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.