Michael Ruhlman's Blog, page 61

How To Cook For Sixteen (and not stress)

The mission was this. Make nine great dinners for a big group, but create menues simple enough so that I could get a morning's worth of work in (ie justify 10 days in Key West) and not freak out at 4 pm. One of the first issues is what to cook food in, the vessels. [...]

Cooking On the Road (Tools I Traveled With)

If you're on the road and will be cooking in unfamiliar kitchens, what are the essentials you cannot afford to be without? Thomas Keller once told me he always brought three things, kosher salt, string, and his pepper mill.  Everything else, a restaurant kitchen was likely to have. But what about when you're traveling to [...]

Stress Free Key West Menu 2012

It requires a certain amount of stress to cook for a lot of people. Otherwise you won't get it done. Too much work, and therefore too much focus and efficiency to both get everything done and also enjoy yourself. You've got to like this very peculiar kind of stress.  Or like the release that inevitably [...]

Waiting For Donna

Race week in Key West is a massive boondoggle for me.  I wake, look out at the water, drink coffee, write until noon, personal writing, then head to the house where I cook for 12 to 16 people every night. I straighten the kitchen, throw away a few forgotten red plastic cups with limes floating [...]

Key West—Gone Fishin'

Been working in the morning and cooking in the afternoon, and no time to post! Been having fun cooking nightly for a houseload of hungry sailors on a generous budget. Last night was steak and lobster and smashed potatoes and salad. Cooking mussels tonight, then wahoo (never cooked before, it will be interesting), saffron rice [...]

An Amazing Response to Staple Meals

Wow, what an amazing glimpse into what people are eating.  A lot of stir fries, a lot of curries, pastas, pot roasts, and eggs, American and international.  There are so many ideas in the previous post I feel like I should do something with them, make them more accessible. Of course, people who read this [...]

Ruhlman's Twenty Giveaway! What's Your Best Staple Meal?

Two and a half years ago, I wrote a post on staple meals because I'm fascinated by what people eat at home when they don't want to think about what to make, what their go-to, middle-of-the-week meal is, because they are invariably quick, efficient, economical, and well, good enough to eat once a week forever. (I [...]

Dry-Cured Ham at Home

On a recent trip to Charleston, SC, to promote Twenty, my first stop, thanks to a tweet from Ideas In Food was to the kitchen of Cypress, where chef Craig Deihl gave me a truly impressive tasting of his dry cured meats and sausages. Damn they were good—highly recommend you wonderful folks in Charleston stop [...]

Literary Interlude: Ann Patchett's Getaway CarA Review

Looking to check out a new media format, the Kindle Single, I came across Ann Patchett's long essay The Getaway Car. I bought it for $3 and was reading away on my sleak Kindle Fire moments later. (Impulse purchasing = Danger!) In this case, the purchase was well worth it. The highly regarded novelist tells [...]

Chicken-Fried-Pork-Belly Caesar Salad

Chicken-Fried Pork Belly Ceasar/Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman [A fellow Twitter hound tweeted this post from last May and I thought, it's always a good time for more pork belly! Back to regular posting next week—M.R.] It is time again to bring out The Chicken-Fried Pork Belly Salad, which I created in August 2007 in [...]