For the Love of Lamb: Yotam Ottolenghi's Kofta Recipe

I think I may have forever changed my opinion on eating lamb last night.

We take part in the Walden Local Meat meat share program, and I have had a pound of ground lamb sitting in the chest freezer for several months, not knowing what to do with it. I didn't grow up eating lamb, and when I have had it in ground form, it always tends to taste just, so...lamby.

Chef Reiton, on the other hand, has a sort-of fascination for it. If I mention lamb is on a menu or that I bought a leg of lamb to roast, his eyes light up. So I feel kind-of bad that I repeatedly pass the lamb section in the meat department.

Hence the dinner we made last night. We own Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook. There is not one dish that I have made from that cookbook that I have not positively LOVED. And so when I mentioned that we had ground lamb hiding in the freezer downstairs and Chef Reiton said, "OH???", my hand went to Jerusalem's spine and gave her a little tug off the shelf. A quick perusal of the index led us to "kofta," little lamb and beef logs mixed with pine nuts, parsley, onion and garlic and seared to dark, crusty perfection before they are nestled in and drizzled with a tahini dressing and browned butter. Ottolenghi suggests serving it with a cucumber and tomato salad, which we did, ignoring his direction to not do the fried, spicy chickpeas.

 The dinner was incredible. If two of us would have done the prepping, we could have had both dishes on the table in 30 minutes. And when the tahini sauce got mixed into the salad and chickpeas? It was a glorious, delicious mess. I told Chef Reiton after the first bite that I wasn't going to be able to talk to him during this dinner...

Ginger-Lime Shrimp (and a Lesson in "Deveining")

There are so many things I love about living on the ocean, but I have to say that one of the best things is the insanely fresh seafood that I can get at a seafood shop that is on the way home from picking up Captain Reiton at the airport.

The first time I went into this restaurant/shop—Belle Isle Seafood—I (somehow? There are only signs EVERYWHERE) didn't notice that they only take cash. When I went to pay with my CREDIT CARD, the girl very graciously explained that she was unable to accept it as a form of payment—this being after a five minute conversation about how much I loved living here after being in the Midwest for so long, and blah blah blah....

So, being embarrassed but being me, I made fun of myself and then asked her if she could just keep my salmon in the case and I would run back later with cash to pick it up. To this she responded (and I quote):

"Oh, no, just take it with you. You can just pay later."

Am I serious??? Yes, I'm serious.  This is the kind of town I live in. It's small. People trust you, or they will kick your ass. And I love it.

So. As I was saying: I also love the seafood, so the other night I bought a pound of fresh shrimp at Belle Isle to sauté up for dinner.  Being fresh, the shrimp weren't processed like they are when you buy them frozen or from the seafood case at the grocery store. That meant they simply had their heads cut off, and that was it. They still had their little legs. Their full, unsplit shells. Their little poopy intestine down the center of their back...

So I shelled them. Ripped off their little legs. And then—I discovered the BEST way to "devein" the shrimp!!! 

(Why is it called "deveining," by the way? It's an intestine, NOT a vein. Are they afraid to call it "de-pooping" a shrimp? Because that is what you are doing, really...)

Now, here's the problem that I've always had about shrimp that I have bought frozen that have been deveined: in the processing of the shrimp, they are practically butterflied. They are sliced open the whole way down their spine so that they flay open when they cook.

I don't want shrimp that look like butterflies on my plate. I want shrimp that look like shrimp on my plate, damn it. Appearance is very much a big deal to me when it comes to cooking, and I have always found it so unattractive to be eating shrimp that look like they've been attacked by the SNL Samurai.

SO. As I was finishing peeling and de-legging my shrimp, I wondered if I really had to slice a shrimp the entire way down it's spine to devein it...

I took a paring knife, inserted the tip blade-up into the middle of the shrimp "neck," so to speak, and sliced upwards, making about a quarter-inch long cut.  Now I could see the poop tract laying right there...

I reached in with my fingertips, grabbed the end of the "vein," and very gently but firmly pulled...

VOILA!!! It slid out! The whole thing! I had an entire shrimp in my left hand and an intestine dangling from my right! No flaying necessary!

Now I had perfectly whole, beautiful shrimp, ready to be marinated and sautéed for dinner. 

And speaking of dinner, wowzers, have I got a shrimp dish that will knock your socks off. I very slightly adapted it from Melissa Joulwan's cookbook, Well Fed. If you are looking for flavorful but easy and fast, this is it. 

