Stovetop Roasted Root Vegetables

Roasting is a dry method that surrounds the food with heat for even cooking. The results of roasting are a beautifully caramelized surface with a tender interior. An oven is the ideal place for all this to occur, but sometimes my oven is otherwise occupied and I have to look elsewhere to provide similar outcomes.

Meatballs from Heaven

Wouldn’t it be great if each time it rained, it rained meatballs from Heaven?  I know the song lyrics say “pennies”, but pennies would hurt!  These meatballs are soft puffs of melt in your mouth goodness. Way better than pennies!

Pizza Dough Southside Style

I don’t like having a utensil or appliance in my kitchen that doesn’t pull its own weight. Any time I can find a use for something that doesn’t lessen the quality of the finished product I go ahead and make it work for me. My bread machine is a perfect example of this multitasking. Not only does it produce a decent loaf of bread, it can be a time and effort saver when I kneed an extra pair of hands in the kitchen (Pun intended).

Essential Red Sauce with Meat

Really, lots of meat... no seriously, I mean a whole lot of meat! The foundation for this recipe came from one of the best ever Italian cooks, my Polish mother-in-law!

My own version is seriously heavy on the meat and cooks for hours with the intention that it be used for a variety of Italian favorites. Make this sauce early in the week and have some that night with spaghetti and a few of the simmered meatballs. Don’t fret about running out of sauce – this recipe makes enough to feed your family with the aforementioned spaghetti plus at least three more killer dishes which I will be posting shortly.

Our New Look

I hope you like our new look! Our goal was to make A Guy Who Loves To Cook! more user friendly by making the blog easier to read and more visually appealing. The layout has changed a bit, but we think the most important difference is the clean look and pleasing colors that will highlight the photos of my great recipes that I hope you will try. We are in the process of tweaking the details so bear with us!

I would appreciate any constructive feedback and if there are any questions or comments, I would love to hear them!

Happy Cooking and Eating!
Ted

Macadamia Crusted Mahimahi

Mahimahi is the Hawaiian name by which this mild, sweet fish is most commonly known. Before air travel to the islands became affordable for the average Joe, the version of this seafood delight we would have experienced stateside would have been called saltwater Dorado. Although most of the eastern United States still gets fresh Coryphaena hippurus from South American waters, we now call it by its more “romantic” Hawaiian name.

Roasted Artichokes with Red Pepper Aioli

Artichokes have been bestowed with a wrapping of elegance for far too long. Even Julia Child, in 1995, referred to the Artichoke as a “luxury” (The Way To Cook by Julia Child). But now Artichokes are readily available at almost any time of the year and it’s time for them to shed that mantle of uppity-ness and assume their rightful position as the king... of finger food!  Let’s face it; there are no utensils better designed than your fingers with which to eat an Artichoke.

White Asiago Pizza-ish Food

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, “pizza” meant two things; either thin with a sweet sauce, fennel-y sausage and browned melted cheese on top from any number of store-front shops; or deep pan, one slice is a meal but I’ll take two with buttery crust cradling layers of cheese, garlicky sausage, and chunky tomatoes from downtown restaurants. We left the north siders to their thick-crust variety and would certainly eat it when visiting, if necessary to maintain cross-town friendships, but we’d talk about the winning advantages of our south side thin crust pies all the way home.

Sesame Fire Noodles

I would imagine, throughout my lifetime, I’ve tasted about 11,937 noodle based dishes. This includes salads, casseroles, mac & cheeses, soups and of course pastas from picnics, bar-b-cues, church basement pot-lucks, receptions, buffets, dinners at home and elsewhere, travels here and abroad and of course college dorm days. (Although I have not included the tally from a couple of years of roaming the Italian North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco which is more or less kind of a blur.)

Fierce Garlic Prawns with Red Pepper Aioli

True Prawns have a few subtle variances that distinguish them from jumbo shrimp – different gills, more pincers and longer legs. But for our purposes here, i.e. eating good food, those differences are really moot because we’re going for big.

Popcorn Soup (Roasted Corn Chowder)

This is not the Popcorn Soup of my childhood; that was made with canned corns, both whole kernel and creamed varieties, plenty of processed cheese and no other vegetables that I can recall. What made that meal a special event at home was the simple addition of a big bowl of Popcorn right in the middle of the table. You just grabbed a handful, let it fall into your soup and ate it up before all the Popcorn melted away into cheesy, corny goodness. Don’t fret, it was the 60’s and we all washed our hands before coming to the table – or else!

