Fifth Rule of Cooking Club
Know your coconut milk products. The On-On Gourmets cooking club met Saturday at the home of Anitra and Manzo Spezzatino for an evening of Thai cooking and consumption. Three new members attended: Pomodoro Calde, an experienced cook with years of…
Ditalini’s Oxtail Soup
When I was a kid, living in Germany with my USAF family, one of my favorite dishes was ochsenschwanzsuppe — oxtail soup, a thick and flavorful beefy broth. In later years, married and living in the USA, I’d sometimes pick up a…
Fourth Rule of Cooking Club
Don’t overload electrical circuits. Members of our cooking club met last night at the home of Magret de Canard for our second attempt at a do-it-yourself dinner, this time to cook our own meats and vegetables on raclette grills. Everyone…
Crouton’s Fire-Roasted Tomato Salsa
I hate grocery store and chain restaurant salsa, with its chunks of tomato and green pepper swimming in tomato-flavored water. Here in Tucson a local restaurant called El Charro makes its own salsa, thick, smooth, and … even though the main ingredient is tomato … not tomatoey. I…
Third Rule of Cooking Club
Pull your own weight. We come to cook, not just to eat. Last night we tried something different. At earlier meetings, members prepared their assigned parts of the meal at home. Once we gathered at the host’s house we sat right down to eat. Ditalini and…
Spring Cleaning
You may notice blank spots where photos used to be on some of the older recipes here at Crouton’s Kitchen. Over the years we uploaded a lot of cooking and food photos to the server our blog lives on, and we were running…
Photoblog: an Italian Family Dinner
Yesterday Ditalini and her Aunt Radicchio made three pounds of gnocchi and a big pot of sauce. When it comes to rolling and shaping gnocchi, there’s some twist of the wrist thing I never quite mastered, but Aunt Radicchio, now…
Photoblog: Dinner with Friends
Crouton dusted off his braised beef short ribs recipe for yesterday’s dinner. This is the one where the ribs cook in a 200°F oven for 11 hours, a recipe he originally learned from Poulet en Crote’s son, a professional chef.…
Ditalini’s Scotch Eggs
Ditalini recently learned how to make Scotch eggs, the popular pub appetizer. While we were in Las Vegas with our family for Thanksgiving, she walked daughter-in-law Truffle and grandson Pesce through the process. Notes It’s a lot easier to buy…
A Birthday Dinner Photoblog
It’s been an annual tradition for several years now: Osso Bucco, our friend from Las Vegas, comes down to visit during my birthday week (his birthday is a week from now, so we celebrate together) and we all go over…