Erik's Food Blog

Growing up as an unabashed carnivore, it took me a while to wrap my head around the concept of vegetarianism. I actively pitied my vegetarian friends in Chicago, Lara and Andrew. The reasons as to why anyone would willingly forgo the great joy of eating a perfectly-cooked steak, or a succulent piece of duck, or a luxurious lobster tail remained a mystery to me. In fact, I felt compelled to "cure" my friend Andrew with a standing offer to treat him to a famous Bleu Burger from the dimly-lit Moody's Pub, in the event that he desired to abandon the error or his meat-abstaining ways. He remained resolute, though I still wonder how. That was one tasty burger. In recent years, I have found it harder to ignore the environmental and ethical arguments against eating meat, so I am thankful that I gained knowledge and experience in the ways of cooking vegetarian dishes from my Chicago pals. That insight has only grown, due to the fact that my brother-in-law Bryan/Rivers/Jonas is a...

I have looked forward to this day for quite some time: the first CSA produce delivery. Short for Community-Supported Agriculture, CSA is basically a partnership with a local farmer, whereby one purchases a share and receives a box of freshly-picked produce each week. After being disappointed with the farm my wife and I supported last year, I chose Earth Dance Farms this year after researching every CSA in the state. EDF stood out in that they grow not only vegetables, but also herbs and fruits, in addition to keeping bees. If today's share is any indication, I and the other shareholders are in for quite a treat. Today's bounty included honey, strawberries, arugula, cilantro, rainbow chard, dill, broccoli raab, spinach, and romaine lettuce. I love cooking with ingredients I have on hand, so each CSA delivery provides a unique culinary challenge, like being on an episode of "Chopped." I wanted to highlight the chard and broccoli raab, and once I decided to use Italian ...

Hello again. It's your non-essential chef (say, that would have been a better name for this blog than the one I chose) back with another recipe. A few weeks ago, Lynnea and I hosted some people from our church for dessert, where I made dark chocolate truffles and baked Bristol's famous three-layer carrot cake. It was my second attempt at the latter, and I wish that I had remembered to write down what I learned the first time: that the recipe yielded enough frosting and filling for at least five cakes. But I didn't, and was stuck with a sugary surplus. Baking that cake is labor-intensive, to say the least ("Sift all the dry ingredients three times..."), so I thought I would take the easy way out and make some sort of carrot cupcakes to make use of my remaindered frosting. For whatever reason, it didn't happen. Fast-forward to last night. I remembered the carrots I bought back then for that purpose, and was surprised to see that they hadn't gone bad in the...

Pork is quickly gaining on beef in the race to be known as my favorite land-based protein (wild arctic char rules my heart). Even my wife, a self-proclaimed pork-hater, loved eating this tasty sandwich. I was inspired by my mother's similarly prepared pork dish, though she kept the spare ribs intact. When pressed about her cooking methods, she told me that she boiled the ribs for an hour before putting them in the slow cooker, though she didn't know exactly what that accomplished. This intrigued me, so I decided to experiment. Of the ten ribs that went into the slow cooker, five had been boiled for an hour and five were raw. In the end, the boiled slow ribs were denser, darker in color, and seemed to absorb more flavor from the braising liquid than the raw ribs, which themselves had the virtue of being much more tender. This isn't to say that I preferred one method over the other, and in my opinion the combination of the two cooking approaches offered a final product with p...

Here's the thing: I love food. More specifically, I love to eat flavorful, well-prepared, high-quality food, but cannot afford to frequent restaurants that serve such fare as often as I would like. So, over the years I have taken the DIY approach to eating, meaning that I have very reluctantly ventured into the world of cooking. I did so with no training whatsoever, unless watching competitive cooking shows like "Iron Chef," "Iron Chef America," "Top Chef," and "Chopped" counts (which from my experience, surprisingly, does every so often). To me, cooking is essentially an exercise in following directions, mixed with creativity, at least a superficial knowledge of ingredients, and a little luck. It is also a skill that anyone can learn, as I myself can attest. I'm undertaking this blogging venture for three reasons: 1) I love to eat the food I cook. 2) People who eat my food seem to love it as well (at least they say that they do to ...