Category Archives: My Husband Brad

Pasta Cravings and Kitchen Rules

Posted on by

5

I love spaghetti.

This is not an understatement.  I would eat spaghetti six times a week.  Maybe seven if Brad didn’t feel like cooking.  And even without switching up the sauce or anything.  Just spaghetti and red sauce out of the jar.

I studied in Florence, Italy in the summer of 2004 and I was surrounded by amazing Italian food.  I took a class that was called “Italian Cooking” every Wednesday night where we would make these INCREDIBLE italian dishes with this large Italian man named Stefano.  I loved Stefano.  I also took his “Italian Wines” class, so he kind of wined and dined me – true Italian style.  AND he could pronounce Bylsma.  That is a major in with me.  I remember I told him I was impressed he got it right ont he first try and he said:

“What, Bylsma?  That’s Dutch.  Everyone knows Bylsma.”

That was one of the reasons that I fell in love with Italy, I think.  No one knows what Bylsma is, where its from, or even close to how to say it.  Gosh, America, keep up.  Everyone in Italy knows Bylsma.  Duh.

But anyway, back to spaghetti.  I might have had that one fantastic meal with Stefano every Wednesday night while I studied in Florence, but the other six nights a week, I went to my favorite little market and made myself pasta with red sauce out of the jar.  Of course it tasted amazing because I was in Italy.  And I was a poor college student.  And especially because the Euro/Dollar conversion was not exactly in my favor.  Best spaghetti I’ll ever have.

But nowI have this (sort of) problem.  I crave spaghetti.  I leave work at midnight and just want spaghetti.  And spaghetti is not the best thing for a girl’s figure at midnight.

I sent this picture to a girl I work with at 11:42 pm after we had closed down the bar together and I told her about my spaghetti obsession.

So last night I was home alone, doing some work and playing with my new iPad (!!!!) when I realized I was starving.  Of course, I had some spaghetti and red sauce on hand, but I decided to spice it up a little bit.  I cut up some chicken into strips and made me some “chicken parmesan” if you will.  And everytime I bread and fry something I am reminded of one of Brad’s kitchen rules.

Just to bring you up to speed if you have never been in our kitchen while Brad is cooking, there are what I like to call “Brad’s Kitchen Rules”.  I sometimes have to remind him that we are not in a professional kitchen and the health inspector is not coming by our apartment. (Which, actually one time she did for a completely un-kitchen related problem.  He likes to bring that up.)  Working in a kitchen 50-60 hours a week, the rules of the kitchen have been engrained in his head.

I also like to remind him that when we first met, I didn’t do dishes for a week.  They would sit “soaking” in my sink until they didn’t fit anymore and then maybe I’d throw them in the dishwasher.  Brad does not allow that to happen anymore.

The first rule that I will teach you is one of the least important in Brad’s mind, but it’s one of my favorites because if I screw it up I just have to wash my hands and start over.  And its probably the rule I’m best at.  So it’s a good place to start.

I present the first in an ongoing series of “Brad’s Kitchen Rules”.

Wet Hand/Dry Hand

So when I was making my chicken parmesan last night, I got my whole breading station set up.  I mixed together bread crumbs, garlic salt, italian herbs, lots of parmesan cheese, and chili pepper.  Then I beat an egg in a bowl.

The point of wet hand dry hand is to get all that chicken battered and not have your hand completely battered by the end of the process.  It can get very messy.  So I assigned my right hand to be the wet hand – the one that touches the chicken and dips it into the egg…

And my left hand was the dry hand that covered the chicken with the bread crumb mixture.  Since it never gets wet, it doesnt have big clumps of breadcrumbs sticking to it.  See?  (the thumbs up means I actually did a good job.  Minimal bread crumb stickage.  Brad would be proud.)

Basically, I melted a whole lot of butter (I mean, if you’re eating pasta at 11pm its already bad enough, you might as well add a lot of butter) and fried that chicken up.

Brad must have liked it because the pots are still in the sink.  That’s when you know you made something good – he forgot his own rule!  And that almost NEVER happens.  Even Stefano would be proud I think.

