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Essays

17 essays · page 1 of 2

Writing about food, cooking, and the kitchen.

technique essays

Pork loin sausage

Turning a sale-priced pork loin into breakfast sausage, with rules of thumb for seasoning and texture.

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food memories

Chicken sandwich, crispy, mall style

In high school I worked in a string of fast food and fast casual restaurants, often on split shifts. A split shift leaves you with a few hours in the middle of the day, not enough time to go home, and not much money to spend. I spent most …

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technique essays

The food log

Why a running kitchen log, not just notes scribbled into a recipe, is what actually makes iteration work.

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technique essays

How to find great recipes

You have probably noticed that most recipes are hot garbage. I’m not just talking about those recipes that contain more story than method, or recipes that underestimate cooking times, temperatures, and ingredients, or recipes that are so …

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cooking reflections

The quest for the perfect burger

What years of flipping, testing, and eating burgers taught me about the ratios and technique behind a great one.

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technique essays

Why ingredients matter in stock

My first dozen batches of stock were bad — unbalanced, weak, bitter, whatever else could go wrong. The worst one wasn’t even a flavour problem. In the chaos of a working kitchen, I grabbed a colander instead of a fine strainer and poured an …

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food memories

Camp cooking

I remember learning to make foil camp packets at a kids’ camp. The recipe was simple: a handful of cut-up veg, a potato cut into cubes, ¼ pound of beef, half a bouillon cube, and a pat of butter in a foil pouch (with some ground pepper). We …

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food memories

Garbage plates

My dad only knew how to cook a few dishes, but he was proud of each one. He loved making boxed mac and cheese. It was usually the blue generic box, and not brand-name KD (Kraft Dinner for anyone not from Canada).

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food memories

Slick spaghetti with a hint of oregano

I remember an old cast aluminum pot, handed down from my grandparents. It was pockmarked, with a patina of polymerized oils in the depressions. It once served as a pressure cooker that exploded in my grandmother’s kitchen, so it no longer …

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food memories

The Dutch deli

I grew up in a small town of immigrants mostly from various parts of central, eastern, and northern Europe. Many of our neighbours were second- and third-generation Mennonites, with a few Dutch families sprinkled here and there. We were the …

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food memories

The smells of India

As our small town evolved, more families moved in from all over the world.

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