Do we eat like this every night? I hope not. Tonight the kitchen gods fought me. We lit the charcoal … and thirty minutes later realized that the fire did not catch. I defrosted a wonderful dish … and discovered that freezing had destroyed the texture and made it inedible. In desparation to put some […]

Dear Chef,  I have been cooking for over 50 years and have never deveined my shrimp. Never saw the real need for it. I love cooking and ethnic foods. Friends and family never complained. A couple of friends my age are shocked that I don’t devein. Are there many people who don’t devein? How important […]

In redoing and then posting our new website, I learned what customers really liked about the old website. So by popular demand, here are the two most requested recipes. No surprise that they are all about the butter! At Kitchen Conservatory, we use unsalted Plugra Butter in all of our recipes. Why? Because Plugra tastes delicious! […]

Dear Chef, I’m trying to find out why we bother to pound chicken breast. It’s already very tender. Why can’t we just slice it to the thickness we want? Does the pounding somehow change it in a good way? Thanks for your time! Melissa There are two reasons to pound meat: to make the meat […]

Twenty years ago, my husband planted two apple trees. They have never yielded any fruit until this year. I have made pie, crisp, and applesauce out of the few apples I was able to pick before the squirrels devoured the fruit. “I stopped bothering to spray the trees years ago, because there was no fruit,” he […]

Fish is a source of food that can put the cook front and center with killing the animal that provides dinner — just ask anyone who cooks a live lobster. Last night, we went fishing and caught two large salmon and one small trout in the cool waters of Lake Michigan. After filleting them and […]

Does White Lily flour make a difference in baking? I put it to the biscuit test, and yes, biscuits made with White Lily are much more tender. White Lily is an all-purpose flour made from soft (not hard) winter wheat that Southern bakers have raved about for generations. The soft wheat is much lower in protein […]

A weed is a plant out of place and some weeds are edible, such as dandelion greens. Last night, we tried purslane as suggested in the August issue of Sauce Magazine. Purslane is everywhere, so eating it seemed like an efficient way to weed control. Although I’ve seen purslane raw in salads, we deep-fried the […]

What’s in your freezer? Freezer-burned archeological digs? Undated mystery meat? I found a mystery package in my freezer. I don’t know the date, but I know that there had to be a good reason for me to freeze this meat. Now what do I do with it? I defrosted the package and discovered duck; it’s […]

Marla’s vanilla cake with chocolate icing