This is Cape Cod.

This is Shrimp Rolls. Humble ocean eats!

Cooking Solo

Sometimes, you don't have the pleasure of cooking with someone else. All by your lonesomes, you must motivate yourself to go to the kitchen and wash, chop, heat, stir, drain, mix, and megawash again, all by yourself. Wouldn't it be easier to just microwave any old thing? NO. You could make Pasta Carbonara.

I've discussed pasta carbonara previously on this bleg, so it's obviously a go-to favorite. This time, I didn't have white wine so I used red instead. In a bed made of lead with street cred.

For lunch today, I visited Jose's Mexican food truck behind the medical building. Chicken Tostadas, please.


Some things turn out all right when you do them by yourself. My new hairdo for instance. I didn't know I had brown streaks in my hair!

Sticky Lemon Chicken: Cheap and Colorful!

Last night, I made Sticky Lemon Chicken, a recipe by the infamous celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. He's what you might call the "bad boy" of cooking and you may have seen the show Hell's Kitchen where he calls nervous, aspiring chefs nincompoops or worse for messing up the risotto or beef wellington. He is also the father of 3 kids and I'm sure he's very gentle and nice to them. It's an exciting show but anyway, Sticky Lemon Chicken!


Sticky lemon chicken requires:

one lemon, thinly sliced.

In his cookbook Fast Food, Gordon Ramsay says "preferably by mandolin." But what is a mandolin?


Don't be so hasty to grab your musical lute-looking thing. It's this kind of mandolin.

Not as exciting.

Lemon and flat-leaf parsley, together at last...


Chicken drumsticks, searing in the pan with a half head of burnt garlic. Heavenly!


Meet the veritable Holy Trinity of sticky lemon chicken rub: Soy sauce, sherry or red wine vinegar, and honey. For the stickiness.


Lemon IN.



Voila! Quite delicious! Not your average chicken dinner. It's sticky, it's sweet, it's salty, lemony, omg just gobble it up.



May I top you off, madam? Until next time! Humble eats :)

Boeuf Bourguignon

If you have seen the movie Julie & Julia, about that other popular food blog, you may remember the pivotal role that the rustic French dish, Boeuf Bourguignon plays. In fact it played so great a role that boeuf bourguignon was billed third after the timeless Meryl Streep and the effervescent Amy Adams (source: iMDB).

Beef bourguignon is a traditional French peasant dish that has been turned into fine dining, from what probably began as a way to eat meat that was too tough otherwise. It is beef cubes stewed in red wine, with onions, mushrooms, and carrots. And butter. And this version has bacon. And bacon fat.




Here is the beef, seared on all sides, and bacon, waiting to be stewed. This by itself smelled so wonderfully fantastic that Amy and I weren't sure if we would make it through the whole process with anything left to eat.



The onions and carrots happily carmelizing.



The mushroom, thyme, and garlic, a powerful trio.



Final product! 1.5 hours later, beef bourguignon. True, it may not look appetizing, but the flavor is rich and amazing! Superb with a crusty bread, like our sourdough loaf.





And it's always worth it to cook and share with a friend. Bon Appetit! I mean, humble eats. Tomorrow: Sticky Lemon Chicken, Gordon Ramsay-style.