Category: Chef Ben Cooks!

When the kids were young enough to take direction (do my bidding) but old enough to ride bikes, we started a tradition of biking from park to park on Labor Day, ending at Brandon Park at noon, where Phil would walk over for a picnic with us. Lycoming College always has classes on Labor Day…

My day to cook with Ben this week coincided with my first in-service day of the year, so the theme of the evening was improvisation. We briefly entertained the notion of Chicken Florentine, but to keep things as normal as possible, we made the familiar Quick Chicken Cordon Bleu. (Though it should be noted that…

Chef Ben chose a French dish this week: Savory Pain Perdu (like French toast, but with cheese instead of sugar) and greens with a poached egg. Of course, steak is the perfect accompaniment to…um…everything, according to Ben, so that’s what we did. We all loved the delicious contrast of what amounts to giant, warm, custardy…

This week, after careful perusal of all deep fried items pictured in his cookbooks, Ben settled on crab cakes. While they looked awfully good, I told him we would bake them instead of frying. He repeatedly expressed his skepticism about this approach, but in the end he declared them “poptacular.” Though he refuses to be…

This week, we tried to make good use of summer’s bounty without working too hard. Ben loves these easy, open-faced toasted sandwiches. While soup appears to conflict with his belief system these days, bacon is his weakness, so he consented to the chowder. We fiddled a bit with Hope Helmuth’s recipe from Hope’s Table, and…

This week, we were inspired to make halushki, by a recipe Kristie Lee shared. While the term was new to us, it is similar to something served at Odyssey of the Mind tournaments held in Berwick, PA, an event very familiar to our family. Cabbage, noodles and onion seem to be the heart of this…

People sometimes ask about our cooking process. I would call it an evolving partnership. Ben thinks of a meal he loves, or he looks through his cookbooks, and usually comes up with something that is not practical to make together. Sometimes, it is too complicated, and requires techniques he certainly doesn’t have, and I can’t…

We have been making this French dish for years, and though it sounds a little like “Cocoa Van” when we say it, there isn’t any cocoa involved, just delicious chicken in a red wine sauce. This week’s batch was particularly delicious, and we got to eat it with Charlie, who was here painting. Ben kept…

…and he eats for a day; show him how to glaze a whole salmon fillet, and serve it with a dill mustard sauce, and he eats very well for a day! This week’s Ben’s Day Wednesday meal was mustard dill salmon with crushed rosemary potatoes, and a side of Grandma’s applesauce from the freezer. The…

Years ago, my sister-in-law gave me a tapas cookbook, which explains that tapas, small dishes served in Spain, are snacks to be enjoyed sociably before a meal, but we decided to do it up last night with a whole meal of tapas. For the week leading up to our “Tapas Tuesday,” we planned what dishes…