Many of the best cooks are men. I'm very proud of a nephew that is a Head Chief in a very nice restaurant. This thread is here to show off the talent I'm sure is is here. Share that chili recipe, post that picture of the barbecue you impressed everyone with, show off your baking skills (most of us love fresh bread). I'm a crockpot guy myself. I just love to turn out a slow cooked Beef Stew or a pot of pork & onion seasoned Black Eyed peas . Tell us your great soup recipe or how you make that special spaghetti sauce. Got a great baked bean idea, share it with us. Thanks !

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*** thread moved from The Back Alley to Random Babble ***

I think this topic is safe Smokey lol

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I posted where I did to expand this forum posting's. Not getting done any other way . [boxing]

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We do not want or need The Back Alley expanded to lol ... it is Packers section that we need expanded. [grin1]

Moving onward to your topic. I will attach a picture of me making cookies with my girls. haha.  20140913_190910.jpg You have insufficient rights to see the content.

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I am working on a few items that my Dad use to make and I was too stupid to learn from him.
He sauteed mushrooms.
Loved his chicken cacciatore. Chili.

He would show me how he browned the hamburger meat or how much and what kind of wine he put int he mushrooms and I was always, "That looks great Dad. I will learn more later." [suicide]

If I could do anything over again these kind of moments would be high on my list.

So I try different things but don't come close. I ask Mom but she memory is shot on the little details like this.

I may well have it 100% right but it tasted better when it was Dad doing the cooking not me.

I tell my wife to get together with her Mom and get these things down. I doubt we have more than 5 years.

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Well, I recently found a colleague who raises lamb, and so next week am getting a whole lamb butchered (trying to figure out what cuts to get this weekend).

And so I'm hoping to grill/cook a bit of a meal for some friends for some upcoming Packer game...maybe fall break (panthers, argh) ... haven't had time to do the Wade-goes-overboard-cooking in ages ... yet-to-be-narrowed-down list:

Bloody Marys and Marias.
Leinenkugel's (the original).
Grilled baby lamb chops (rosemary and mint marinade).
Grilled jumbo shrimp (Grand Marnier and orange marinade, wrapped in bacon).
Grilled venison tenderloin medallions (strawberry/balsamic glaze, medium-rare to rare).
Grilled chicken drumsticks (poultry seasoning ratcheted up with sage and peri-peri spice)
Eight-cheese mac-n-cheese (Sharp cheddar, Extra sharp cheddar, Fontina, Muenster/Provolone, Pepperjack, Mozzarella, Parmesan, Maytag Blue)
Fire-and-ice four-meat chili
Cajun corn-on-the-cob (1" chunks, cooked in Zatarain's shrimp boil).
Grilled beans, potato and onion cubes (thyme and garlic marinade)
Halved cherry tomatoes with feta cheese, basil, and green onions.
Bousin-stuffed mushrooms, sautéed in garlic butter.
Smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese stuffed celery.
Toasted baguette slices with seriously-spicy hummus.
Boiled quail eggs with devilish flying fish mayo.
No-apple, no-orange, fruit salad.
Fresh baked mini-ciabbata rolls (okay, I cheat here, get them in a bag at Walmart).

Actually, I look at this, and except for the mac/cheese and the stuffed mushrooms, this is all surprisingly healthy stuff. Plus I always eat far less when I cook, isn't that weird?

Hmm....who should I invite?

[grin1]

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Wade , nobody knows where you're located. Let's start there !

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I have several rules of thumb for cooking which tend to serve me very well:
1. Read recipes, but never abide by them. (Recipes are for seeing the ingredients people put together, not sources of measurement criteria.) I used to have a lot of disastrous experiments; but now I just page through recipes a bit, see the combinations, steal them, and experiment away. Not perfect, of course, but the big failures are surprisingly rare.
2. When in doubt, marinade. Even a few minutes with fish, or a half hour with anything else, can do wonders to refine/accent/bring out/etc taste. And meats/most raw veggies, longer is better.
3. Spice early and don't worry about using too much. Too many spices can be a problem (which is why getting the right curry mix, e.g., can be difficult, since any "curry powder" is itself a mixture of spices). But too much of a few -- rarely.
4. Mixing salt and meat is a question of timing. Watch out for too much salt in marinades and rubs. With few exceptions (e.g., prime rib), best time for salt is, surprisingly, neither before putting meat on the heat nor after removing it; it's after the meat has been seared on high heat.
5. Use the whole bottle of wine. Took me a long time to get a wine-based sauce that I like for meat. Then someone told me about the idea of a "reduction". Still no go. But then one day I had some extra complications in other dishes and didn't have time to monitor, taste, re-taste sauce like the food snobs are always doing, so I just added a whole bottle of a nice red, poured in a bunch of chicken/veal stock, added a generous amount of garlic or rosemary or whatever the fresh spice of my impulse was that day. And then left it go on low until most of the liquid was gone. Stirred in a bit of meat drippings at the end, and voila, what I'd been trying for. Makes a mess of the pan, but other than that zero hassle.

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Hehe...the middle of nowhere, Smokey. (a/k/a as Northeast Iowa, just a few miles south of the Minnehaha border, and maybe 75-90 minutes from LaCrosse.

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I don't know about wine with mushrooms...though it definitely sounds like an idea worth stealing. :)

As for the meat for chili...I don't know what your dad did, obviously, but here's one easy way to get some extra taste. Take about half of whatever dry spices (non-salt) you use, and stir them into the ground/chopped meat beforehand with just a bit (tablespoon or less per pound) of lite olive oil (teaspoon or less if you use a darker oil). And let it sit for 30 minutes or more before you add it to the pot.

Another trick is to never add the meat until it is at or close to room temp. Obviously you never want to leave it out too long, especially with something like chicken, but letting it warm a bit releases something or other and you get more flavor from whatever meat you're using.

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