Sweet and Crunchy Sautéed Haricots Verts

Haricots Verts are thin, mostly straight, French Green Beans. Not to be confused with the French cut Green Bean. The French Cut is done to make the thicker Green Bean resemble the slimmer Haricot Vert.

Chili con dos Carnes

 Everyone has a favorite Chili recipe. Some like it savory, some sweet; with or without beans; red, white or brown and varying degrees of heat from mild to “I will never be able to taste again!” There are also those truly fearsome Chili aficionados with their set of rules that govern what is or is not real chili. Good for them, everyone needs a cause to fight for!

Seventy Five Feet of Heaven

I just came across these photos from our 2011 Caribbean Valentine Cruise and I wanted to share these wonderful creations. The pastry chefs were very busy judging by the magnitude of this magnificent spread that was literally 75' long! In addition to gallons of chocolate, there was a very large assortment of pastries, fruit and candies in many unique and tasty forms.

Mom’s Meatloaf (was never like this!)

It’s the rare American who is not passionate, in one way or another, about meatloaf. The pro-meatloaf contingency may speak fondly of meatloaf “every night when we were first starting out”, or stuffed with this or that or smothered in this or that or “the best part is the sandwiches”. Conversely, the anti-meatloaf camp will probably drone on about meatloaf “every night when we were first starting out”, or stuffed with this or that or smothered in this or that or “the best part is the sandwiches”. While the reasons to either love or hate the lowly loaf are many, and so very similar, I believe that most haters have just been exposed to too many bad attempts.

Hammy Chowder

Chowder... the word alone brings about delightful feelings of comfort and a sense of well-being. Add to that a nourishing and filling dish and you’ve got the perfect winter supper. This is not to say that I consider all chowders to be wintery fare. I can be persuaded to, without much coercion, indulge in either clam variety at any time of the year. When local sweet corn is at its peak of abundance and I’ve consumed more than my fair share of golden nuggets directly from the ear, my thoughts often turn to spicy southwestern corn chowder. But ham chowder just says such sweet things to me during the cold months.

Mrs. Powell’s Dumplings & Chicken

Mrs. Powell rented rooms from my Grandmother in Chicago when I was a little kid. Grandma Bess lived in what had previously been the home of the Mayor of Morgan Park, before the city of Chicago absorbed the once posh suburb. It was a big house with front and back parlors, a huge dining room and several floors of enormous bedrooms with sitting rooms. It had to be big; it was the house in which my dad and his four brothers, in ages spanning over twenty years, grew up. It was also the house in which she lived until she died. After my grandfather died and all of the boys left home, Grandma Bess took in boarders and Mrs. Powell, who I think was in her nineties then, was there as far back as I can remember.

Buffalo Chicken Pinwheels

These are incredibly easy to make for a party buffet. Pinwheels are everywhere! You will surely see them on just about every catering menu, but why buy someone else’s creation when you can make your own in just minutes?  Start with some of the treats you already enjoy in another form and just transfer them to a pinwheel arrangement.

Braised Chicken Paprikash

This has been a favorite around our house for decades. I’m not sayin’ how many decades, but just using that word should be enough to tell you that it’s been a long, long time.

Roasted Pork

On the near west side of Chicago, every Czech-Bohemian restaurant has their own version of this dish. They’re all based on some mom’s Sunday Dinner recipe. This kicked up version offers similar tastes to satisfy the “comfort food” region of our brains, while entertaining the other definition of Bohemian – the different thinker in us all.

Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage

We don’t eat enough purple food! Just seeing this side dish is enough to make you smile – it’s just so… so purple! This isn’t a kind of Kraut, sour or otherwise. Of course you could make Sour Kraut with Red Cabbage, but then it would be Red Sour Kraut. While Kraut has a snap or least a bit of a crunch, all of the vegetables and fruit in this dish are just barely recognizable. I like to layer flavors here; just pay attention to any cooking show on television – it’s a big deal, and really works to add dimension to foods, but there’s no layering here. All of the individual ingredients have given up their distinctive tastes for the good of the dish.

Houskove Knedliky (Bohemian Dumplings)

This is a traditional accompaniment to Roast Pork served every day at most Czechoslovakian restaurants in Chicago. Frankly, the quality of the dumpling is how we determine whether or not we’ll be returning to the restaurant! 

They’re not fluffy like the dumplings Grandma made in her Chicken & Dumplings, but they’re not like Spaetzel, those little chunks of Bavarian dough noodles. In fact, when you see these for the first time your impression will likely be that someone put slices of bread and gravy on your plate.