I should have put this recipe up here long ago, but the day has come. This is super-easy, involves almost no prep, and is very tasty. For some reason people think kiwi and lime are a funny combination, but they complement each other very nicely.

Required Equipment:

• Rice cooker
• Chef’s knife
• Peeler or paring knife
• Cutting board
• Skillet
• Small prep bowl
• 2 Bowls for serving

Ingredients:

• 2 Chicken breasts
• 3 kiwis
• 3 limes
• 1.5 cups of rice
• salt, pepper
• butter/oil

Suggested serving: serves 2. You might also want to try marinating the chicken in lime juice before cooking it.

Procedure:

• Prepare your rice, put it in the rice cooker, and start it.
• Slice the chicken breasts very thin and into medium-size pieces and give them a light salting.
• Warm up the pan and put some oil and/or butter into it. I use corn oil, but butter tastes the best.
• Slowly introduce the chicken into the pan. They should sizzle and cook through almost all the way before you turn them over.
• When they are done on both sides, remove the chicken or just turn off the heat.
• Peel the kiwis and mash them up into the prep bowl. You may want to remove the cores if they are too firm.
• Cut open the limes and squeeze two into the prep bowl.
• When the rice finishes cooking, distribute it into the serving bowls.
• Squeeze the remaining lime over the rice, and mix it up.
• Put the chicken in the bowls and then season with pepper.
• Pour the lime and kiwi mixture over the chicken.
• Serve and enjoy!

Why is this recipe named after Paris Hilton? When you taste the sauce you will find yourself uttering her trademarked phrase: “That’s Hot!” This is a Japanese-influenced recipe, using grated ginger, pressed garlic, and wasabi for heat, and mirin for a sweet taste. The marinade and sauce use mainly soy sauce as the base. This is a lot of work, but really tasty!

Required Equipment:

• Grater
• Garlic Press
• Peeler or paring knife
• bowl for marinating
• small mixing bowl for sauce prep
• Skillet
• Small saucepot

Ingredients for Marinade:

• 1/2 a stick of grated ginger
• 2 cloves of pressed garlic
• a little bit of wasabi mayonaise
• enough soy sauce to cover the chicken

Ingredients for Sauce:

• 1/3 a stick of grated ginger
• 2 cloves of pressed garlic
• some wasabi mayonaise
• a small amount of mirin
• a good amount of soy sauce
• a small amount of flour and water

The Chicken:

• 2 Chicken breasts
• small amounts of olive oil and soy sauce

Suggested serving: serves 2, try also grilling/frying portabella mushroms with some soy sauce and EV olive oil, then mixing them in with white rice and the chicken on top.

Procedure:

• Peel and grate 1/2 a stick of fresh ginger into the marinade bowl.
• Press the garlic into the bowl.
• Add some wasabi mayonaise. I’m not sure if this actually makes much of a difference in the marinade!
• Now add soy sauce. There should be enough soy sauce to cover the chicken, and there should also be enough garlic and ginger to coat the chicken while its soaking.
• Add the chicken to the marinade, and mix it around so that it gets covered with garlic and ginger and soaking in soy sauce. Cover this with saran wrap or a lid and put it back in the fridge for some time. I did it for an hour and it was great.
• While the chicken is marinating, you can prepare the sauce. Start by grating the rest of your ginger and pressing the garlic into the mixing bowl.
• Add some wasabi mayonaise, to taste. Unlike in the marinade, I am sure you will taste this, so gauge your taste appropriately.
• Add some mirin, so that the sauce becomes like a chunky syrup. This is the only source of sweetness in this recipe, so don’t be too conservative with it if you want it to come out sweet.
• Add soy sauce, so that the sauce now becomes a thick light brown liquid.
• Add some flour and water (mix together first so there are no lumps) to expand and thicken the sauce a bit.
• Now you can do your dishes and wash everything you don’t need any more! Or, if you’ve got a dishwasher, you can load it up I suppose
• When the chicken has marinated for a while (I let it go for 1 hour), it will have soaked up the marinade and should apear reddish brown. Take it out of the fridge so it warms up a bit.
• Prepare your skillet: heat it up on low heat, and add olive oil and some soy sauce, mixing it up a bit. These two ingredients will not blend, but that’s okay as long as they are distributed.
• Slowly add your chicken. If it’s too cold and the pan is really hot, you may cause the oil to get angry and leap out of the pan, so be careful.
• When you’ve got about 5-10 minutes remaining, put the sauce into the saucepot and heat it so it will simmer off a little bit of water by the time your chicken is ready.
• When the chicken is ready, you’re ready! As I said before, I fried some portabella mushroom slices in extra-virgin olive oil and soy sauce, and mixed them in with some white rice, put the chicken on top and then poured the sauce on it all.
• When you first taste the dish, you must say “mmm…. that’s hot!”

