If you were thinking about making my seven-layer spinach lasagna from the other day, grilled garlic bread would make the perfect appetizer….
Cheese
Seven-Layer Spinach Lasagna
Choosing a recipe is a lot like playing the Kevin Bacon game.
The Kevin Bacon game, or Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon, centers around the small-world principle, or the idea that any two people are linked by a finite number of connections. With Kevin Bacon, the goal is to link him to any other actor using no more than six intermediary actors. For instance, Elvis and Kevin Bacon are separated by only one intermediary – Edward Asner, who appeared with Elvis in Change of Habit, and with Bacon in JFK. At last count, over one million actors can be linked to Bacon in fewer than six steps.
The principle can be applied to any number of disciplines or phenomena – from linking baseball players in various decades, to demonstrating the thought process in choosing a recipe….
Nachos
I am always running late. Always.
I could claim it’s not my fault, but really it is. At the least, my punctuality problem is rooted not in laziness or lack of ambition, but rather in its excess. Dinner in an hour? Surely I have time for an abbreviated workout. Poker at 7:30? I can read one more case before I need to leave. Meeting friends soon? Let me start another blog entry.
Which is exactly what happened on Superbowl Sunday….
Cheese Grits
Not every great recipe requires seven steps and several stopwatches. Cheese grits are one such example.
Grits are crushed kernels of dried corn. The dried kernels are crushed between millstones and the resulting fragments are sorted according to density. The dense shards are grits, and the lighter shards are cornmeal. Polenta is an even finer grind of yellow corn, with all the particles of flour later removed. These stone-ground grits can be made from either white corn or yellow corn, with little difference in taste between the respective varieties.
Stone-grounds grits are coarser than …
Grilled Quesadillas
Of late, grilling has become one of my favorite cooking methods. Unfortunately, as the sun is quickly setting on this warm St. Louis weather, so too are my grilling days. So before I have to shut the propane off for good, I decided it was time to grill some quesadillas. These are so fast, so easy to make – and just so good. They’re bound to be a hit.
Quesadilla literally means “little cheesy thing,” in Spanish. So some form of cheese is required. But after that, the beauty of quesadillas is in their elegant simplicity. They’re a blank slate on which to experiment. Throw whatever you want at them — and just see what sticks.
Speaking of sticking,…