Cooking is important

Pax Arcana
Last night I made one of the sparkly and art deco Mrs. Pax Arcana’s favorite dinners — baked orzo with shrimp and feta cheese. It is a fantastically easy thing to make and requires very few ingredients from outside an average pantry, yet the simple combination of crushed tomatoes, tangy feta, olive oil, white [...]

The hot stove

Pax Arcana
I may be a jealous dipshit who fucken sucks at life, but I do have one thing going for me — my pots and pans are awesome.
Thanks to my goofy interest in cooking — and my gala 2005 wedding — I am the proud owner of a pantry stocked with enough top-tier equipment to [...]

Coolio wants to make you a salad

Pax Arcana
You may have asked yourself, “Hey, what’s Coolio up to these days?” If you did, please return to your Hogan’s Heroes reruns and scheduled lobotomy.
Anyway, turns out Coolio (real name Coolio Coolio Ghali) is now pimpin’ it in the kitchen with his own Web-based cooking show. As you can see below, Coolio has mastered [...]

The silliest thing we read all day

Pax Arcana loves us some side dishes, salads, and even brown rice, but still we were flummoxed to come across the following lede in the food and wine section of today’s New York Times:
The entree, long the undisputed centerpiece of an American restaurant meal, is dead.

Can this meat be beat?
To be fair, reporter Kim Severson [...]

Padre Gastronomica: Using an oven

After Pax wrote his recent piece about that food blog he likes, and said that even I could learn from it, I decided to take my hand at cooking this fine evening. See, normally I come home and choose between heating up leftovers from home (if I’ve been back to the great state of Maine [...]

Pax Gastronomica: Sausage, spinach and sweet potato soup

While successfully executing someone else’s recipe can be rewarding, we find it far more satisfying to cobble something tasty out of whatever we’ve got lying around. Tonight we found the perfect venue for our homemade chicken stock (we roasted a bird Sunday evening and prepared a full gallon of stock with the carcass) by modifying [...]

Ruhlman extends his brand

Michael Ruhlman, proprietor of the helpful and occasionally entertaining eponymous foodie blog, has branched out into even more bloggy goodness with his new Elements of Cooking blog — the accompaniment to his new book of the same name.

The new blog has great photos (a hallmark of Ruhlman productions) and is off to a good start, [...]

Pax Gastronomica: Rolled pork cutlets with apples, walnuts, and bleu cheese

The Paxii love them some pork chops, but only under the right conditions. The only way to enjoy chops is if they’re left pink in the middle, which typically requires a thick (at least an inch) chop, seared and pan roasted.
Unfortunately, appropriately sized chops are still pretty hard to find, as most grocery stores still [...]