Not A Single Fork

Happy Hanukkah! May your candles burn bright this season!!My apologies for not being better versed in my Hanukkah knowledge...I got a little rusty. We stumbled through my very bad explanation of the Festival of Lights and then we moved on. You probably know we have an opinion or two about everything so wanted to share how much we appreciated Chef Nikki setting us straight with her experience and o...

I was never very good with leftovers because my mom hated leftovers. I just never learned any clever techniques for repurposing food but things have changed. I have come to love leftovers and the creative options they provide. Weird, right? That doesn't mean I save everything forever (unlike Natalia and her bean burrito story...stay tuned in for that saga) but I don't dread having extra food hangi...

We don't do interviews very often but when we do...it's one for the books. We had the pleasure of speaking with Chef Nikki Pettineo. She has had a colorful and varied career and tells us all about it. She began in the corporate food world but quickly moved on to become a personal chef for several professional football players. She has cooked on yachts and has taught culinary arts to almost everyon...

We're not quite finished with our list of kitchen basics that you should know by now. We actually agreed with most everything. Hard to believe, I know. Tips on cooking rice and finishing pasta in the sauce. Did you know that pastas have "matching" sauces? That means that some pasta shapes are better suited to specific sauces. Roasting a whole chicken is always a good technique to add to your cooki...

More kitchen advice in this week's episode starting with a Buzzfeed article about kitchen basics that you should probably know by now. We're not really into "shoulds" so we decided to tackle this list. We could get on board with most of the suggestions but there are so many, we're doing a second edition. But we're always going to support mise en place, knife skills and recipe reading. It goes into...

You know that saying..."expect the unexpected"? That's kind of my life but it was no more apparent than when the woman who produced our first promo reel for The Girl Can Cook! asked if she could work as an extern for us as she completed the requirements for her culinary degree. But it happened so what makes for a better interview than someone who has a journey that includes a drastic career change...

Well...this one was a fun romp. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. I started my real cooking journey in the 1980s while I was in graduate school for clinical psychology. Maybe it was just the inquisitive, scientist part of me coming out but I was all over reading about exotic foods, techniques and how different they are from what I grew up on. Now, most of the food I grew up on was delicious b...

Here we go with another look at Retro Foods. This time foods that are making a comeback. As usual, we disagree with any number of items on this list but most of them have stories behind them. Lots of storytelling going on in this episode. We spend an inordinate amount of time on Jello. I think it's because neither one of us get it and yet I grew up on it and Natalia does love a good Jello shot. If...

We all know it even if we don't like to admit it. Fast food lures us in with all the salt and grease and sugar and we love it. We especially love it when we've been drinking...too much. So we spend a lot of this episode, extolling our occasional love for particular fast food treats. And we really do mean treats because fast food is a guilty pleasure for us. Sadly, in the food industry because of o...

We dive deep into Filipino food in this episode with Chef Anthony Santos. If you don't know Filipino food or even if you do, you're going to love hearing about the how Chef ended up with his own food truck cooking his favorite foods. It will make your mouth water. Halo Halo is a traditional Filipino dessert with a sweetened condensed milk ice cream and Chef original idea was to have an ice cream t...

Chef Anthony Santos is our guest on today's episode. The chef and owner of the food truck Manila Ice, he is making quite a name for himself by offering up the only Filipino street food in the area. Actually, the only Filipino food, period, outside a native Filipino's home. We were lucky enough to spend most of one afternoon with Chef Anthony and you get two episodes as we talk to this very interes...

Foods to make your head spin? What do we mean? Part of our mission on the podcast and in the studio kitchen is to broaden people's food horizons (or at least try). To that end, here is another attempt to introduce you to foods you may not have heard of but that we think you should seek out to try. Have we tried all of them? Almost but we're willing to try just about anything...short of the weird f...

Did you have a garden this summer? If so, this episode is definitely for you. If not, it may inspire you to have a garden next summer or maybe even this fall! Although we are not vegetarians, we both love and appreciate vegetables. We're always surprised by the number of people (especially of the male persuasion) who don't eat vegetables. They won't touch anything green and possibly have never eat...

