BRUCE (AKA The Chef)

MARK (AKA The Writer)

 

DREYDL (AKA The Dog)

Check out this cheeky tome called Ham: An Obsession With The Hindquarter

FINE COOKING calls it "a witty ode to pork's most primal cut." It's our hymn to backsides: American country ham, European dry-cured hams like prosciutto crudo or jamón ibérico, wet-cured hams like the ones from HoneyBaked, and even fresh hams, the best pork roast you'll ever eat. (Click on the cover to get your copy today.)

The Ultimate Cook Book

Our big compendium cookbook--900 new recipes, tons of cooking tips. You'll be an ultimate cook in no time.

Want to see a video on this book. Check it out here.

Cooking Know-How

WINNER OF THE 2009 GOURMAND AWARD at the Paris cookbook show for the "BEST COOKBOOK IN THE WORLD" for "easy recipes." Also starred reviews in both Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, a main selection of the Good Cook Book of the Month Club, a selection by NPR as one of the best cookbooks of 2009, and a favorite of the San Jose Mercury--that called us "culinary wonks."

Pizza: Grill It, Bake It, Love It!

Our brand-new pizza book. That's the squash, caramelized onion, and pine nut pie. And there are 89 more.

The Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book

Cookies galore--and every one of them with chocolate: chips, shavings, cocoa, melted, irresistible.

The Ultimate Peanut Butter Book

America's favorite spread? Yes, but also the world's. Wait until you see all the no-cook Asian sauces, the African stew, the Filipino braise, and a host of favorites from breakfast to dessert!

Cooking For Two

Every dish for just two--and no waste. Cut it, open it--and use it. It's a feast for twosomes.

The Ultimate Muffin Book

Get your muffins! The chocolate chip ones soon became a holiday tradition in our house.

The Ultimate Ice Cream Book

The book that started a whole career. A quarter million copies in print and still going strong!

The Ultimate Frozen Dessert Book

And a follow-up to The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, this time with gelato, sherbet, granita, and a groaning board of ice cream cakes and frozen pies!

The Ultimate Shrimp Book

A one-book compendium for America's favorite seafood

The Ultimate Party Drink Book

Up, shaken, frozen, pitcher punches, shooters--here's a guide to drinks to make your next party a splash

The Ultimate Brownie Book

Fudgy, cakey, you name it--even a chapter on brownie mix doctor recipes--here's a book that'll keep everyone smiling!

The Ultimate Candy Book

A reviewer on amazon called it "an evil book." We could only hope so. Gooey, crunchy, a ton of chocolate barks, fudge, divinity, and it just keeps going.

The Ultimate Potato Book

Spuds forever! We love everything about the potato--and in this book, we made our favorite vegetable front and center since every recipe is a main course with spuds aplenty.

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Our Youtube Channel

Want to see more? Come on over to our youtube channel. We're cooking up a storm! Check it out here.

It's all about the recipes!
Get your copy of our seven-step plan to get off processed food!

Click on the book jacket for your copy. Don't miss it. Seven simple steps, a hundred great recipes, lots of motivational help, and all in an easy plan that starts small and could end up changing your life!

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Want to come cruising with us? We're off to Alaska with Holland America on August 4th for a week--leaving from Vancouver (and returning to there) with lots of cruising up the Tracy Arm and through Glacier Bay National Park. We'll be cooking up a storm in classes on board, so come have a blast with us. For more information, click here.

 

REVIEWS OF COOKING KNOW-HOW

Don't take our word for it. Here are some cool reviews of COOKING KNOW-HOW:

weightwatchers.com

In Mama's Kitchen

5 Second Rule

Richmond Times-Dispatch

The Winston Salem Journal

Super Chef

NPR--chosen one of the ten best cookbooks for the summer of 2009

Relish Magazine (although the writer complains that I use too many big words. Heaven forfend!)

And if you want to see an outrageous clip of us on San Francisco TV, check out our appearance on A View From The Bay here.

Or for white bean veggie burgers on the same show--in which I go off on a bizarre jag about the ethics of cruising--click here.

DANCING WITH A COLLIE

brought on no doubt by that empty bottle of wine on top of the fridge

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    Bruce's Blog

    Bruce has his own blog. A knitting blog. Knits Men Want. It's a companion site to his new knitting book: ten rules every woman should know before she knits for a man--plus ten patterns men are guaranteed to like. And I do. I have some of the sweaters. And I wear them. Imagine that. Check on the cover to check it out.

    Entries in braise (12)

    Tuesday
    May182010

    Red Cooking Tofu

    Comment9 Comments

    It's been a couple of bad days. We've been on the road for weeks now, as you probably know--and came home to 1) a dead stove (no way to turn the oven on), 2) a broken dishwasher (a nice leak all over the kitchen floor, staining it for a week), and 3) a phone company snafu of epic proportions. They shut off our phone! Their error, a keying error, trying to shut off another phone. But it means they also shut off our internet. The phone's back on now after much screaming but they're telling us it'll be a week before they can turn the DSL back on. Somehow, they were able to shut it off in 24 hours but can't turn it on for over a week.

