It’s 3:00am. I’m still sick and can’t sleep. I know this routine pretty well by now and I’ve given up any hope of rest in favour of getting house chores done. I’ve already washed all the dishes, sharpened all my knives, watered the house plants and now I’m going back through my lists of old Foodblogs and clearing out the deadwood. *sigh* Read More
Despite years of being the “guy who never ever gets sick” I contracted something at the beginning of December which caused my immune system to completely collapse and left me a physical and mental gong-show for the entire month. A month, I might add, in which I was Executive Chef and couldn’t miss a moment of work.
I got vertigo, chest pains, the shakes, heart pounding, random numbness in my extremities and oh yeah, I couldn’t sleep. The few doctors that were available during the holidays couldn’t fix me, hell they couldn’t even tell me what was wrong inside… So, I just sucked it up and suffered through Merry-‘Freakin Christmas and into the New Year.
Perhaps due to all the Zen breathing exercises that I employed back in December to get my heart rate under control I cracked open my long-neglected copy of The Tassajara Bread Book during a particularly sleepless night and started down Edward Espe Brown’s rabbit hole of sponge-fed Buddhist bread making… It was just something to do at 2:00am. Read More
Continuing our recent trend of posts about mentoring all the fresh new faces joining our industry, I whipped up a Holiday gift guide for this year focused on all the stuff that a brand new cook would need to get started in a kitchen. We’re talking about someone green, first day of culinary school green. Finally made it out of the dishpit and is about to chop their first onion green. Read More
If you’ve ever been to a real Chinese market, have a Chinatown near you, or hell… If you’ve been to China you’ve seen and hopefully tasted Siu Mei in all of its barbecued, glistening glory. It’s a take-out tradition that goes back to Guangzhou in the days when every neighbourhood had a local “oven master” that would roast various animals in special sauce to perfection and sell them to their neighbours to eat with a bit of rice and pickles. Read More
“What’s really going to make you unique sometimes is the way your brain is different than anyone else’s brain who ever existed on the planet. That’s valuable right there. Write down what comes out of the brain… And sometime an idea isn’t good until the second half arrives later.”
-Dan Carlin on the Joe Rogan Experience