Monthly Archives: December 2013

king trumpet mushrooms: because every party needs a fungi.

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close your eyes for a moment and think about every type of mushroom you have ever eaten.

in no particular order, my list includes: morels, white button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, chanterelle, portabellas, creminis (which are technically just baby portabellas), hen-of-the-woods, shiitake, brown clamshells, white clamshells, porcini, matsutake, enokitake, maitake, and king trumpet mushrooms.  there might be some others, but those are the main ones i can think of.  honestly, i think fourteen different kind of mushrooms is pretty good right off the top of my head.  what was your score?

while you are distracted with this fun little mental exercise, i guess i’ll go ahead and get to the point of this post.

true, this post is about mushrooms as i am sure you have already guessed.  but this post is also about a swedish guy named carl linnaeus.

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yuzu, part deux: the fruit of my loins.

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remember a few posts back when i made yuzu pasta and my girlfriend whipped up an amazing batch of yuzu cupcakes?

while i would like to pretend that culinary curiosity was the only force of nature which inspired such an amazing post, the truth is not quite as glamorous.  we cooked an entirely yuzu themed meal because we had so many yuzu we didn’t even know what to do with them.  we literally had so many we were bathing in them.

we worked hard, and when all was said and done, we had accomplished a great feat.  we breathed a deep sigh of elation and continued with our lives.  two yuzu recipes had been born out of a desire to let no fruit go wasted, and that was nothing to be scoffed at.  after all, necessity is the mother of invention.

like any normal person would after living through such a trying ordeal, i thought i was done with yuzu recipes for the year.

as it turns out, i was sorely mistaken.

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fish and taters: england got it all wrong.

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frankly, i’m not a big fan of british cuisine.

as a quick disclaimer, i’m not making some sort of grand proclamation denouncing the deliciousness of all food served in the united kingdom.  britain has become a country rife with cuisine from all kinds of cultures, so much so that i have a few friends that joke about tandoori chicken being the national food of the uk.  i will gladly agree with any person asserting that britain has some really tasty food.

i don’t like british cuisine because, once you ask that person who asserted the deliciousness of british food to provide an example, the first thing they come up with is fish and chips.

not mince pie.  not bread pudding.  not kebabs or tandoori chicken.  fish and freaking chips.

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diced! voting is officially open.

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hi there pmk readers, the moment of truth has come!

voting for the diced! competition on Rantings of an Amateur Chef is officially open for business.  if you guys have the time (and feel like supporting a meager poor man in his grand dream to become the creme de la creme of internet chefs), swing on by the poll and cast your vote for my recipe, inverted mini-cumberland pies.

thanks again for the support, everybody.

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diced! (and shameless vote grubbing).

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hey there, pmk readers.

i’ve been a good blogger over the past few months, haven’t i?  i’ve never asked you to do anything that might make you question my moral scruples, right?  we get along already, don’t we?  i’ve shown you all kinds of recipes.  you’ve given me all kinds of great feedback and comments.  i’ve thrown joke after crappy joke your direction.  together, we’ve transformed pmk into a budding, goofy, readable cooking blog.

in fact, i’ve gotten so almost-popular that i’m in a cooking competition for the first time ever.  the competition is called diced! and it is being hosted on Rantings of an Amateur Chef.  for round one, the competitors were asked to make an appetizer out of corn, corn flakes, and corned beef.  i thought long and hard, cooked my recipes, took some photos, and sent it into the fray to represent me in this culinary showdown.  i personally think it came out amazing.

but sadly, no matter how good my recipe looks or tastes, in the end it is the votes that count.  so i have a favor to ask of all your followers out there: pop on by Rantings of an Amateur Chef, scroll to the bottom of my recipe for inverted cumberland mini-pies, click on the tiny little like button, and tune in on the december 7th to cast your vote to keep me in the competition.

thanks guys, i owe you one.

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