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by Design

The Most Important Cooking Skill is…

The most important thing I have learned about cooking came from a carpentry class. It’s an old adage: “Measure Twice, Cut Once.” Here‘s how the adage applies: In my sixth grade class, the teacher gave a pop quiz. The

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What My Mom Taught Me About Cooking

I learned almost everything about cooking from doing the opposite of what my mother did. She never followed recipes and stuck to the same dozen recipes she learned from her mother and aunt most of her life. She never

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Taste of the Decade is Our New Book

AURAS Design is celebrating its 40th anniversary. It’s the perfect occasion to realize a project that has been in the back of my mind for at least half that time. Taste of the Decade is a compendium of recipes

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Getting It Eggs-actly Right

I love eggs for breakfast, so I wanted to make the best scrambled and poached eggs that I could using what I had—a microwave oven. After trying lots of timings and ingredient variations, I finally found the right combinations that make great eggs—and they might even be better than using a stove.

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Comfortable Food

The real game-changer from an ordinary oven-roasted bird is the way it’s prepared. This chicken is flattened using a technique that only takes a minute to do, but produces superior results to butterflying or spatchcocking.

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Sous Vide (sooo-veed) is for Yous

If you think you have tried every new gadget and cooking technique, there is another tool and technique that you should try—because it is not new at all. Sous vide is a cooking technique that is the secret in many restaurant recipes.

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Have a Three-Way with a Rib Eye

Beef lovers really like a slab of Prime Rib or a thick rib-eye steak. But if you have a sharp knife and some freezer space, you can divide your rib-eye into three cuts—and each is delicious.

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If I Had a (Rubber) Hammer

Even the best sets of pans eventually run into trouble when it comes to the perfectly flat base needed to evenly cook food. So, what can you do when you have a beloved pan that isn’t on the level? That is where the hammer comes down.

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Fry Baby Fry

What self-respecting food blogger would forget to do a post on creating the perfect french fry? This technique is almost too easy to prep, makes consistently crispy fries with creamy interiors, and is remarkably easy to clean up. That makes it dangerously delicious.

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Stay Sharp

Ironically, many accidental cuts occur during prep because the offending knife is dull. As perhaps the most important tools in your prep drawer, a set of knives—regardless of their quality or cost—is only as good as their sharpness.

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Magic Mushrooms

Making a good mushroom dish is all about creating a meaty texture with the mushrooms, a combination of extracting the water from the fungi, searing the exteriors, and adding flavor with spices and stock.

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Great Finds

Great Finds is an occasional post designed to pass along some of the new discoveries that have improved my cooking in the last year.

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Five Things To Do Before You Diet

Cooking a lot also means eating a lot, and the result over forty years for me had been more weight, higher blood pressure, high cholesterol, heartburn, and high blood sugar. A decade ago, I decided to do something about it.

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Salad Daze

Here is what I think makes a satisfying salad. Not too many ingredients, not too many varied greens, a mix of salty-sweet-pungent, and a balance between enjoying all the elements together and yet allowing individual ingredients to keep their own flavors.

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I (Used to) Hate K-Cups

I had to finally admit that I could make a decent cup of coffee with a K-cup, and that, despite my long-brewing dissatisfaction with the technology, it has an inevitability in the workplace.

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Wagyu!

Wagyu is the tenderest, most unctuous beef you could ever eat. It is so flavorful that some steak-lovers find it almost too intense, so small portions are often more than enough.

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