chad(dq)

Chef at Home may be the greatest food-related television show of all times. Better, even, than Good Eats.

It may not look it, but this Today Show salad by Sarah Moulton is more than just a handful of ingredients thrown together. The dressing goes perfectly with the chicken, corn, and tomato. If you like green onions and avocado, go ahead and add them. Seriously, though, I plan on eating this salad once or twice a week until October.

Today I’m going to start actively pursuing some of the health goals on my 101 Things list. I’ll be counting calories for 30 days, eliminating soda from my diet for six full months, and eliminating fried foods from my diet for six full months.

Time to box up the fry daddy and say goodbye to my lovely lady, diet coke!

I’ve begun posting some restaurant reviews to Yelp; you can read them here. I have the best of intentions and plan to continue writing reviews; we all know that I’ll stick with this for a few weeks and then guiltily quit. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Recent reviews by Chad K.

What’s this?

I can’t tell you how delicious Raghavan Iyer’s Cashew Chicken with Cilantro Sauce sounds; I’m going to add some yogurt to the recipe and try it next week.

If you haven’t heard of Raghavan Iyer, he’s the current darling of the new-media food world. I first heard him on either The Splendid Table or KCRW’s Good Food, and it was immediately apparent why he won IACP’s Cooking Teacher of the Year award in 2004. You can pick up his new book, 660 Curries: The Gateway to Indian Cooking, at Amazon, but visit your local Costco if you’d like to save a few bucks. Also, buy a churro.

I spent the day packing up a UHaul and sweating profusely. I started off the day with a giant soda, but after an hour or two of heavy lifting, switched to ice water. It was delicious. The key to drinking more water and less soda, I think, is to pack a lot of hard, physical activity into my day. I bet if I begin working out first thing in the morning, I’ll crave ice water the entire day.

Obviously, I’ve relapsed into soda drinking. I’ll cut back again. I’ve also let my diet slip. Over the last few weeks, I’ve eaten more red chile beef breakfast burritos than any human being should. When I move, I’ll be stocking my fridge from scratch. I think I’m going to spend the next month or so regulating my diet carefully. If you haven’t taken a look at the government’s food pyramid site, you may want to give it a whirl. It’s a pretty decent resource on nutrition and healthful living.

I desire a home elliptical machine…if I worked out on an elliptical every time I played XBox 360, I’d never have to worry about diet or fitness.

One of my favorite podcasts is KCRW’s Good Food, and the last episode was great. My favorite segment was about kopi luwak, coffee brewed with beans collected from the feces of the Paradoxurus (an animal that’s part of the civet family). In Santa Monica, the place to go for kopi luwak is Funnel Mill Rare Coffee and Tea. Visit the site; it has more information on how the beans for kopi luwak are gathered and brewed AND a hilarious picture of of a Paradoxurus reading a newspaper and doing its business right into a coffee mug (bottom of the ‘coffee’ page).

I’m not a coffee drinker, but I’ll say this — I love my diet coke and, if I thought the taste of diet coke could be enhanced by feces or urine or vomit or bile, I’d pour myself a glass without hesitation.

Cheers!

Lifehacker has a post about Eat This Not That and its list of the worst foods in America. Part of me wants to buy the book and go on a quest to eat each of the foods listed; another part of me just wants a cinnabon. I’ll probably settle for a giant diet coke.

He likes to eat sandwiches, burritos, and pitas. And he likes to hold the gd food himself!

I’m using some of the Christmas money I was given to buy a Global 8 inch Chef’s Knife. I picked it up at a kitchen store earlier today and fell madly in love with it. I’d be chopping 10 pounds of onions right now had my new global been in stock, but I ordered it from Amazon and it should arrive sometime tomorrow (fast shipping compliments of Amazon Prime). Take a look:

This purchase leads me to a new favorite term: hobby chef. It’s slightly less pretentious than home chef, but it’s serious enough to allow me to drop big bucks on knives and pans and spatulas.