Posts by author: Casey

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I got my first honest-to-god internship at a Pittsburgh TV station. What fun! Hobnobbing with Steve the weatherman, organizing Summerfest at Sandcastle water park, working on a Good Morning America live feed from the Pittsburgh Zoo. How could an ambitious gal like me pass it up? But this was an internship, which meant I was getting college credit instead of cold hard cash for my troubles, and therefore I was still bound to a family residence.

Logistics meant that if I stayed parentally supervised, I’d have an hour and a half commute each way to Pittsburgh. Not happening. I’d stay alone at my mom’s house while she was away for the summer. The continued sweet freedom of a college student!

Only there was no meal plan in an empty house, and though I’d been cooking small dishes like garlic green beans and herbed couscous (and yes, mac & cheese) in what passed for a dorm kitchen, this was my first chance to be cooking and feeding myself on a daily basis.

So my career as a kitchen wizard began. It’s funny that for someone who ended up so food-obsessed, I have absolutely no recollection of anything I ate or cooked that summer, save for one thing: I distinctly recall that a heaping plate of nachos and a foamy root beer float were my end-of-week reward for a job well done. Maybe even twice a week.

>> Read on to see what made the nachos and root beer combo so special. >>

Apologies in advance to all the non-New Jersey readers out there, as I don’t mean to make you jealous with today’s post. However, for those of you living in/around north Jersey, get excited: Starting next month, I’ll be teaching classes regularly at Chef’s Lab, a new cooking school and culinary resource center in Montclair, NJ.

July’s schedule is live and ready for sign-ups—I’m teaching a summer brunch menu (including my favorite lemon-ricotta pancakes and famous spicy-sweet bacon) on Sunday, July 18 at 1:30 pm, but there are a host of classes from using rubs and marinades for flavor and introductory knife skills to pie-baking, artisan bread-making, and Indian, Greek, Cajun, and Italian-themed sessions.

New Yorkers, it’s an easy ride on the Montclair-Boonton NJ Transit line, so don’t be afraid of our commuter rail system. Let me know if you need specific directions.

And while we’re at it, and because it’s summertime (oh really, Summer Solstice? you’ve been throwing 80-degree temps and 80 percent humidity at me for a week now, so I think you’re a little late to the party), my reviews of She-Smoke: A Backyard Barbecue Book by Julie Reinhardt and Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter by Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein are currently up on The Good Taste Review.

I’ll be contributing to this smart new repository of cookbook reviews and recipe critiques sporadically—as in whenever Editor Stephanie sees a book she thinks I’d like to review and sends it my way. For now, however, feast your eyes on my thoughts on those two books, which are useful tomes if you’re planning a summer cookout/cocktail party, contemplating your first (or second) grill purchase, or just in the mood for some meat-based light reading.

And I hope to do some one-on-one meeting with my GFS faithful at Chef’s Lab in the coming months, so please don’t be shy. You want to learn, I want to teach, and we all win!

I was never really a rum drinker. I hate too-sweet drinks, so frozen red daiquiris were not part of my repertoire, and Malibu always smelled too much like Banana Boat suntan lotion to be considered an actual beverage. After a particularly rough summer house party in my early 20′s (yes, one of those experiences), it was rum—not SoCo, not tequila—that I swore off forevermore.

Then I met Zach Brinley and my rum worldview changed considerably.

Zach’s family business, Brinley Gold Rum, started in 2002 with his dad Robert, a scientific product developer who had been working in St. Kitts for two decades and saw an opportunity to reinvigorate the tiny country’s rum industry by taking over a former Rothschild rum factory on the island. Zach, fresh out of college, saw the opportunity to be more than the low guy on the trading rung in New York City and the father-son team jumped right in.

Though maybe not on the magnitude of the 1976 Judgment of Paris, where a Cabernet from California’s brand-new Stag’s Leap Winery shocked the world by defeating venerable French wines in a blind tasting, it was still a coup for the fledgling Brinley Gold Rum brand to win multiple gold medals at the International Rum Festival in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada in its first year of production.

>> The newest Brinley Gold flavor, Shipwreck spiced rum, after the jump. >>

I was planning on making one of the Barefoot Contessa’s recipes the other night when I noticed she called for 3 extra large eggs instead of 3 large eggs. I didn’t have any extra large on hand—what is the difference and should I be buying two sizes of eggs for my recipes?

The short version is no, you shouldn’t be bothered with keeping two different sizes of eggs in your fridge unless you’re a baking maniac or a rabid Ina Garten fan. Large eggs are the baking standard, measuring about 2 oz. by weight. Extra large eggs weigh in at 2.25 oz. by comparison.

Barely anyone but the Barefoot Contessa (who apparently has a major jones for the XL size; I have cooked probably one of her recipes in my lifetime, so I trust you readers to back me up on this) specifically calls for extra large eggs in their recipes.

Pastry geniuses Dorie Greenspan, Gale Gand, Johnny Iuzzini, and the incomparable David Lebovitz all specify the large size in their recipes, as David explained to me, “In restaurants, large eggs are the norm (at least where I’ve worked), so many recipes tend toward large eggs.”
>> Read on to find out the one instance where it makes a difference to use the egg size called for in the recipe. >>

Now that Baltimore’s ESPN Zone is closing—the original location, no less, which has served Buds to backwards baseball-capped brahs for more than a decade—where is a sports-and-beer fan to go for a filling meal before an Orioles game?

Here’s a thought. Forego the big-screen TVs and take a stroll up the hill away from the tourist-laden Inner Harbor, through the historic neighborhood of Mount Vernon—maybe stopping to admire the Colonial architecture and massive monument to George Washington, or just hightailing it past the historic Belvedere Hotel to The Brewer’s Art.

Upon the enthusiastic recommendation from Good. Food. Stories. Guy Correspondent Max Rudy, Dan and I snuck in a quick but satisfying trip to this Baltimore gastropub before Friday’s baseball game.

Under the original cornice mouldings and imposing mantelpiece making up the bar back in the front parlor room, we chose wisely from the multiple offerings on the bar menu: the country ham flatbread, a heavenly pillow topped with 18-month Benton Smoky Mountain ham and herb-flecked mascarpone cheese, liberally studded with bourbon-soaked cherries and flecked with black pepper honey and pickled mustard seeds.
>> And we didn’t even get to the beers that The Brewer’s Art is known for yet. Read on. >>