If you are in a super rush, make the marinade first before you deal with your shrimp, then toss your shrimp into the marinade bowl as you clean them up. Then, as your shrimp are marinating for 20 minutes or so, you can get the rest of your sides together. Shrimp only take a few minutes to cook completely, so depending on your sides, you could have dinner on the table in about 45 minutes, from start to chow-time.

As I've pointed out with so many recipes lately, use the quantities and ingredients you have. You do NOT need to follow ingredients and measurements here exactly. It will still taste good, I promise. But here's what I used:

Ingredients for 2-3 people:

• 1 lb. of fresh shrimp, shelled completely and "deveined" (I also give them a rinse)
• juice from 2 juicy limes (smooth skin, heavy, feel squishy)
• fresh ginger root, peeled and finely grated on a zester or minced up, about 1 1/2-in. worth
• a jalapeño, seeded and minced, or a tsp. of crushed red pepper flakes
• 3 peeled garlic cloves, finely grated on a zester or minced
• about a quarter cup of minced cilantro
• 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
• 1/4 tsp. freshly ground pepper
• 2 Tblsp. olive oil

Steps to Make:

1.  Combine the lime juice, ginger root, jalapeño or flakes, garlic, cilantro, salt and pepper in a medium bowl and whisk together with a fork. Drizzle in the olive oil and whisk rapidly to blend with the juice mixture. This is your marinade.

2.  Add the shrimp to the marinade and toss really, really well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and stick in the fridge for 20-30 minutes but nor really any more than 45 minutes. The lime juice will cook the shrimp. Really.

3. When your sides for dinner are almost done, heat up a large skillet on the stove on medium-high. When it is nice and hot, dump the entire contents of the bowl into the skillet. Shake the skillet to create a single even layer of shrimp. Cook for about two minutes. You will see the shrimp turning pink and starting to curl. Stir the shrimp to blend them with the sauce and to flip them onto their other side (you might need to help some of them a little). Shake the pan to make your even layer again, and cook for another 2 minutes or so.

4. Platter the shrimp and garnish with some cilantro fronds or torn cilantro leaves.

That's it! Super fast. Super easy. Super delicious! You could also skewer the shrimp and grill them, too... YUM.

Word of advice: just don't overcook them. Fresh shrimp are so tender. I had no idea. If you cook them too long, they will get rubbery and weird. Don't panic about the short cooking time. If the shrimp is all pink and curling, it's DONE.

And I promise to make something shrimpy this week and video the whole de-pooping for you...

*UPDATE: I made the video! Click here to read a more descriptive post on how to devein shrimp and to watch the video. 

John Besh's Brown Butter and Vanilla Waffles

That's it.  That's all that's left of them.  Four waffles piled in the most golden, glorious, butter-soaked stack you ever did see. They smelled so mouth-wateringly good coming off the waffle iron, I couldn't resist diving in for a few bites before the photo shoot.  And then—I just couldn't stop.

So, this is it, dear reader.  This is the photo you are going to get of John Besh's Brown Butter and Vanilla Waffles.

Sorry.

The recipe comes from his second cookbook, My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking.  Like his first book, My New Orleans, this cookbook is delightfully readable, full of anecdotes and personality and conversation, beginning with a plea that, when I read it the first time, made me say out loud, "THIS is why I write my blog!" 

Besh understands that cooking, at the heart, is a way to express love for one another.  It is not a form of entertainment.  It is not a competition. And the reality is is that our entertainment industry has become overrun with food shows—food shows that intimidate many budding home cooks, not inspire them.  Besh aims, in My Family Table, to take on that intimidation and turn it into confidence by showing you how he cooks at home for his family.  For his friends.  For real. 

This is why I love this man (remember our Besh-obsessed honeymoon in NOLA?).  He can out-chef the best chefs out there, but at the heart, he is a family man who loves people and loves food; his cookbooks are a testimony to that. When I cook with him, I feel like he gets me, unlike the many, many other celebrity chefs out there who seem to be more into themselves than anything else.

So.  If you don't own a Besh cookbook, yet, I would highly recommend going and ordering My Family Table on Amazon.  When you get your book, after you read his inspiring introduction, open it up to page 110, and make yourself the Brown Butter and Vanilla Waffles.  

You will not—NOT—regret your decision.  Either one of them.

Defrosting Your Fridge: Ideas for What to Do with That Food!

