I’ve entered this chili in a few work chili cookoffs. It’s always pretty good but never a winner, so here’s my second place chili (2018 second place CDG security chili cookoff, open category, thank you very much). The goal here is just to have a very savory chili. I don’t like anything sweet in my chili. Ideally very spicy as well, but I have to tone down the heat cause of my damn kids, or eat a whole crock pot of chili by myself. This pairs well with a shit ton of grated cheddar cheese. Works great on a hot dog (also with a shit ton of grated cheddar cheese). Enjoy the chili that’s pretty good.

In the last 8 months, the pork roast has been one of my dishes with the highest easy to making you look like a bad ass chef ratios. Seriously you can put in pretty minimal effort and come out with a dinner that people are very impressed with. It’s also incredibly cheap for the flavor you get out of it. Buying tip: find one at the meat counter with as much fat on top as possible. You’re aiming to get a nice crispy layer on every slice, so don’t cut that shit off. The secret, just like with most any roast, is dry brining overnight and using the reverse sear technique. Basically, having a lot of time to hang out with some meat. With us all stuck in our homes during this year of 2020, you probably have time. Make some pork. Bonus points if you use the pork stock recipe to make gravy for this.

Manhattans are my favorite drink, and I’ve been iterating on my recipe for a while. This is what I’ve settled on for now, but it may change later. It usually does when I find a new vermouth i really like. It’s extra big (why not just bump up the bourbon amount to make measuring the rest of it easier on the ratios?) and I think it’s well balanced. Intentionally no bitters in this one since the Carpano adds enough bitterness in my opinion. If you like more bitter, add some bitters. Also spring for the luxardos, they’re really good. Also if you’re somehow just hitting this recipe and none of the rest of the blog, Jeff is me.

The sauce here is the base of a few different dishes I make, and its so good for how easy it is. Once you get the basics of just throwing some garlic and rosemary in some butter or oil, then adding milk or cream to make a super fast white sauce, you can look smooth as hell and impress everyone. Maybe even start a blog that a handful of people read. Remove the mushrooms and marsala, use butter instead of oil, add flour, and breakfast sausage, you have my breakfast gravy recipe. Remove the rosemary and add more garlic, butter, cheese and some white wine, you’ve got an easy seafood pasta sauce. You get the drift. —- Onto the chicken. —- The secret to making better boneless, skinless chicken is to dry brine it. It’s super simple, but takes planning. Get a wire rack and a sheet pan if you don’t have one in your kitchen already. I’ll wait here. Now that you’ve got your rack, the night before you want to cook (here’s the planning part), pat that chicken dry, season with kosher salt on both sides, and place on the wire rack. Put it in the fridge, uncovered, overnight. Sorry I forgot to mention part of the planning is having fridge space. Once you start doing this regularly (works for steaks and roasts too) you’re going to want to buy dedicated meat fridge anyway, so use that. When you’re ready to cook, take the chicken out of the fridge, rub olive oil all over it and season how you like. You’re going to notice the firmer texture of the meat, and its going to give you a much better sear, and better flavor. I prefer cast iron if it’s rainy out, or grilling it. Just always make your chicken like this so boneless skinless chicken doesn’t completely suck.

This is exactly what I’m looking for in my burger. Spicy, cheesy, thin patties, grilled bun. This will probably get improved upon gradually as I go, but this is my burger. If I had a food truck or restaurant or whatever, this is what I’d give you. If you want this burger hit me up and I’ll give you this burger. It’s better on the cast iron than the grill.

This is one I wasn’t really going to post originally, since I just use everyone else’s recipes for it, but after trying it a few times, I had trouble getting it to be warm when I served it. After searching a few times for how to keep everything warm, I just figured the steps out here. Used a lot of eggs and butter. This is way easier than it sounds, and the flavor is super good. You’ll look pretty bad ass when you pull this one off.

This is my go to recipe for grilled chicken. I try to always stock the base ingredients, so this is often just a clean out the fridge type of recipe. The base marinade on its own is pretty good, and flexible enough where you can anything from the flex spots and it will turn out great.

I’ve made a pork roast a few times lately, and have been getting into gravy, so I wanted to take all that to the next level and make my own gravy totally from scratch by making my own pork stock. Turns out it’s really easy. Just put all of the stuff in a pot for most of a day, make the house smell pork stock-y, and then pour it into some containers. I put everything into 2 cup portions, which should make enough gravy for our family of 4 (two small kids). Mileage may vary. If you want to make gravy with this, just take your drippings from your pork of choice, heat that up, throw in some butter and flour, stir it for a bit, then add this pork stock. It’s gonna be like jello when you take it out though just warning you. After a bit you have gravy. Look at that, you get another recipe for reading this.

Man, this is the first recipe I put on here. Crazy. This SquareSpace stuff make this look pretty nice. Anyway… My wife (Borat voice) and I really like this restaurant in Issaquah, Krawbar. They’ve got crazy good oyster shooters. Go eat there and support local restaurants (also their oyster shooters are better than this recipe). Uh, more backstory, we went to Hood Canal this summer and just got oysters off the beach, which was pretty rad, and that was the first time I cooked oysters. So now I wanted to try oysters at home. So, to combine all of that, I first went and bought oysters. Easy first step. I put them in the fridge all day under a wet paper towel so they stayed alright, had a few beers, and looked up a bunch of mignonette recipes (and started a food blog). There weren’t a lot of Asian style ones, like the ones we had at Krawbar, so I decided to just fuck around and see how close I could get. This is that recipe. We did this with raw oysters (you could do it with cooked ones too). If you want to cook them (they’re better raw), I’d say just throw the mignonette together, grill the oysters, then spoon this over as they cook on the grill until they seem done. If eating it raw, just serve like shown above with a spoon and let people do what they want. I’m pretty happy with this one.