July 7 – July 13, 2025

Sunday:                               Poule-au-Pot with Mushroom Gravy, Butter Cake with Peaches

July 14 – July 20, 2025

Saturday:                            Pizza with Roasted Corn Sauce and Tomatoes

Sunday:                               Birthday Dinner at Mere and Howard’s for Uncle Rick

Mere’s Tomatoes with Burrata (above) my Baked Beans (below)

HOSPITALITY, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO RELAX AND ENJOY COOKING

Note:  Took a vacation last week and was going to extend it another week since we didn’t cook anything new or particularly noteworthy, but then I thought about my own long journey to becoming an okay cook and the even longer journey to become comfortable entertaining others while cooking.  I hope that you enjoy this post, the point of which is to urge you to have us over for dinner.  We’re generally free . . . all the time.

Those of you who have followed the blog for some time, will recall that in an earlier incarnation I was known as “Psycho Chef.”  Indeed, I have a chef’s coat with that very name embroidered on it. 

I will offer no excuses for my behavior in the kitchens of yesteryear, but I think an explanation might help those of you who get a little tense when cooking for a crowd.

When I first began to cook – mostly on weekends before I retired – I was, like Saul of Tarsus, a man of the book.  I needed exact instructions, precise temperatures and a printed recipe in front of me at all times.  I had not yet learned that the secret to less hectic cooking was to have all of your ingredients chopped or sliced or in front of you and easily available before cooking.  This led to frantic onion chopping while searing, say, a steak.  And that, of course, led to overcooked steak, sliced fingers, and a string of comments I cannot repeat in front of children.

Another lesson I had yet to learn was to plan (at least in my head) the cooking schedule needed to bring, say, boiled rice, baked fish and a dressed salad to the point of edibility within roughly the same decade.  All of this was no excuse for the behavior of psycho chef, but you can, I hope, see how one could be driven to the edge of good temper and decent vocabulary by these amateur errors. 

But what really brought about the evolution of psycho chef into good-enough cook was the pleasure I got from talking, drinking and eating with friends and family.  And you can’t do that if you are in the kitchen, alone, frantically trying to get everything cooked before midnight.  [I was often in the kitchen with my dear Beez who was trying to help me get things somewhat organized.  I don’t take kindly to orders from anyone and it may be that especially during those trying times when she was kindly helping that my response earned the sobriquet of “psycho chef.”]

Be that, as it may.  If you’re going to entertain folks – to enjoy their company and their conversation – you need to get that mise-en-place down pat and you probably need a written schedule.

And the final thing you’ll need are some menus* which allow you to cook, assemble, and prepare up to the point of reheating or a quick cook on the grill, so that you can be with your family or your guests, not swearing at yourself or your spouse or the damn fool whose recipe didn’t remind you to get the meat or the eggs or the butter out two hours before cooking.

*Most steak can be served at room temperature, or par-cooked and then finished on the grill or in the oven.  Mashed potatoes can be kept warm and revived indefinitely.  Salads can be assembled ahead of time and dressed at the last minute.  And, if you’re not looking to avoid work and want to do something special for friends and family, don’t forget the foods that require a long cook, but don’t require much work immediately before serving – briskets, pork shoulders, smoked meat.  And, my favorite, Sunday Gravy and the meatballs and meat that go with it, can be cooked early in the day, reheated and married with pasta just before serving.  Indeed, with a little thought almost any recipe can be broken down and you can find a way to pre-cook, par-cook, reheat, and so on.

So this somewhat pretentious advice is what we’re offering this week, without a recipe since nothing in the last two weeks has really grabbed our fancy.