Amazing Kurly Recipes

Kurly loves to cook and bake and will share some of his recipes with Kurly readers  from time to time.  Warning: Most of them are not the healthiest-but they are really good.

Anyone who knows me can tell you I like to eat-and eat very good food.  With the slow death of individually owned eateries where one finds "great" food, I have grown tired of the mediocrity found in chain restaurants.  As a result, to enjoy good food, I cook and bake at home as much as I can. 

Much of how you eat is learned in childhood, and being that my mother was an excellent cook and baker, I ate very well three times a day.  I first found myself cooking and baking for myself my last year at Cornell University, where I lived off campus on East State Street, which was both horizontally and vertically a big hike to eateries found on campus, in Collegetown, and downtown Ithaca.   Later on, as a bachelor, I got tired quickly of eating out (although breakfast at the great diners in Sullivan County NY never got old-particularly one owned by Shotzie Gluck, who was the best breakfast cook I ever met) and continued to experiment in the kitchen. 

I have learned over the years that cooking and baking are true arts-like the visual arts or literature classics.  Eating a great dish brings a rush of love and satisfaction that makes ordinary life a little special-even for the moment that you are eating it.  Most people that I talk to can quickly tell you about someone in their life that has cooked or baked especially well-usually a mother or grandmother-and we all have our favorite dishes.  

I love to prepare food for my family - my wife Jodi hates to cook (yea, she would rather order out). Early on in our marriage, Jodi freely forfeited the feeding-the-family obligation to me. Thus, I am the family chef by default and face the daily challenge of whipping up decent food to keep the family alive and well. Most of the time, the food comes out pretty good and I get compliments from Jodi-my teenage daughter Hannah (who can eat chicken wings 27 times a week)  can't give me the satisfaction of a positive comment-it's not in her inner makeup to say she likes my cooking.

As all those who do it know, cooking for your family is very difficult-the biggest challenge is keeping it interesting-it's difficult not to get lazy and cook the better dishes too much-you have to avoid where the family gets sick of eating them.  I faced an additional culinary hurdle when my son Aaron decided in his early teens to become a Vegetarian.  Dinner time at the Kurlander house was much like a diner-I had to prepare two or three separate dishes every night.  I found there are just so many variations of using black beans.  Things got easier when Aaron went to NYU-and according to him, they cook the Veggie stuff a lot better than I do.

While I have the obligation to cook and bake, I really developed a passion for cooking and baking from watching the great variety of cooking programs on Cable, particularly The Cooking Channel-.  I don't like the majority of them which involve intense contests between master chefs cooking up and plating intricate, esoteric  combinations of  dishes.  I prefer more the Rachel Ray or Alton Brown method of sharing how to cook easy, really good dishes.  My favorite program is Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, hosted by Guy Fieri, which showcases great eateries with great foods across the country.  One of my dreams in life is to dye my hair white, spike it, grow a goatee, and travel the country in an antique car showcasing and eating comfort foods like Fieri does-that's a great gig. 

I have to admit, that many of them are exact duplications or variations of amazing recipes I have inherited from my mother and grandmother (Bubbe), some are lifted from an old book published in 1955 I found being sold at the Lake Worth Public Library called The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook, (can you say "schmaltz") and others are stolen right off of the inside labels of cans or Internet sites.  There will also be some that I concocted from scratch.

So go back to the Kurly Recipe Tab and pull down a K-Recipe and try it out-let me know what you think of it by contacting me at kurly@stevenkurlander.com.