I love lists. It doesn't matter if it's a checklist, a to-do list or a list of foods. I'm all in. In today's episode, I read a list of exotic foods to Natalia and we dish about whether we would try them. Many interesting stories are told and re-told as we wind our way through durian, fetal duck eggs and the popular one around here, Rocky Mountain Oysters (euphemistic term for bull testicles).Deep...

Happy September 1st! It's still hot but not as and at least, it's not August anymore! Thought we'd have some fun today since it will be cooling off soon. We love to talk about, read about, learn about different food combinations so we're sharing a bunch that we found recently. We like to surprise each other so this time...I have the list and Natalia gets to respond, off the cuff. That way, you can...

Yes, there really is a test for how much you can tolerate disgusting food. It doesn't ask if you like oysters (or not), it digs pretty deep on what kinds of food and food hygiene situations that you can handle without being deeply disturbed. It is a free and pretty fun test to take. The drawback for me? The test is written in a way that makes it hard to answer. Double negatives (to me) are a big n...

This may be a silly question to those of you on the coasts but here in the middle of the country known as the "flyover" states, Trader Joe's is a relatively new phenomenon. I'm pretty sure a lot of people in our fair city have never heard of Trader Joe's let alone been inside one. Also pretty sure many would think it's some kind of commie, pinko plot to undermine the fabric of 'Merica. Whatever ca...

We get so many questions about knives and pans and tools and food and, and, and.. In this week's episode, we tackle your questions about saute pans (and skillets) and share all our opinions about them and of course, we have many. We also have a lot of pure information about the pros and cons of all those pans and which one should be used where and when. We also have a few words about dishwashers a...

Did you know the Japanese have almost 500 words to describe food sounds? English only has 130. Crazy, right? And we love crazy so we give you a rundown of just a few of the words the Japanese use to describe the sounds that food make when we eat them. To add to the fun, we made it a game so Natalia has to guess what the word describes. Then we took a trip down the canning lane to explain why we're...

"We're having a heat waveA tropical heat waveThe temperature is risingIt isn't surprisingShe certainly can Can-Can"...So sang Marilyn Monroe and then my personal favorite, Liza Minnelli in a variety show special with Mikael Baryshnikov. Of course, that dates me! Surprise! But really it is SO DAMN HOT!Natalia is sweating and swearing (more than usual for her salty self). I'm just staying indoors in...

Canning. It was the darling of the pandemic. Canning was so popular, I couldn't find canning lids. Not sure if the mystique continues but I think it does so we spent this episode talking about how you can start canning. Too many vegetables in your garden? You went crazy buying tomatoes the last time you were at the Farmers Market (they were all so beautiful, right)? You made a boatload of salsa, m...

Do you love the pasta you get in a restaurant but can't seem to make it the same at home? The difference...pasta water! In today's episode, we break down (with the help of @Serious Eats again) the many sides of serving pasta with and without pasta water. A short but mighty episode with lots of information packed in. If you're always throwing out the pasta water, you will want to listen to this. Pl...

Chaos cooking. The name really says it all or does it? We're breaking it down in today's episode and you know we have our opinions. We think it's...well, you'll have to listen to the episode for that. But suffice it to say, we don't hate it, at all. Natalia likens it to "drunk ass" cooking. You know, the stuff that tastes or sounds really great when you're licking the woodwork. I guess that would...

Food fusion, a passe topic for most chefs these days. Like a lot of trends, it has come and gone so of course, we thought it was high time to talk about it. It was also high time to dig into the archives from our past life and look at where we've been. In today's episode, we revive underground supper clubs. No one talks about those either or maybe they just call them "pop ups" now? We had the priv...

It's that grilling time of year so yes, we're grilling and smoking and offering up a series of grilling videos. Yep...all that and a bag of Doritos! We have an Online Recipe Collection (if you haven't heard) where we share for the tiny subscription price of $15 a month. recipe videos galore. Now these are not you're same ol' garden variety recipe videos. They include US! You get our scintillating...