recipes based on ones found in Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen that I've modified for this very reason. Turkey ham and olive oil is substituted for the Tasso in the Jambalaya along with some other minor changes. As they say in New Orleans, laissez les bon temps roulez!

Chicken Jambalaya

At one time Cajun and Creole cooking were two very distinct styles however that distinction has blurred over the years. One thing that is a constant between the two is the use of the Trinity, that is onions, green peppers and celery. These three ingredients appear in almost every Cajun or Creole dish and it's by varying the amounts of each that the flavor of the dish is fine tuned.

I learned early on in the kitchen that proper prep work makes the cooking easy. Everything needs to be cut, chopped, pureed, or otherwise prepared before you turn on the oven, stove or grill. With that thought in mind, I tend to combine everything that is going into a pot at the same time into one dish before I ever throw things into a pot. My recipes are broken out that way to help make things go easier.

In a perfect world a whole chicken would be used with the meat cut off the bone and the bones used to make the stock for this recipe. Since most of us don't have the 4-8 hours it takes to make a stock from scratch, the use of canned broth or bouilllion is perfectly acceptable.

More...