Cuisine

These web pages were originall created around 2002, when I had moved for a few years to Los Angeles to try my hand at acting. I had been inspired by my dear friends John Edward King and Robert Gevert to love food, and I was excited about my own learning experiences. Things like blogs were very new, and I had the technical skills there, so I decided to hand-code my own HTML and CSS and share my recipes with the 'interwebs'. It's hard to believe that was almost a quarter of a century ago! As we transition to the next paragraph, we'll also transition to my "voice" all those years ago...

There are two things that interest me about cooking that prompts me to develop these web pages. First is the obvious: to share my recipes with the world. Second, and much more important, I'm fascinated by peoples' fear of cooking. So many of my friends act as though cooking is some scarry "black art" that they could never achieve. The truth of the matter is (in my opinion) cooking is built up out of some basic "building blocks" and lots and lots of variations on very few themes.

Case in point: most of the recipes listed here start with a roux. Ask most people what a roux is and they'll look blankly at you, even if they've been making them for the past 30 years. (A roux is a mixture of equal parts oil/butter and flour, cooked on medium high heat over the stove.) If you add chicken stock to the roux you have a basis for soup. If you add warm/hot milk to the roux you have the basis for a white sauce. Add cheese to that you have a cheese sauce! If you play around with these things enough you can improvise lots and lots of recipes on your own.

So maybe someday this will evolve into a book. I'd really like to show people that cooking is simply like a language. You don't just memorize and recite it. You learn to speak it.

Well, to start with I'm just listing a few recipes here, but I intend to add some articles and maybe even some Quicktime videos to the mix. Stay tuned!

New material! I just added some important notes to the Basic Souffle page. I threw an Easter Brunch and had some pretty bad problems that I was barely able to recover from. The first lesson is probably that I shouldn't ever try to do something fancy in a hurry. But there are some good pointers that I just added to the souffle recipe that will help assure your will turn out Just Fine!