I have been ridiculously busy recently, and so I decided to put my cooking snobbery aside and use some store-bought pasta sauce! The thing I really don’t like about it is that there are either no veggies or they have preserved veggies, which are not as good. Here’s the perfect compromise! I used Classico’s “Cabernet Marinara” when I made this, but I’ve also found Muir Glen makes a great marinara sauce.

Required Equipment:

• Cutting Board
• Knife
• Skillet
• Cooking Spoon

Ingredients:

• Mushrooms
• Yellow Bell Pepper
• Balsamic Vinegar
• Olive Oil
• Your favorite store-bought marinara sauce

Procedure:

• Set aside some of your pasta sauce in a small bowl on the counter so it stays at room temperature (don’t want it to be cold).
• Wash your mushrooms and remove the stems. Wash the yellow pepper and cut off the top and bottom. Strip the ‘ribs’ off the peppers as well… those don’t taste like anything.
• Dice the pepper into very small squares (about 1/4 inch).
• Cut the mushroom heads into small slivers and then cut those slivers crosswise until they are your preferred size.
• Heat the skillet until it is hot, then add barely enough oil to coat the pan (go easy on the oil).
• When the oil is hot, add your mushrooms and peppers slowly. They should sizzle but not burn.
• For a few minutes, periodically shove everything around in the pan with your spoon, and then shake the pan back and forth so that everything flattens out.
• Once the mushrooms are softened up and are turning a light brown, throw in some balsamic vinegar… enough so all of it can be soaked up by the mushrooms and peppers. Continue to shove everything around and shake the pan for another couple of minutes.
• Slowly add your sinful store-bought sauce to the pan, and stir it all together.
• Let the sauce simmer for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, and then it’s ready to serve!

The whole process should probably take under 20 minutes (under 10 if you’re quick with the knife), so if you’re serving pasta you can start to heat the water up before you start with the sauce, and the water will probably be boiling by the time the sauce is ready. Enjoy!

This is my “minced apple sauce” recipe! It has been met with enthusiastic approval from my Thanksgiving crowd two years in a row!

This was a result of my first effort to make apple sauce, which I did off the top of my head. It turned out to be not like how it’s really done, but instead it is a truly unique kind of sauce. The uniqueness comes from its consistency: rather than being a mushy sauce, it’s more of a saucy pile of tiny minced apple pieces.

This recipe involves an insane amount of chopping. It will probably take you 30 minutes to peel, cut, and mince the apples to serve 4 people. Then the cooking takes about 20 minutes. Obviously if you’re only cooking for one person, you can accomplish this in about 1/4 of the time, so give it a shot. People will ask you: are you out of your mind? Why didn’t you use a food processor? Well, I tried using a food processor after getting that question a bunch of times and the difference is subtle but evident. With the food processor you can’t get the minced pieces as small as you can if you do it manually with a knife. It is just not possible. The trick is being efficient and neat with your cutting!

Required Equipment:

• cutting board
• chef’s knife
• peeler
• skillet

Ingredients:

• 4-6 gala apples
• about 1 cup of water
• some cinnamon
• optional: brown sugar

Procedure:

• Cut out the cores of the apples by cutting the apple into four pieces, making cuts around the core. This will leave you with two medium sized pieces, one large piece, and one small piece. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry too much about it.
• Try to create pieces of about the same proportions as the small pieces by cutting the large and medium pieces.
• Line up the wedges so they are layed out side-by-side so they can be cut all at once with the same knife stroke.
• From here on, feel free to use your own efficient cutting technique, but be prepared for a ton of cutting.
• Cut each wedge as finely as possible. I usually get pieces that are at most 3mm thick, so I truly mean as finely as possible. Try as hard as you can to keep the slices in a row so they will be easier to cross-cut.
• Now turn the pieces around and cross-cut them as finely as possible. The result will be a whole lot of tiny little ’sticks’ of apple.
• I can’t think of a way to neatly and efficiently cut the pieces at this point, so I resort to simply chopping them with a rocking motion of the chef’s knife, chopping over the entire collection of pieces until there are no pieces larger than a 3mm cube.
• Repeat the preceding steps for every wedge of apple. It will take forever, but it’s worth it! Feel free to put the minced apples in the skillet but don’t turn it on just yet. The minced pieces will turn brown due to the exposure to the air, so don’t worry about that.
• After you’ve got all the apples minced, turn on some low heat under the skillet. Add some water a tiny bit at a time. This is like making risotto… add a bit of water and stir it occasionally. Add more water when it looks like the water has evaporated. In addition to stirring you should also try to mash the apples with the back of your spoon (don’t do this with a metal spoon or it will ruin your skillet).
• After about 15 minutes, throw in some cinnamon to taste. Also, try some brown sugar if you think it needs it. Stir heavily until the cinnamon traces disappear.
• At this point, it’s up to you when to stop throwing in water and stirring. 20 minutes total (5 after the last step) should do it, but don’t let all the water disappear, leave some traces of moisture before serving.
• This sauce is way better if it is served right off the skillet. Hot!

