Chefs
Hi, we are Bryan and Jessie - a recently married couple who enjoys cooking at home, eating at our favorite local restaurants, and trying new restaurants and recipes. We also have two pets - Brew, a black lab, and Alton Brown, a domestic shorthair.
Foods we couldn't live without: blue cheese, potatoes, gin, popcorn, garlic and butter
Number of cookbooks we own: 57 and counting
Favorite kitchen tools: Shun knives, Le Creuset cookware
For more information, click here.
Latest Headlines
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Cinnamon-glazed donuts
If you’ve never had a homemade donut fresh out of the fryer, you’re missing out on what a donut should be. There is no such thing as a “bad” fried dough (taste-wise, not health-wise), but making donuts from scratch, compared to donuts that are designed to survive long-distance transport, long shelf-life and uniform shapes, yields [...] -
Recipe Review: Ham and Cheddar Sourdough Stuffing
Our Thanksgiving tradition is to try out new recipes for the big meal. No, we don’t make them ahead of time, we just wing them and hope our luck in knowing what will taste good holds. Luckily, we’ve picked delicious recipes over the years and have quite a collection of well-loved November and December issues [...] -
Turkey Tortilla Soup
Round two of inventing Thanksgiving leftovers and we’re only left with the turkey. It is still a bit blustery out and we’re fighting colds left and right, so a soup made perfect sense. In case you are new to our blog, Bryan isn’t a huge soup fan, although I think I’m converting him as I [...] -
Thanksgiving Leftovers Reinvented
Wondering what to do with your Thanksgiving leftovers? How about making a turkey “shepherd’s” pie? Faced with Thanksgiving leftovers after warming up turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, and dressing (post to come on the recipe we used soon) for the third time in 36 hours, I thought it would be good to reinvent our leftovers. [...] -
Not just any port in a storm
I’ve been a huge port wine fan for years. It’s the perfect finish to a great meal, and a fine port is indeed a wonderful thing. Port is a dessert wine fortified with a neutral grape-based spirit. If you’ve never had a good port, it’s sweet with a high residual sugar content, and typically has [...] -
An old Bordeaux
We’re not wine experts, though we enjoy learning about wine and trying new wine. Our experiment today (as part of Thanksgiving festivities) was to see if a 16-year-old Bordeaux is still palatable. The wine in question, a 1994 Les Fiefs de Lagrange, was purchased by my parents in Waterloo, Belgium, in 1997 or 1998. It [...] -
An Afternoon in St. Helena
On our trip to Napa and Sonoma, we stopped by St. Helena to check out a few places downtown, including WoodHouse Chocolate. The chocolates at WoodHouse Chocolate are outstanding and we had tried a piece of chocolate with wine at Rombauer Vineyards, rivaling chocolates from Europe. In the words of Bryan, the truffles we had [...] -
Morimoto Napa Review
As Bryan’s last post touches on, we were lucky enough to spend a few days in Napa Valley in mid-October. Trying to decide what vineyards we should go to on our first visit proved to be a difficult decision, although we did pick quite a few great places along the way. But figuring out where [...] -
Best bets in Napa and Sonoma
As usual, I apologize for our severe lack of posting recently. I’ve been busy launching a new product, and Jessie has been tied up with loads of top-secret PR work. We did, however, find time to sneak out to Napa and Sonoma, Calif., a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a brief summary: Four giant thumbs [...] -
Same old booze got you down?
One of the highlights of our trip to the 2010 Food and Wine Classic in Aspen (wow, was it already three months ago?) was an opportunity to sample new and exciting liquor hitting the market. My love for the hard spirits comes and goes, and usually when I’m at a bar I stick with my [...] -
Greek yogurt totally from scratch
OK, if you want to make Greek yogurt (think brands like Fage and Chobani), the simple way to do it is to drain plain yogurt overnight. But if you really want top-notch Greek yogurt that not only tastes better but costs a wallet-load less, you’ll want to start from scratch. Fear not – the bacteria [...] -
Roasted Banana and Coconut Ice Cream
Sorry for the lack of posting recently. Our jobs have taken up a lot of time. We haven’t stopped cooking, or inventing and trying new things — far from it — we just haven’t found much time to write in the last month or so. Lately, I’ve been baking a lot, and Jessie’s been making [...] -
Bison tenderloin in bourbon sauce
If you’ve been eying the frozen Bison meat in your supermarket but are afraid of cooking with it, fear not. A good cut of bison is as hard to screw up as a good beef steak, and if you take a few extra steps to impart as much flavor as possible, it’s a great “special” [...] -
Open-Face Pizza
After a crazy day at work for both of us, neither of us wanted to spend too much time on our feet in the kitchen, but we were still hungry. Ordering pizza from one of our numerous pizza places was tossed out, but a decision on where and what couldn’t be reached. Instead, I went [...] -
Mint Ice Cream Recipe Review
We planted mint in our garden last year and quickly learned how delicious, and invasive, it can be. Fresh mint smells great and, let’s face it, who doesn’t like picking fresh mint from their garden for mojitos in the summer? We haven’t made ice cream in quite some time. In fact, it has been almost [...]