Grilled Bacon Meatloaf Burgers – Building a Faster Meatloaf Sandwich

I love meatloaf, but not as much as I love meatloaf sandwiches. In fact, I’ll make a meatloaf just for the leftovers. I’ll fry the cold slice in a buttered pan until hot and crusty, and enjoy it on toast with ketchup. This is basically that, plus bacon, in burger form. What it lacks in loaf shape, it more than makes up for by being faster and easier. By the way, even...

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Eastern North Carolina-Style Barbecue Sauce with a West Coast Twist

I’m not sure if using honey instead of sugar really qualifies as a “West Coast twist,” but it does ensure that people from North Carolina can’t attack me for this Eastern North Carolina-style barbecue sauce not being authentic. Anyway, while this isn’t exactly what you might find in the Tar Heel State, it was fantastic on the pork, and I hope it inspires you to add this...

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Paper Pork Shoulder – It’s a Wrap

This “paper pork” was inspired by a technique for smoking beef brisket that involves wrapping the meat in parchment paper after a certain point in the cooking process, in an effort to keep the meat moist, and succulent. Turns out it works great for pork shoulder. I decided to try it for an oven-roasted pork shoulder, wrapping it from the beginning, and it came out so perfectly...

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Eggplant Escabeche – The Second Best Way to Eat Eggplant

The best way to eat eggplant is fried, which I’ll hopefully prove to you one day with a video recipe. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for the second best way, which is this eggplant escabeche. It’s cold, refreshing, vibrantly-flavored, and I’m guessing, very healthy. This was inspired by a visit to a restaurant in San Francisco called Lolinda, where Chef Alejandro...

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Lemon Ice and Losing My Innocence in New York City

Whenever I make this refreshing lemon ice, I always think of a story my father told me many years ago, about the Italian ice vendors in New York, stirring a few lemon seeds into their tubs, so that people would think they were using real lemons. They weren’t, which sort of disappointed me at the time, but eventually I came to appreciate the hustle. I loved the story, but...

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Next Up: Something with Lemon

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Fresh Corn & Sausage Muffins – Twelve Inches Away from Perfection

These fresh corn and sausage muffins would have been great if it weren’t for one of the main ingredients. Unfortunately, the spicy Italian sausages I used turned out to be a poor choice; but other than that, I was very pleased with this experiment. Like I say in the video, a sweeter, milder breakfast sausage would probably work very well here, but you’ll have to wait until...

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Soft Hard Boiled Eggs – Cooking with Steam

As vaguely promised in the grilled shrimp Louie video, here is my foolproof method for doing hard-boiled eggs, when we want softer, creamier yolks. This style works very nicely for salads, and above and beyond the texture, we get pure egg flavor, without the sulfuric bitterness that over-boiled eggs suffer from. Of course, there are variables. Large egg sizes can vary, as...

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