Happy belated New Year, all! I can't believe we are well into 2016 already. Where does the time go?

I haven't written a word to you all for over a month! It appears that the holidays were busy and then some! It feels good to be back.  In between all the traveling and company, I've been slowly hashing out my New Year's resolution to create a daily routine (as routine as a pilot's wife can get). Getting back to you all will be part of my writing goal (but I've got some other projects in the works, so I'm going to need you to share).

One of my other New Year's goals is to get better at experimenting in the kitchen.  There are so many foods that I buy at the store that I can make at home (yogurt, ricotta, kombucha, etc.  Notice the fermentation theme, here).  I've just been lazy and haven't taken the time to read up on it and to try it. 

Well, Fate decided to lend a hand and throw us a broken fridge to help me get that ball rolling...

A few weeks ago, Chef Reiton and I noticed that we were getting random pools of water appearing from beneath our fridge.  After a bit of inspection and research, we learned that the little hose in the back of the fridge that allows the defrost water to drain can get clogged, causing the water to leak out onto the floor and into the bottom of the freezer drawer (we wondered where that huge sheet of ice was coming from...). Thanks to Google and those who share their knowledge on home refrigerator repair, we discovered how to solve the problem ourselves instead of having to call our friendly but expensive Whirlpool repairman.  

The down side? We had to defrost the fridge.  

Crap. 

Thankfully, 1) the winter storm that hit Boston on Friday was bigger than was expected, so the 7 inches of snow piled on our back deck could serve nicely as a natural cooler.  2) We tend to shop twice a week for food, so we didn't shop for the second half; the dinners just became compilations of random scavenged foods as we tried to use up what was in the fridge and freezer, just in case repairs didn't go as quickly or smoothly as we wanted.

Well, despite our interesting meal combos, we were still left with:

• a bunch of cheese (we have a good-cheese fetish, admittedly)
• lots of pickled items in jars
• butter
• half-n-half
• a frozen leg of lamb
• a few random vegetables
• some chicken wings and a carcass

The cheese, jars, and lamb leg got stuck out in the snow in a plastic storage tub.  But those veggies and the chicken?

Well, my New Year's resolution of experimenting started halloo-ing from the back of my brain, and so I pulled out a wonderful little book, The Essential Book of Fermentation by Jeff Cox, given to me for my birthday by our dear friends, Joe (now my boss—I'm officially a copy editor!) and Marie.  

What was I going to ferment? That gorgeous purple cabbage that had been sitting all lonely and forlorn in my fridge, that's what.  In five minutes flat, that baby was slivered into shreds and sprinkled with sea salt and caraway seeds:

All I had to do was completely man-handle that pile of shreds for 10 minutes, scrunching and crushing and squeezing and mixing, until I got it to be a juicy, purple, tender mess:

I covered the surface with some plastic wrap, put a plate facedown on top so that all the cabbage was covered up, then I pressed the plate down hard, pushing all the shreds down underneath their own purple juices.  Now the cabbage was ready to ferment, slowly developing into that amazingly health food: sauerkraut.  If you've never had it homemade, you are missing out.  It is entirely different from the sweet, vinegary kind you get at the store.  And homemade fermented sauerkraut contains bacteria GALORE that will make your gut incredibly happy.  Like, really insanely happy.  In fact, a lot of nutritionists say that eating sauerkraut every day does wonders for your body.  Some food for thought...

As for the other vegetables and chicken parts that sat on the counter—you regular readers guessed it...

CHICKEN STOCK.

Chicken wings and a carcass and a bit of leftover roasted chicken got dumped in the Crock-Pot and covered with a quartered onion, old celery, leftover herbs, a hunk of carrot, sliced up shrivel-y ginger root and turmeric root, a wrinkled serrano chile pepper, and the frozen scraps left from making spiralized zucchini noodles.  I filled the pot with water, put it on high until it all came to a boil, then turned it down to low.  That was yesterday afternoon, and she's still going strong.  I topped it off with a bit more water this morning, and I'll probably let it go until tomorrow afternoon.  The more nutrients I can suck out of those bones, the better. And if you could just smell my house right now... Man.

I'm happy to say that the fridge fixing went ridiculously smoothly.  It took me longer to take advantage of the empty fridge and give it a good scrub down than it did for the repair.  Here she stands, all clean and shiny, ready and waiting for that homemade sauerkraut and chicken stock.

The only question is, what do I experiment on making next???

