Rachael Ray

As a cook, I don’t have much use for spring, being indifferent as I am to vegetables in all their many forms. (I prefer to only eat things with parents.) And fall, being the time of year when all the restaurants open, doesn’t do much for me either. No, winter and summer are big cooking seasons in the Ozersky household: the latter for grilling and the former for the big, deep, fatty braises that so please and clog my heart. I am obsessed with braising. For one thing, it conforms to my natural rhythms. A burst of frenzied exertion, followed by several hours on the couch. It cooks while I sleep, and when it’s done, I turn it off and go [...]...

Just like that, your life changes. Sometimes it’s a baby; sometimes it’s a tumor; sometimes it’s a knife. The first one isn’t coming anytime soon, and I can’t speak to the second. But the knife is here and it’s staying here. I now have the only knife I’m going to use for the rest of my life. The knife is an  Bob Kramer all-carbon 8″ chef’s knife, manufactured by Henckels Zwillig. Bob Kramer is the greatest knifesmith in America. (Here’s a video of him doing unnatural things with a chef’s knife.) I should say here that I didn’t buy it; I was badgering my friend at Henckels to use his employee discount on my behalf, and he got sick of hearing [...]...

This week, as a service to Rachael Ray.com readers, many of whom drink coffee, I interviewed coffee expert Teresa von Fuchs, who in spite of her formidable-sounding name, is actually a great gal and easily relatable. Teresa is the director of wholesale at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters, one of the city’s elite coffee operations. Theresa, when I go to buy coffee, every kind has a million varieties from places I never heard of. How the hell am I supposed to figure out what to get? There’s a lot of meats and cheeses most people aren’t familiar with, either. All you need to do is ask about them, the way you would at a butcher or a cheesemonger. Listen you. Don’t get wise. There is [...]...

I’ve written about my grandmother before. I loved her deeply, and not least because of the fountain of starchy, fatty treats she provided me daily. What a woman! She used to make a full breakfast of eggs, sausage, and home fries for me on schoolday mornings - and then put them in a used TV dinner tray so I could eat them in the car - thus giving me an extra 15 minutes of sleep. What an awful man she turned me into! But I adored her and revere her memory. Especially when I think of her Chinese Roast Pork. My grandmother was from Revere Beach, Massachusetts, and Chinese food to her meant shrimp with lobster sauce, won tons, roast pork, [...]...

I naturally imagined that, having never made jambalaya before, that it would turn out badly. The fact that it didn’t, that it in fact turned out to be a culinary triumph here in Casa Ozersky, testifies to both my dumb luck and the usefulness of hubris. A better man, having never stepped up to making one of the country’s most beloved and cherished dishes, would - at least at first - try to make it the right way. It’s not as if I didn’t have a blueprint. I reached out to John Besh, the greatest chef in New Orleans history, and asked him how I should make it. He sent me an exact recipe for the traditional dish. I can’t [...]...

A great many meats have sat on my cutting board over the years. And every time they have, there I was, in a state of hysterical paralysis, barely able to contain myself. Every nerve in my body, every flashing neuron, all the cholesterol-choked blood oozing manfully through my veins, urged me to eat. “It’s been long enough!” they said. “It’s rested! It’ll be fine!” But, I knew, it wouldn’t be fine. The process of resting meat has been one of the fundamental laws of my meat universe. Cook a steak, and put it on your cutting board, and cut it up. Here’s what you’ll get: a big cutting board full of blood and greast. Well, not actually blood. It just looks [...]...

Food geeks, at least of the kind I count myself, have - for the most part - had almost no effect on American home cooking. Which is fine. I understand. Not everybody is going to sit around thinking of sixteen different ways to use leftover animal fat. But I think more home cooks are thinking about “why” as to opposed to “how.” Which I think will be a king change in how we all approach home cooking. This hopeful notion struck me over the holiday, when I was in my usual mouthbreating recumbant position on a friend’s couch. I had over the previous 24 hours engaged in a marathon flurry of debate between myself, barbecue oracle Craig “Meathead” Goldwyn, the blogger [...]...

I recently got invited to a chef’s potluck party at Commerce restaurant in New York. A lot of great chefs were going to be there, I could only assume, and since the LaFriedas are also friends of the place, I knew I wasn’t going to get any points by bringing meat. What can you bring to a potluck? You know somebody is going to bring macaroni and cheese, various casseroles, meatballs, and the like. At a chef’s potluck, all bets are off. I knew that there was only one thing for me to make. The Meattata. The meatatta, as it name might indicate, is a frittata made almost entirely of meat. Now, I know that a classic frittata will often have meat [...]...

One of the weirdest, worst, and most enjoyable dinner parties I ever went to was held about 15 years ago, in South Bend, Indiana, and involved a large group of drunken Russians. The Russians were grad students at Notre Dame, where I was in graduate school. A chummy group of chemical engineers, they liked me and invited me to dinner at one of their homes. When I got there, I looked around the kitchen I saw what were to be the sole elements of the dinner: a giant bag of pelmeni and four comically oversized bottles of vodka. The entire night consisted of endless bowls of pelmeni and endless shots of icy-thick vodka. Pelmeni, I found out to be delight, are [...]...