Essays on Bruce loves to cook

A simple vegetarian red Thai curry

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I reworked my flexible Thai curry into something I can make in under an hour: [[Simpler Thai red curry]]. I also made it friendly to vegetarians, since it works so well with tofu and mushrooms.

Condensing recipes for freezer prep, or how I make things like beef stew

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I like to tell people that I’m proactively lazy. I like to cook when I have the energy and not cook when I’m lazy, and have great food either way. I also have limited freezer space, which has led me to prepare condensed versions of foods that can be defrosted and turned into full meals in under 20 minutes. Condensing foods is an old technique that works well for home cooks today.

How do you fry ground beef without oil?

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I regularly stay at a corporate apartment with a nice little kitchen that has only stainless steel pots and pans. Real pans are normally a good thing, but when I’m travelling I don’t bring oil or butter, and I don’t want to buy more than I need, since I hate throwing out food (or packing it home). And while stainless pans are inert and last forever, they’re picky until they reach the right temperature and are properly lubricated.

Pork loin sausage

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pork loin was on sale this week, packaged in half loins (roughly 3.5 kg). I picked one up and split it into four roasts. Loin usually ends up as chops, or brined and smoked as back bacon (Canadian bacon). It’s a fairly lean cut, but cut right it has some marbling and a fat cap, and it makes great ground pork if you include the fat cap.

Chicken sandwich, crispy, mall style

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 of those hours at the mall, in a food court that sat next to a big arcade.

The food log

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before I kept a log, my stock was flat. I’d made it a dozen times, tweaked it a little each round, and it never got much better: more roasted vegetables one week, a splash more vinegar the next, none of it adding up to anything. The problem wasn’t the stock. It was that I couldn’t remember what I’d already tried, so every batch was really just the first batch again, wearing a different hat.

The impossible quest for the perfect chicken burger

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

According to r/burgers, most chicken burgers are not burgers:

A chicken sandwich contains an entire piece of chicken or filet, rather [sic] a ground and blended patty. A pulled chicken sandwich is also not a burger.

How to find great recipes

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 poorly formatted that they’re difficult to read. I’m talking more about recipes that have no clear idea about what they are or why. And failing any semblance of self-awareness, most recipes fail to teach you much about the how either.

The quest for the perfect burger

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My first restaurant job was flipping burgers, and I loved it. Not just the job, the food. Standing at a griddle all shift taught me what I actually wanted from a burger: crunchy, fresh veg, a thin patty, and flavours that didn’t hide.

Why ingredients matter in stock

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 afternoon’s worth of stock straight down the drain. I stood there for a second before it registered what I’d just done. It wasn’t really a story about being careless; it was a reminder that I needed a method I could repeat, not instincts I could only trust on a good day.

Camp cooking