An Experimental Recipe for Bob and Jerry: Mini Blueberry-Lemon Cakes

To start off this post, I must begin with: BOB AND JERRY, YOU ARE the BEST!!!

I walked into my little middle school library this morning, ready to help Bob and Jerry move some bookshelves—and they were done! I immediately yelled for no one to hear, "You guys are AWESOME!" and plunked the cake carrier I had in my hand down on the floor to survey their work.  They literally left nothing else for me to move.  Every other item on my floor plan, besides the bookshelves, had not only been put into place but thoroughly cleaned.  I'm telling you, school custodians ROCK.

So, what was in the cake carrier I had set on the floor? An experiment that came to mind a few days ago while I was at the grocery store, gazing at the plums.  They were on sale, and after making that frickin' amazing semifreddo for our anniversary party, plums have become my new friend.  I bought two, along with some peaches, blueberries, and blackberries.

Later that evening, as I was thinking of meeting Bob and Jerry and wanting to bake them something to thank them, I had this idea: what if I made little mini pound cakes in muffin tins, and what if I took slices of plum and laid them in the muffin tins first before I put in the batter, so that when I inverted the pan, I had this luscious slice of fruit on top of a golden, buttery cake?

In the book Ratio by Michael Ruhlman that I am reading (I told you it was going to come up again), he has a recipe for pound cake.  I decided to use that and then tweak it to include the fruit.   I love baking his way because he has you weigh almost everything.  I even weighed the eggs! If you don't have a kitchen scale, yet, you must acquire one.  Once you own one, you will not know what you did without it.  You can get a good one that does both grams and ounces and has a tare key (so you can weigh things in a bowl without accounting for the weight of the bowl) for under $25 on Amazon.

Anyway, with pound cake, the fat, flour, eggs, and sugar are all equal parts.  Easy squeezy to remember.  It's called pound cake because you used to use a pound of each ingredient to make the cake! That's a lot of pound cake.  So here's what I did (mildly adapted, once again) with Ruhlman's guidance:

1) While I heated the oven to 325 degrees, I gathered all of my ingredients and weighed them out or prepped them.

I buttered (with real butter) one nonstick muffin tin at this point, too.



Interestingly, Ruhlman says that allowing a finished batter to sit releases the air that you just beat into it, so you want it to go into the pan as soon as you are done beating it—hence buttering now and NOT later.

Here are the ingredients:

• 8 oz. (2 sticks) of unsalted butter at room temperature (ideally between 65 and 70 degrees.  Never knew that before! I actually stuck a digital thermometer in it to check! Ha!)
• 8 oz. sugar
• 1 tsp. kosher salt
• 8 oz. eggs, which is about 4 large eggs plus 1 yolk, also at room temperature (I cracked them into the bowl and allowed them to come to room temperature), whisked lightly to combine (which I forgot to do and it was okay)
• zest of 1 lemon
• 1 Tblsp. of lemon juice from that lemon
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 8 oz. flour
• 72 blueberries
• ground cinnamon

2) Now I loaded the muffin tin: in each cup I dropped 6 blueberries then sprinkled a dash of ground cinnamon on top of them.

3) With the oven hot and everything ready to go, I now made the batter.  (Note: I use a KitchenAid stand mixer which uses a paddle.  This mixer is incredibly efficient and knocks the socks off of any hand or stand mixer that you can buy.  Again, I know they are pricey, but if you can get one, or get people to pool Christmas/birthday money together to buy you one, BEG for one.  They will change the way you cook, I swear.  Anyway, because of its power and efficiency, the times I am listing will be different, i.e. longer, if you are using a regular mixer.)

• for 1 minute -- beat the butter on MEDIUM speed
• for 2-3 minutes -- add the sugar and salt to the butter and beat it all together on MEDIUM-HIGH until the coloring is very pale yellow and the butter mixture has grown in volume about a third
• for 1 minute-ish -- add the eggs slowly so they blend well into the butter mixture
• add the lemon juice, zest, and vanilla and mix in well
• turn the mixer down to MEDIUM-LOW and add the flour, mixing only long enough to blend the flour in--which isn't very long

That's it.  Ruhlman doesn't say anything about scraping down the sides, but I stopped the mixer a few times to do so, and then ran it again to make sure everything was mixed together well.

4) Using a number 40 ice cream scoop (I use this all the time to portion out dough and batter), I plopped a heaping scoop of batter into each cup, smoothed the tops a bit, then put the tin in the oven.