    Which means I have a ton of work and no way to do it--except driving an hour (I live really, really rurally) to a Starbucks, where I'm sitting right now, online, trying to get all my work done in the thrumming drone of a zillion conversations.

    Sigh.

    Times like these, I need comfort food. Much comfort food.

    Which for me often means tofu. I love it! I know: me, a carnivore of ravenous proportions. But there's something so delicious, soft, and comforting about tofu, particularly in a deep braise. Here's a real secret: often, I'd rather have it than mac-and-cheese.

    Do you have any secrets like that? Comfort foods that most people think aren't? I'd love to hear about them.

    But for now, on to the tofu, done in the classic Chinese braise.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateTuesday, May 18, 2010 at 4:01PM | in , , ,
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    Tuesday
    Apr272010

    Oxtails Bouguignon

    Comment3 Comments

    Now that's a pot of luscious real food. When I was a little kid, I loved oxtail soup, a hearty German dish that uses a rather low-class cut from the beast: the tail, the little sections of vertebrae that are stocked with chuck-like meat, lots of collagen, and some pretty good opportunities for gnawing.

    In other words, heaven. And as with all forms of paradise, a struggle. Bliss is a journey--and not always easy.

    Over the last year, Bruce and I have wrestled with some of the ethics of eating meat. After I went on an L. A. NPR show to talk about the ham book (here), I was besieged by some rather militant vegans who insisted that I come to terms with the ethics of being, well, not a carnivore, but an omnivore.

    Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried to explain our ever-evolving position, they wouldn't listen. I hope you might. Bruce and I have come to a few conclusions over the past year.

    1. We (almost exclusively) eat meat from local suppliers at farmers' markets and farms. Unfortunately, this guideline falls apart when we go into heavy recipe-testing mode. There's no way we can crank out fifteen pork recipes for a magazine only buying what our friends have on their farm.

    2. I only eat meat once a day, and not always then. Bruce isn't with me on this one, but I've come to the conclusion that I feel better and am more alert if I have fewer meat moments in my day. This is a personal decision. I have NO scientific basis for knowing that I feel better. But I believe it. And believing makes it so.

    3. If we're going to eat meat, we're going to eat all of an animal. This one's a little harder for most people. But we've come to the decision that it's ethically wrong to kill an animal just to eat the tenderloin and certain prime cuts. No, we need to eat as much of the animal as possible. Because for us, if we don't, a life has been wasted for silly excess. 

    And so oxtails. AKA, sheer delight. One of my favorite things. Here's the recipe:

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateTuesday, April 27, 2010 at 11:08AM | in , ,
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    Friday
    Apr022010

    Beer Braised Pot Roast with Mushrooms

    Comment2 Comments

    When I first met Bruce, he wouldn't touch beef chuck. He thought it was too cheeky, too fatty, too much of everything. A great chef or not, he might have cooked it--but he wouldn't eat it. He was too busy being a waif-thin New Yorker.

    Leave it to a good Southern boy to change his mind.

    Nothing spells dinner like pot roast. It's what we had after church on Sundays, for holidays meals, for no reason at all.

    Except ours was a tad gummy. We often had it out of the pressure cooker. And so we lost the most important parts: the browning and the long braising--which infuses every bit of that melting fat and collagen with flavor.

    So here's a meal that can change a New Yorker's mind, that can keep him at the table: that chuck roast, cooked in a streamlined version of the famous Belgian stew, carbonnade flamande.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateFriday, April 2, 2010 at 11:21AM | in , ,
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    Friday
    Mar262010

    Chinese-Style Braised/Roasted Leg of Lamb, Part 2

    Comment6 Comments

    Let's be quick about this. No blather about holiday neuroses. Sometimes, food's the thing. Real food at that. The big task for this recipe is done. Now for the finish.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateFriday, March 26, 2010 at 9:01AM | in , , ,
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    Thursday
    Mar252010

    Chinese-Style Braised/Roasted Leg of Lamb, Part 1

    Comment7 Comments

    What is it about holiday meals? Why are they so often the last resort of the hackneyed, the familiar, the tried-and-true?

    Is it because of Great Aunt June's harping on politics? (What is it with her and Grover Cleveland? Did they have a thing back in the day?)

    Is it because someone's bound to bring up something uncomfortable? ("Dear, I remember fondly those lovely daffodils that I gave you last year and that you managed to kill.")

    Or are we just so jangled in this modern world, so made-nuts by bloviating pundits and know-nothing wags, by bail-outs and world-wide collapses, by wars compounded on more wars, that we finally succumb to the ordinary, if only to (as Annie Dillard once wrote) "stick a nickle's worth of sense into our days"?

    Whatever the cause, I'm here with a cure. For the Easter doldrums. (Other things will have to wait.) This Chinese-style leg of lamb will turn the table on its head and offer something new among the staid traditions: the pastel hats and foofy dresses.

    Or you can fix this wonder anytime and be glad of it.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateThursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:38AM | in , , ,
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    Monday
    Feb012010

    Cider-Cured, Braised Ham

    Comment5 Comments

    Welcome to ham month on the blog. Don't worry: it won't be ham all the time. But all month, I'm going to be featuring snippets from our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. Up top on this page sits the ham for today: a cured, braised one. And there to the right on the page sits the book itself. It's already available on amazon--and will be published in just a few weeks.

