The Crazy Chef

The name literally means "boiled water" but this soup is a masterpiece of how to extract flavor out of only two ingredients &m...

We've all read our share of fairy tales but only later do you realize how many involve food. Food has always been scarce throughout hist...

This is one of the easiest techniques of pickling in the repertoire. All you need is salt, water, and time. Plus, a mechanism to keep th...

It's almost absurd how the CC has never posted this. Ingredients 2 lbs cherries 2 tbsp white sugar 2 lemons (or 2 limes) dash of salt No...

In the depths of winter, this soup is just fantastic. Recipe courtesy of Zarela Martinez. View this post on Insta...

This wonderful painting of a skate by Jean Simone Chardin has been exhibited in the Louvre for the longest time. Dating to 1728, it wa...

A nineteenth century salad from the works of Lucien Tendret - author of  La Table au pays de Brillat-Savarin . Put into a salad bowl some ...

Most citrus leaves are edible. In fact, they are downright addictive. Particularly when steeped and added to a martini. (However, that...

It's always entertaining to learn some brand new linguistic content. Historically, the Japanese adjective for spicy -- karai (辛い) -- d...

Game Market (Source: LACMA, Los Angeles.) Fish Market (Source: Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.) Originally a set of four paint...

Every year the CC goes through the same ritual at the end of summer. Making tomato paste. And each year he goes through the exact same set...

So the CC posted on his Instagram a suitably random post about how even vegetable-hating kids love the CC's mac-n-cheese. Lo, to his su...

Celery is a completely misunderstood vegetable mostly because people get the technical details wrong. To fully appreciate it, you must sha...

Mexican chefs think of soup as an all-purpose instrument not just a winter thing. In fact, in the dog days of summer when nobody feels like ...

Do you love Thai food? Do you love fresh bread? Do you love basmati  or jasmine  rice? If so, you're in love with this partic...

Ingredients (serves 2) 5-6 eggs 2 small shallots 1 tbsp green peppercorns (pickled in brine) goat-milk feta (crumbled loosely) b...

(This article was written earlier but Blogger has a rather annoying "auto-save" feature and the article got deleted. The CC had to...

Tuna croquettes (マグロのコロッケ) ♥ Baby potatoes fried in duck-fat with gomashio ♥ Truffled foie gras ♦ ♦ ♦ Oyako Don (親子丼) ♥ Miso soup w...

The CC was "traditional" — American, Filipino, French, Indian, Italian, Japanese. (Thai couldn't make it sadly.) Lamb cho...

This is the CC's second-favorite beef dish with the honors going to steak tartare . A true masterpiece of Indonesian cooking but it do...

One of the great things about "fusion" cooking is how seamless it can actually be. Canned tuna is not exactly the most exotic of...

The CC briefly worked at a job whose main redeeming feature was the absolutely killer Korean grocery store across the street. The store was ...

The CC just adores the name mostly because it totally lies about the underlying subject — well, maybe not about the "fruit" part —...

Bifrons refers to Janus — the double-headed Roman god of beginnings and duality after whom January is named. There's no such author, o...

The CC once bought a large number of books online through a fairly shady Delhi-based bookseller on Abebooks. He wasn't even sure that th...

It is not very well known that the artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a terrific cook. We have descriptions of his endlessly inventive cookin...

Granola is the CC's favorite breakfast cereal. The CC doesn't eat breakfast very much but even so over the years he's bought ton...

This is a classic English dish and it's really easy to see why it's amazing. Short answer =  umami . The CC has always ranted ab...

Alain Senderens is probably one of the greatest chefs that nobody has ever heard of. Most of the modern clichés and techniques were invent...

Inspired by my recent Paris trip, here's summer lunch  à la Provençale . Consommé à la japonais aux légumes d'été ♦ Bulots froi...

The CC is absolutely obsessed with collecting recipe books that date back to the late-60's and early-to-mid 70's. Why the 70's...