The Friday Link for 7/19/24

Hi everyone! This week's Friday Link is all about food!

I'm a big foodie.  My mother is a sensational cook and she taught me so much growing up.  I cook most of my family's food, I love cooking videos, I LOVE historic cooking videos, and my secret dream vacation is a street food tour of South Korea.  

In any given week I will watch 5 to 15 cooking videos, from many of the channels I have featured here.  Some of the end results look good.  Sometimes it looks okay.  Occasionally (especially on certain historic cooking videos) it looks horrific. But occasionally, I will stumble upon one that looks so good I'm going to have to make it myself as soon as I can.

This week, I had three of them! 

If you are not the cooking type, that's fine.  Watch these as good old fashion food porn, but if you like to cook and have most of these ingredients on hand, give them a shot.

Number one this week is a gem from Tasting History with Max Miller.  I've enjoyed many of his fun videos, but this one has me scrambling to the store for strawberries.  I never knew strawberries were so popular for so many years. Max does a great little history lesson on the strawberry, but the superstar of this video is the recipe. It's a strawberry tart, looks relatively simple, has bread crumbs in it (???), and judging by Miller's reaction (he whips out a "Y'all!"), it looks like it tastes AMAZING! My guess is it'd be perfect with vanilla ice cream. 

Next up is the always wonderful Ina Garten, with a recipe that I can swear I ate once out in Crete. Pastitsio is basically a Greek version of lasagna, but it is made better with the addition of bechamel sauce.  Now this recipe is a little more labor intensive, maybe not the one you want to do as a rookie cook.  That said, you're never going to become good unless you try it.  From what I remember from 33 years ago (!) it was delicious! Good luck! 

And finally tonight the second video I've featured from Sam the Cooking Guy out of San Diego.  This is Chicken Christopher.  Now two points.  Sam is making some of the techniques look really easy.  Be advised some skills are being displayed here. Also, I am not a big fan of timed cooks, especially when there has already been some prep work done. That's not the real world. Sam is doing a restaurant quality version of this, which includes speed.

My suggestion is to watch Sam do the 15-minute version and aim for your version to be 25 to 30 minutes, not bad considering how delicious that chicken looks when he is done.

Bon Appétit! 

Please make sure to keep up to date on your vaccinations and please be careful in large crowds! 

Have a great weekend!