The Fuzzy Chef & Friends

I recently won the Pacific Wine Club's "Cooking With Wine" recipe contest.  My submission was an original recipe of "Smoked Steelhead and Mushroom Risotto", which you'll now have to get the PWC newsletter to read.

If you're coming here from that newsletter, welcome!  I don't post that frequently these days, due to working way too hard, but there's a pretty hefty post archive and the bulletin board has a lot of very friendly, very gourmet, people on it.

Other than that, I thought I'd take this chance to give you some tips on how to cook with wine.  Click "more" to read the tips.

This recipe was adapted from Sundays at Moosewoodwith a bunch of my own changes, particularly to include even more whole wheat flour. It's amazingly tasty and easy, and people who tell you they don't like whole wheat bread will gobble it up.

The battle of the titans!

In the left corner, we have Sri Chinmoy! This recently deceased quasi-Indian cult leader, marathon runner and flautist, through his restaurants such as Ananda Fuara in San Francisco, brings us the Neatloaf, a popular savory main dish of mysterious ingredients!

In the opposite corner we have Prabhupadha! The late founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, otherwise known as Hare Krishna, brought Vishnavism and surprisingly good Indian food to millions of people worldwide via his empire of temple-restaurants and three cookbooks. Today he brings us the Nutloaf!

Two bald Indian former cult leaders. Two 1970's-style vegetarian meat-substitute main dishes. Two hours to cook. Two heavily greased baking pans. Which one will win? Click and find out.

For me, cooking or baking ... it's all an "art," if by art you mean not very precise and thus not very reproduceable. Writing out my own recipes is a pain for me because I seldom measure, except approximately. "How much do you add?" "Enough." Sure, I'll measure things with some precision when it's someone else's recipe I'm trying for the first time, but even then I tend to diverge quickly when I'm "know" what's going to taste good or how my ingredients are different from the author's.

My wife, on the other hand, always measures everything precisely, and never cooks anything without a recipe ... even if it's a family recipe which she's made 100 times before. I know I frustrate her to no end with my imprecision, but on the other hand I do most of the cooking because I'm faster.

What I'm saying is that I thing that there are scientists and there are artists, regardless of cooking vs. baking. And that measurement-cup precision is a requirement of personality ... or of inexperience. That's where Americans get the idea that baking requires some kind of rigid precision: most Americans are very inexperienced bakers. Even for my gourmet friends, even for me, we cook pasta maybe 20 times as often as we've made bread from scratch. So since each bread loaf is a new experience, or a half-remembered one, we tend to a slavish adherence to printed measurements lest something go wrong.

Also, I tend to find that people with a "scientist" attitude tend to be more attracted to baking, than to entree cooking where the cookbook authors tend to say things like "salt to taste."