I baked them for 25 minutes, let them cool in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then inverted them out onto a cutting board.

Will I be doing this again? YES.  These babies are firm but tender, bright from the lemon and blueberries, buttery and eggy and just perfectly sweet.

But I'll try it a bit differently next time.  What I had wanted was to be able to flip these out of the muffin tin and serve them bottoms up.  I put too much batter in the cups, though, so the tops were mounded; they didn't lay flat upside down.  I need to use less batter next time.

And—did you notice? I used blueberries instead of the plums that I had mentioned. (The plums I bought weren't looking as pretty as I wanted when I sliced one open.)  Next time I'll try it with plums with a different spice and see how that goes.

So happy with these, though.  As I bit into the first one and began to chew, I felt a big smile start to spread across my face...

Cancer and the Kitchen

The past few months have been rather life-altering in our home.  Some changes, as you loyal readers know, were for heart-popping joyous reasons—like getting married to the darling of my heart.  Some others...not so much.  In fact, they were rather heart-crushing. Back in August, right at the start of the school year, my dearest biggest sister was diagnosed with colon cancer.

Nicole (or Cole, as she is affectionately called amongst us siblings) is one of those people that anyone has a hard time accepting that anything bad happen to her. She is an individual who does nothing but make the world a better place—and I am absolutely telling the truth when I say that. She takes after my two grandmothers in the fact that she does not have a judgmental, critical, negative bone in her body. She may disagree with you—but she understands the disagreement and leaves it alone, simply letting her love for you shine through in the hundred ways she shows it.

And here she has cancer. God damn cancer.

In the midst of all this, Chef Reiton's sister was being tested for celiac, a disease whose name is thrown around a lot these days, but if you have it, it really really is not a good thing. As we started learning more about it and what it does to your body (we tend to want to know all the details about what our sisters are potentially facing), Chef Reiton started becoming concerned. A lot of the symptoms of celiac disease were things that he had or currently was dealing with. Could he have celiac?

Because of the hereditary nature of celiac, and colon cancer, as my brother-in-law and Cole's doctors informed us, Chef Reiton and I decided to look into things a bit more personally: he stopped eating gluten. I thought about getting a colonoscopy. Thought about it, and agreed to get one—and never set up an appointment.

As the months went by, Chef Reiton started feeling fantastic. He started losing weight. His indigestion went away. Some numbness in his foot subsided. His headaches stopped.

I, on the other hand, started feeling worse.  One day I found myself questioning why I didn't have the energy to run up the stairs anymore. And when I found myself feeling pissy every day, I heard myself say, "What is wrong with me?"Anyone who knows me knows that none of these are characteristic of me; I normally am bouncing off the walls and feeling pretty darned happy about life.

And my stomach was just not feeling right.

But, being myself, I told myself that whatever it was was passing, I just needed to get some rest, and I would be fine. Whatever.

And then one day at lunch, I felt like my insides were going haywire. I left work early, thinking I had the flu. But five days later I was still super crappy (literally) with a fever and some serious abdominal pain. I went to the doctor who, upon hearing my new family medical history, immediately signed me up to see a surgeon to get a colonoscopy. The one I was supposed to have gotten months ago.

Long medical story short: the virus that I went in to the doctor's for went away with a month's worth of Prilosec. The colonoscopy experience was a trip; in my dream during the procedure I heard my surgeon say something about "six," and I thought: He found something.

And he did. A polyp the size of his pinky finger was hugging my colon wall. "I don't think it's cancerous," he said post-op, "but most probably precancerous. Thank God for that diarrhea! That's what made you come see me! Another year or two and that thing would have been cancerous."

Holy ironic crap. If it wasn't for Nicole... You see where I'm going? It would have been me.

But it's not. I simply have to get another colonoscopy in six months. Aaaand I have diverticulosis. (I thought that was what old people got!) I now take Metamucil twice a day (my 91-year-old friend, Heinz, laughed at that. "I only have to take it once!" he said.).

Chef Reiton, in the meantime, not only stopped eating gluten, but he started dabbling with the paleo diet. Next he scheduled an endoscopy—and was found to be normal.  A possible gluten irritation, but no disease.

So we were both cleared. But all of this really got us thinking.What we take in, yes, always comes out. But it spends some time hanging out inside, rubbing off on us in either good or bad ways. I had always thought that we had been healthy eaters. And we were, according to the USDA.

