About the Cook 03 Jan 08

About Me
Thursday Night Smackdown: A battle against time to save the known universe, starring Eric Stolz.

Not really. I’m Michelle, a food and drink lover from Jersey City, New Jersey. I’m a program director at a small non-profit. You should read its blog as well and then donate some money, because I need a bigger raise so I can buy all the food necessary to populate this blog. My weapon of choice is a KitchenAid Professional 600 standing mixer, and I try to keep several spatulas on my person at all times. I also like to curse frequently, and with great gusto. Fucking A!

I started this blog to chronicle and share my love of all things edible and to motivate myself to start actually using my cookbook collection. Also so I could have a way to get more mileage out of the f-bomb; now, people all over the world can hear it, not just people in my immediate vicinity. But it’s mostly about food, which I fucking LOVE.

My partner in crime, Brian, is an actual rocket scientist. He loves to cook and brew beer, a tedious pastime that involves lots of equipment sterilizing and standing around waiting and makes the whole house smell like grape nuts. His weapon of choice is a Polder instant-read thermometer. You can check out his past beer and barbecue-related escapades at Us vs. Beer (now defunct).

Chester and Felix are our dogs. They eat our failures. They are surprisingly picky for dogs.

I have no training of any kind in (a) cooking, (b) pastry, (c) writing or (d) photography. This will, most likely, be quite evident to you. I’m sorry.

About the Blog
Along with original recipes, I’ll be blogging the Thursday Night Smackdown. Each week one of us will choose one of the many “man, we should really make this one day” recipes from our ever-expanding cookbook collection - preferably one that introduces us to a new technique or ingredient - and make it. We’ll take pictures along the way and give you our review of the dish and cookbook. I welcome any and all suggestions for cookbooks or potential Smackdown meals.

I welcome all comments, unless you’re trying to sell me something. Trash talking is allowed, but if you choose to start, prepare to have your ass handed to you on a fiestaware platter.

About Food
As I said above, I love food - real food. I’m committed to eating whole, fresh foods grown in an organic and sustainable way as much as possible, and I’m committed to spending the time it takes to seek these foods out and prepare them. I try to avoid - as I think we all should - edible products masquerading as real food, like Funyons. I have to eat multiple times per day every day for the rest of my life, so I want each of those moments to be pleasurable and beneficial.

My culinary rules of thumb include: If you’re not actively enjoying what you’re eating, stop eating it. If the foodlike item you’re considering eating includes ingredients that you couldn’t easily obtain yourself, preferably at a greenmarket or somewhere like Whole Foods, consider second thoughts before consuming it.

Also, any food is improved by at least 50% if (1) covered in cheese (2) wrapped in puff pastry or (3) accompanied by a vodka gimlet.

Disclaimer
Most, if not all, of our Thursday Night Smackdown recipes will be coming from our cookbook collection (which recently tripled in size; thank you, going-out-of-business Borders branches!), and we will be following the recipes as closely as possible. This means that (1) our variations will usually be pretty minor, so that (2) I’m not really comfortable posting the recipes, since I’d essentially be giving them away. You know, copyrights and whatnot.

I will continue to post pictures of the ingredients and the process along with our description and review, and you should feel free to put 2 and 2 together and try to re-create the dishes yourself.

Of course, I’ll still post full recipes for homemade creations, and will post Smackdown recipes if we’ve adapted the original in some substantial way.

Please continue reading. Your call is important to us!