    I can't wait until you see it! It's the first time I've written a book in first-person. All our other books are written as "we." This one's "I." It's my fractured, at-times hilarious take on how Bruce developed those 100 recipes, plus the story of how we raised our own pig, took it to slaughter, tried to cure one leg, failed, tried again, and learned more about ham than you can imagine, including tres chic European hams and down-home American country hams.

    To quote from the introduction:

    From that first fateful day when we started this project [you'll have to read about it--let's just say it involves the lethal combo of Eudora Welty and porn], Bruce and I have endured refrigerators full of ham leftovers, with hunks of pork being delivered by UPS every afternoon; I've been to northern Kentucky in the dead of freeze-butt winter; both of us have been to a ramshackle slaughterhouse in rural Massachusetts; and we have borne witness to an enormous toe-on pig leg in our back refrigerator, a swarm of maggots in a French charcuterie, and a group of chic, black-bedecked New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in aspic.

    So let's get our first sneak-peak recipe from the book: the way to make your own wet-cured ham.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateMonday, February 1, 2010 at 1:43PM | in ,
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    Monday
    Oct262009

    Red Cooking Pork Belly

    Comment1 Comment

    I thought we might as well go over the top. I've been saving this recipe back; but heck, the day's are getting shorter and it's time to fatten up for winter. Thus, a big hunk of pork belly. NOT smoked. About 2 pounds worth. Notice how lean this thing is. You can find the same at high-end supermarkets. But this baby is from our own pig. This year's version, that is. Wilbur II. (The tale of the original is told in our forthcoming HAM book. Let's just say it involves gunky stuff scraped off Prada boots with twigs, screeching French butchers, and a certain collie on meat patrol for weeks. But that's another story indeed.)

    Anyway, "red cooking" is a classic Chinese braise, so named because of the way good soy sauce develops a slightly red cast after simmering for hours. In other words, this is not a dish for a Wednesday night but a weekend one, for sure. (With a couple statins as a chaser, of course.)

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    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateMonday, October 26, 2009 at 1:43PM | in ,
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    Friday
    Aug142009

    Vietnamese-Inspired Beef Shanks On The Grill

    Comment1 Comment

    If ever there was a recipe that begged for an apology, this is it: a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, forget-the-quick-and-easy feat.

    Most of the time, Bruce is on a pretty short leash. I'm always the one playing the food prude:"But it's got to have fewer ingredients (or steps or necessary techniques) for anyone to make it."

    Until our HAM book, that is. There, he was given free rein--and some of the recipes are wild, crazy and wonderful, his creativity on full display. (However, I'll admit that I stuck a sidebar on some of them called "Slash The Ingredient List," all about how to do the same thing with fewer items.)

    Well, here's one of his more fanciful creations and the kind of food he lavishes on me and our weekend guests: a grill/braise recipe with Vietnamese flavors that takes on all comers.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateFriday, August 14, 2009 at 11:40AM | in , , ,
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    Tuesday
    Apr072009

    Rabbit Braised With Rosemary And Olives

    Comment3 Comments

    Relationships are odd, no? We shack up, sure, individual space becoming suddenly (and oddly) collective. And we make certain promises (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit). But then there's the rest, the stuff we don't really know about until it happens--or even know about until after it already has happened. Like the ways we change each other over time.

    One of the first meals I ever made for Bruce was rabbit. He, Mr. Trained Chef, had never prepared it himself, had only had it once at a restaurant. But he was game. (A good thing because, as I recall, I didn't even ask.) And he relished the meal. So began the complicated dance in which each of our rather set food tastes--me, the food writer who'd been all over on assignment and he, the Johnson and Wales boy--began to morph, adapt, and meld.

    These days, he's the king of the rabbit braise. And he may have come up with a winner off the cuff the other night.

    One note: our rabbit was already cut-up in the package. If you want to make this dish, you'll also need one cut up into about 9 pieces. Listen, the anatomy can be tricky for the uninitiated. There's a whole discussion of how to cut one up in COOKING KNOW-HOW, complete with step-by-step pictures. But if you're squeamish, ask the butcher at your market to do it for you.

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    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateTuesday, April 7, 2009 at 8:41AM | in ,
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    Thursday
    Mar192009

    Braised Pot Roast With Carrots And Artichokes

    Comment2 Comments

    And so the main course for our dinner party. If you know me, you know it was a braise. A big hunk of meat that's been at a low simmer for hours, yielding a soft, luscious chunk on the plate, surrounded by vegetables and sauce. I ask you: what could be better?

    Again, Bruce followed the technique in COOKING KNOW-HOW. I sound like a broken record. But we're pulling that book out all the time and playing with the techniques it lays out. We both love how much freedom we get to make a different dish every time. We've written a lot of cookbooks. And yes, we use our own recipes. But we've never used a cookbook like this one. And we wrote it! How odd.

    So here goes.

    Click to read more ...

    AuthorMark Scarbrough | Posted on DateThursday, March 19, 2009 at 9:31AM | in ,
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