But what about according to us?Were we listening to our bodies? Did we stop to think about how we felt after we ate a meal? Did we take the time to not just notice our body functions but to discern what was causing them to be the way they were? Did we care enough about what those feelings and functions were saying?

Usually, no. If things taste good, it's hard to say 'no' to them, even if you feel like total crap later.

But when something big happens, like your sister getting cancer (and now my darling aunt, too), and then you have a scare yourself, you suddenly start thinking, "Maybe I should pay attention, because things are apparently happening in there, and I wasn't listening."

So. That huge story. Where is it leading?

One of the ways we have been dealing with our health hiccups is to follow more closely to a paleo diet. Chef Reiton is staying off all grains since he feels so much better not eating it (paleo foodies eat mostly meat, eggs, nuts, and veggies, and they drink lots of water. But no grain, no legumes, minimal natural starches and sugars...).  I am eating much, MUCH less grain.  I also am incorporating a LOT more fiber into my diet (doctor's orders), which means a heck of a lot more veggies than I already was eating.

This has been a huge switch in the way that we were eating and cooking. Remember all of those posts on homemade bread? Cookies? Cakes? Yeah. They happen a LOT less now. I still eat some. I have a 15-year-old stepson who still wants a cookie once in awhile. But despite a once-a-month splurge on pasta or a piece of pizza, Chef Reiton is strictly paleo—and down to a 32-inch waist.

The funny thing: Nicole and her husband started looking into paleo at the same time because of the connections of foods and cancer. Her research into the diet led her to a cookbook that she thought I would enjoy, so she passed on some of its recipes. After one night of cooking one of them, I was hooked.  I had to have it: Well Fed by Melissa Joulwan.

It has now been added to the Cookbooks to Be Owned list.  Every frickin' recipe in it rocks (except for the meatza pie. It felt too much like squashed meat loaf for me.). I love the pad thai. Never thought I could do spaghetti squash, but here? OMG. The ginger-lime grilled shrimp are fabulous. And the Moroccan meatballs are to die for. (I just want those little swords she has poking into them...I want to eat off a sword.)  Two nights ago we made the citrus carnitas:

I now wholeheartedly agree with blogger Shayne who said, "You should probably rename this to pork crack-nitas, because I cannot stop making and eating it." With such a cheap cut as pork shoulder, you can afford to.

Eating healthy—eating consciously—is not difficult.  It does take some initial sacrifice.  But come on, we are humans. We are adaptable creatures who love a good time; when it comes to food, we can always find a way to still have it good. It's just a different good than what we were used to, that's all. It is in no way less pleasurable.

For those of you who are still here, reading until the very end of this very long post, it shows that something I said caught you. I hope that whatever it was, it was a good spark. I know that despite all of these changes for my family, we are realizing more than we ever did before that Life and the love of it are precious. When you find It raging towards you, in joy or in pain, you've just got to grab it by the horns and ride, ride, ride.

Just make sure you're riding towards a kitchen.

A Honeymoon of Foodies

I think I've been unconsciously stalling writing this next series of posts because I'm afraid that my writing won't even come close to relaying how amazing the experience of our honeymoon was.  And it truly was that: AMAZING.

Let me use this little preface to tell you what we did.

You know that I have listed to the right one of the cookbooks that must be owned as John Besh's My New Orleans (and seriously, you must purchase it if you don't own it already).  It is a cookbook that is both an autobiography and a collection of recipes.  It needs to be read for its story first and then cooked from, because the personal and cultural history given of the foods you are about to cook will make you fall in love with your creation.  You will understand Besh's philosophy of cooking, and you will find yourself actually respecting the food you are about to eat.

Because of this cookbook and its divine recipes developed by a remarkable all-American guy, Chef Reiton and I nixed the thoughts of honeymooning on the beaches of St. Thomas and instead embraced an idea that suddenly popped into my head as deliciously un-honeymoon, seductive, and lavish: we decided to hop a short flight to New Orleans--the city where he professed his love, a city I had never seen, and the beloved city of our dear John Besh and his restaurants.  And our trip had a goal--albeit a very un-honeymoonish one: we would eat with relish and delight at every single one of John Besh's restaurants.

And so, with a bit of planning, we headed off to New Orleans, based ourselves at the Hotel Provincial (darling place, great staff, and fantastic location), and got ready to eat like we'd never attempted before.

Read on for a play-by-play of our John Besh Experience...