The Semi-Reformed Nomad

 I am a huge fan of America's Test Kitchen and their books.  For starters, they put the "TEST" in test kitchen.  A lot of those recipes that look so good in magazines, that you try to make, and they turn out bland, horribly, cakes don't set, glazes run down the sides of cakes, etc, and you feel like a failure as a home chef. But a lot of those recipes aren't TESTED or lack critical steps.  Thus anyone following step by step without modification (like adding the necessary 30-40 minutes needed to caramelize onions rather than the 5-10 minutes most recipes lie that it takes) would have the same disappointing result. Not so with ATK.  Their youtube video series are also good. One issue with their cookbooks is that there is quite a bit of overlap.  As someone with a lot of their cookbooks, I see that.  A book in the "make ahead" compendium with show up as an identical item in the Autumn/Winter cookbook, and so forth.  But enough stays on theme and has enough

 Most weeks I'm trying to cook some stand out recipes from a cookbook.  I have so many that cooking all recipes in an entire one, particularly when my audience is limited (no spicy food for one; no fish for one, etc) seems unrealistic. So we mark the end of the first half of samples from Around the World in 450 Recipes .  It's pretty expensive new, but you can get it with the resellers on amazon.  My own copy was an impulse grab at Half Price Books. The Africa-inspired cod with prawn sauce was AMAZING, and not all that complicated. The book does leave a bit of vagueness in some of the recipes and it appears geared towards a British audience so you may have to google some ingredients to find their common American equivalent.  Other than that... the fish and prawns implied throwing the garlic and onions in simultaneously, which is a common but pretty fatal culinary misdeed.  So I threw the onions in about half an hour before the rest and what resulted was an incredible dish I'

 So I'm thinking of having a few categories I'm experimenting with.  One I'm excited about is new recipes I tested out from my extensive cookbook collection and blog readings. Let's try a first post: This week I'm cooking from "Around the World in 450 Recipes".  Monday night, I chose the "Africa" section for Jollof chicken and rice, a hotly contested dish originating from West Africa. The recipe is a little light on spice varieties but I went with it mostly as written, only substituting Red Boat fish sauce for dried shrimp because I could not find dried shrimp for love or money.  It gives the dish a nice umami burst.  The chicken was a nice cut up bird from Wegman's, since I was too lazy to do the cut work myself. Results were quite nice, I thought, though possibly a little less than authentic.  I did pare the green pepper down to a quarter of one due to a less than brave palate in my dining companion and the remaining ingredients did well. 

 Greetings! I decided to retire and branch off "A Caribbean MD is Good Enough for Me!" because it was, here I am, and I'm trying to settle into my life in New Jersey while still scratching my travel itch. This will likely mostly be a food blog.  After being shamed into learning to cook at 30 by a 21 year old roommate, and gradually tinkering more and more with cooking, I'm really loving the practice and art.  I figure if the first half of my life was sufficient to learn medicine and triple board in pathology along with learning to talk, color, walk, ice skate, half speak Spanish, scuba dive, and the like, then surely in the latter half of my life I can master cooking. There will also be a travelogue, but as I am "semi reformed", I spend most of my time in my newly adopted home state occasionally dashing out of the state (or the country) to get rid of the DTs.  While traveling, I like to pick up new and fun tips on cooking as well as special ingredients to br