Quick & Easy One Pot Risotto Style Pasta for the Win
Dry pasta is easy on the pocketbook and can stretch into a few more meals by adding vegetables and frozen peas. It is a game-changer for me because I will never boil pasta again for hot pasta dishes. The technique is more of a "risotto" style technique because you cook it like rice sort of. It works with short styles of pasta along with string pasta. I have never tried it with fresh pasta but my cook's intuition tells me that it probably would not work because the pasta woul


Flexitarian Gumbo is Perfect for National Soup Month
Typically, in Louisiana, January is a popular month for soup. With mild Fall and Spring Seasons, Winter seems to be the best time to eat the state soup, which of course is Gumbo. I just taught a virtual class on the secrets of my Gumbo recently, it's been a learning curve to learn how to be comfortable talking to a screen instead of living folks. All in all, it went great, I made the roux really fast, demonstrating a new technique of heating the oil really hot, toss in the fl


Soups are a perfect Intro to Fridge Foraging
I have been thinking a lot lately about cooking without recipes. For my daily home cooking, I still use all those techniques and methods I learned as a chef. Back in the days when we had the restaurant, we practiced recipe-free cooking daily. We would come in and do a visual assessment of what needed to be moved in the inventory. Since we bought mostly fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh meats and seafood, there was always something to use up during its peak freshness. Soup


Top 10 Tips for Flexitarian Cooking for the New Year
Check out my companion podcast about Flexitarian cooking. Just click the podcast tab on my website. #flexitarian #semivegetarian #vegetarian #healthycooking Every year in January, I always do an audit of what I've been eating for the past few months. Not that I eat badly, but I tend to gravitate towards things and I always like and I like to see what that is, to make sure that I'm on the right track for my health goals. This past year has been respectable, I have been on trac

