The chili begins.

Up in your grill...

Howdy Strangers,

The big news in the big man family is that we are buying our very own first house in West Orange, NJ.  This is, theoretically, good news for you as well since the house comes with a totally kick ass Weber grill, with which I can scorch meat with all summer!

I don't have much in the way of new recipes or photos, but sure to find some soon once I get this baby fired up.  Any suggestions as to what I should make?

P.S. - I did make a shepard's pie and a meat pie that make you wish you were a shepard in the worst way.  Check these out:

Accidental Genius (or Momofuko you)

Last Christmas I got the Momofuku Cookbook from the Mrs.  The book was beautiful and fascinating, but honestly I hadn't really had much time to make the food in it.  Part of the problem, of course, is that I've been meaning to eat at one of the Momofukus for almost two years now, but haven't gotten around to it.  Sometimes it's hard to be motivated to make something that you've never eaten before.  For me at least.

Anyway, so this weekend, I found some time to try out David Chang's rice cake recipe, complete with something he refers to as  Red Dragon sauce.  The rice cakes were edible.  It's basically rice shaped into a log and fried in a pan with oil.  I also slow roasted a chicken and adapted his ramen recipe to suit my own ingredients.


Both courses were well and good, but the moment of genius occurred when I took the leftover chicken and slathered the sauce over it and give it a quick re-fry.  Out of this momofukoing world!

Hard Day's Night

Hi All,

It's been a while since you've heard from me.  Months to be exact.  I'm really sorry about that.  I can't say that it won't happen again, but I can say that I've been thinking about Big Man all this time and trying to figure out how to write more with everything else that is happening.

When you last left your fearless hero, he was a new father and studying for the NJ and NY bar exams.  Months later, I'm still a new father but am now working in a law firm at the schedule and pace of a young attorney.  I passed both exams, and tomorrow will be sworn in as an attorney in NJ.  I still have to send in a bunch of paperwork before being admitted to NY.

Work is interesting.  I like my firm and I like the sophistication of most of my cases.  But it really doesn't leave me much time to write or to even to cook.  Mrs. Big Man has really stepped up her game in the last few months, cooking most of the dinners on the weeknights.

I did have a massive culinary victory on my birthday when I invited 15 people over and made Indian food for everybody.  This was one of my goals, to get some proficiency in Indian food.  I bought a cookbook on the subject, pretty thorough in my opinion.  I'll put up some amazon link at some point in the future to point you to how to buy this book if you are interesting.  Some percentage of the proceeds will go towards justifying the time that I spend thinking and writing about food.

Anyway, while I've been thinking about how to keep Big Man going while also keeping my day job, I think the answer is just to re-adjust some of my expectations about what this blog is.  It began as an experiment, and I made no promises.  But, naturally, pretty quickly in fact, I worked toward improving the look and quality of the content, substantively and presentationally.  I created some recipes, and reprinted a few old favorites, with the hope that maybe at some point in the future, they would be the makings of a cookbook or magazine article.

The truth of the matter, however, is that I'm not Orangette.  She blogs and writes cookbooks with her blog and gets magazine gigs and takes prettty pictures of her husband's pizza shop.  I blog and practice law and raise my son and go fishing and look for a house to buy and spend time with my wonderful wife.  I'm a renaissance man, which means that I'm limited in the time that I can spend on this.  So, going forward, rather than publishing recipes, I will likely stick with pictures and shorter posts.  Brevity if a virtue, they say.  And to the extent that I am up to that task, I'm going to give it a try.

So, I hope this means I'll be writing more.  Maybe not.

Enjoy the pictures!  But if anyone is offended by a pig roast, you might not want to scroll all the way down.

Damn Good Fried Chicken for a Yankee (I cheated, I'm half-Texan).

Beautiful Tomaters

In Texas, Basil is free.

So we eat it with tomaters.

Summer Sweet Salad

I don't totally remember what this is, but it looks delicious.

What is a summer fair without a prize winning rooster?

Lobster Roll in Portland, ME.

I picked blueberries in Bar Harbor.  There were more than I could fit in a paper bag.

It's a salmon, stupid.

We drank well in Maine.

Jersey Tomaters.

Best damn BBQ I've ever had.  Even better with a hangover.

This is what I had for lunch.

                           

Jersey does BBQ, too.

It gets hardcore at the Jersey Shore.  Don't mess wit NJ.

6 Days

In 6 days I will be taking the NY, then the NJ bar exams.  Looking forward to cooking something soon.  So far, it is just my brain that is fried.

Pizzaaaaa

Don't mind me.  I'm not really here.  I'm actually studying for the bar, so I am DEFINITELY not blogging right now about food.  I am way too busy to be doing anything remotely like that.  Although, I do have a couple pictures of pizzas that I've been making.  I've been working on really perfecting my pizza making.  Right now, my pizzas are way better than your average pizza place pizza about 75-85% of the time.  Although, occasionally I do have pizza disasters where you have to scrap the dough off the pan with a paint scraper. 

I have no sage advice about how its done right now, except to say that, yeah, throwing the dough in the air is ACTUALLY necessary to making a good thin crust.  You need the centrifugal force that is only available in a zero-gravity, spinning, floury, environment.  O.K., enough talk.  I have to go.  I really do have to study for this thing.  But here are some pictures in case you are wondering what I'm having for dinner tonight.

Also, my friends Burkett and Katherine had us over for dinner yesterday.  Dinner was amazing, and I got this pretty picture of our first course.  They were extraordinary with grilled lemon squeezed over them!

Hello (again)

Where has the time gone?

It's been a forever since I've written anything. Like I said before, I've been busy. Since you last left your aproned hero, I've handed in all my papers, taken an exam, and graduated from law school. Everything was swell, I had family come to town, took a few days to go fishing and relax and visit more family and the next thing I know... Bam! I'm starting bar exam review to get prepared to take the NY and NJ bar exams. What crap!

Not to say I'm not looking forward to being lawyer. But I was also looking forward to a little down time after this semester and it has not come. As we speak, the baby is napping and I'm forced to choose between blogging and getting to eat lunch.

*pause to eat lunch*

Ok, to be fair lunch wins over blogging. But, I guess lately most things have won over blogging. I make no apologies, just saying is all.

In other news, my digital camera broke, so I had to fix the thing all the time while being happy to have an excuse to buy a brand new camera. The Mrs. says that I should wait until I have, you know, actual income, before I buy a new one. I say, yeah, but the baby is always blurry in our pictures and wouldn't it be nice to take a clear, good picture of him before September? I think we both have a point. In the meantime, I fixed the camera that broke, cooked some Mahi-Mahi and took pictures.

I'll preface the pictures by noting that I'm not Mahi-Mahi's biggest fan-fan. First of all, I think it's silly that it is called the same thing twice. Mahi would be a completely appropriate name for a fish. Mahi-Mahi is a bit redundant. Second of all, I think Mahi-Mahi tastes like very tender chicken. Since I am perfectly capable of making very tender chicken out of actual chickens, I see no need to pay three times the amount for a fish that tastes the same. The Mrs. is a big fan of fishes that taste like meat, but I just prefer meat. So, long story short. If you find yourself with some Mahi-Mahi and are wondering what to do-do with it-it, here is one option.  It was baked with some garlic and given a shallot and vermouth sauce.  It was good, just not spectacular. I'll take a stir-fry over this any day.