I thought you should know that I revised my meatsauce recipe that I posted a little while back. The chief revision is the manner in which the meat is introduced into the sauce. Previously, I had said to add it after the tomatoes. I checked a bunch of recipes and they all say to brown the meat right after the garlic and onion (I had always done it that way, but for this recipe I tried it differently), so I moved the meat step before the tomatoes. I also adjusted some timing instructions. The primary concern was that unless the meat was browned without the tomato water it might be dangerous if the meat did not cook through all the way.

Eric trivia: did you know that when Eric was a young kid he would eat raw hamburger meat? I used to love cooking hamburgers. Partly because I got to eat some of it raw! I would usually take about 1/8 of a pound off of the hunk and stuff it into my mouth! This was not a “rare” occurance either (pun intended). Who knows what horrors this did to my digestive system?

Meatsauce is the first thing I ever learned to cook that involved more than putting something in the broiler and flipping it over 7 minutes later, so I’ve been working on different varieties of meatsauce for about 2 years now. I felt this new one was good enough to put on the web site!

This recipe is for meatsauce that is heavy on the meat and has a nice spice taste. It’s not “hot” spicy, but it does have a little bite. This serves me 3 times, so it probably serves 4 regular pasta eaters :^)

Required Equipment:

• 1 Large (12″), deep skillet/saucepan
• 1 cutting board, chef’s knife
• 1 stirring spoon

Ingredients:

• Almost 1 pound of ground beef/lamb
• 1 8oz can of Hunts tomato sauce
• 1 6oz can of Contadina tomato paste
• Almost 1 box of Pomi chopped tomatoes
• 1 small red pepper, diced
• 1 small garlic clove, minced
• 1 very small yellow onion, diced (don’t even use all of it)

The following will be used in very small quantities:

• Balsamic vinegar
• Olive oil
• Salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, basil, turmeric

Procedure:

• Put the pan over low/medium heat.
• Chop up your garlic and onion.
• Once the pan has heated up, put a moderate amount of olive oil in the pan… enough so that when you tilt the pan around it can get a thin coating of most of the surface.
• Chop up the red pepper.
• Once the oil is hot enough, throw the garlic in there and shake it around, making sure the oil is coating the pan and the garlic.
• Shortly after, add the onions and stir them around with the spoon.
• Next, add the red peppers and stir them around.
• After about a minute, throw in a splash of balsamic vinegar and stir that around so it gets distributed.
• After about another minute, take the meat and scrape it out onto the pan. Using the spoon, break up the meat into tiny pieces. Keep stirring it and chopping it up until the meat has become tiny scraps. There should not be any large clumps. It should cook until it is all light brown and there is no more pink/red visible.
• Take the box of pomi chopped tomatoes and dump in most, but not all of it. Add it slowly, as it will sharply lower the pan temperature.
• Crank up the heat to medium-high and let the watery stuff from the tomatoes simmer off for about 5 minutes. Stir occasionally. Throw in a dash of salt at some point during these 5 minutes.
• Stir this occasionally, for a total of 7 minutes. It should be simmering.
• Add the tomato sauce and stir it in. Let it simmer and bubble for about a minute. Then add some tomato paste and stir it in. Use half the can. Let it simmer and bubble for about a minute.
• Now it’s spice time. Add a large dash of salt and stir it in.
• Add and stir in: a few turns of pepper, a dash of oregano, a small dash of basil, a tiny bit of turmeric and a small dash of thyme. The proportions of each spice should be adjusted to your taste. I hardly put in any turmeric or basil at all.
• If you’re cooking pasta, now is the time to put it in the boiling water. Stir the sauce occasionally while your pasta cooks. This is probably between 7 and 11 minutes. You should lower the heat on the sauce so it doesn’t bubble violently any more.

I made this sauce with rigatoni and grated some fresh parmesan cheese over it. It was fantastic! You should adjust the spice levels to your taste. I used beef, but I’m sure it tastes great with ground lamb as well.