And Me, the Leftover Queen

Posted on by

0

Yea, so you saw that Brad cooked another amazing meal while I Skyped with the folks last week.  But we have a bad habit of cooking like we are feeding a small army (you are always welcome for dinner, we invite our neighbors all the time), and with it usually just being the two of us we have some extreme leftover food.

 

Good thing I rock at leftovers.

 

Here was my late lunch/early dinner today.  Wild Arugula salad with Roasted Corn, Cherry Tomato, Homemade Balsamic Vinaigrette and Chilled Skirt Steak.

 

 

Beats a PB&J anyday.  Yum.

My Husband, the Chef

Posted on by

1

Have I mentioned I am married to a chef?

Seriously, ladies – If you are not already in a serious relationship, find yourself a chef to marry.  It makes life delicious.  And it helps if he’s really hot and a pretty amazing guy, too.  That makes life delicious, attractive and awesome.

This is my delicious, attractive and awesome chef husband Brad.

When Brad and I are not working in a restaurant, we are eating amazing food or planning the next amazing food that we have to put in our mouths.  For us, life pretty much revolves around meals.  What we are eating  now, what we will eat next, and where we have to eat soon.

We get two nights a week off together (if we’re lucky) and we usually have planned out early in the week what we are cooking one of those nights and where we are eating the other night.  When you live in LA, there are a million amazing hole in the wall restaurants just waiting to serve you up your most amazing meal ever.  We are seldom disappointed.

This weekend (our weekend is Thursday/Friday.  It’s kind of awesome.), we finally got to try out Son of a Gun, which is an AMAZING restaurant on 3rd in Hollywood right by the Farmer’s Market.  The chef/owners used to work with Brad’s boss, Ben Ford, and then branched out to write a cookbook, a catering business and eventually started their own place.  Their first restaurant was Animal, a meat based concept that is also down in Hollywood and also amazing.  Brad loves the amount of bacon, pork belly, and foie gras that is on this menu.  I wish there were more vegetables.  But last time we were there we ate across from Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, so I don’t complain too much.

One day I will give Son of a Gun a proper review, but for now I’m just going to tell you it was amazeballs.  Reminded me of a classed up East Coast seafood shack…  Felt like home.

So this brings me to tonight.  I felt like steak.  We decided we would grill.  We went a little crazy at Whole Foods and thought we were having more people eating, so we got a ridiculous amount of food.  This is usually the way our nights go when we decide to stay in instead of go out for dinner.

I skyped with my mom and dad while Brad chopped, diced, mixed and tenderized, so I cannot take credit for hardly anything on the table.  I did , however, make the horseradish cream sauce, and I did do a lot of the dishes afterward.  And Gibson helped out whenever she was needed to clean the floor, so we all contributed in some way.

The final menu?

Heirloom tomato salad with burrata.  Grilled potatoes and corn on the cob.  Olive oil bread (Brad called it “Mario Bread” because he totaly stole the recipe from Mario Batali’s restaurant).  And last but certainly not least – Skirt steak with chimmichurri and my horseradish cream sauce.


Just a typical Friday night meal.

I die.

To those who we thought were coming over for dinner, you totally missed out.  But don’t worry, we have lots of leftovers.  And we will probably do it again next Friday night, so clear your schedules.

West Coast

Posted on by

0

image

Last night I took this picture before getting dinner at Brads old restaurant, Bar Pintxo…

Toast

Posted on by

8


World, meet Johnny Toast.

Turns out this character – who is in fact, a real person – came along with the package when I started dating Brad.  He hides in the Sig Ep composites between 1988 and 1992 that hang on the walls of a bar in Ithaca called ‘The Chapter House”.

And now he is a huge part of my life.

I learned early on in my relationship with Brad that he had a friend he called Johnny Toast.  I knew his real name was Steven, but he was in Brad’s phone as Johnny Toast and he was usually just called “Toast”.  And before I had been to Ithaca, Brad couldn’t explain the nickname to me.  He just swore he would just show me one day.

Doesn’t that picture just explain why you have to see it in person?

Maybe this one will give you some more information…

All of the other 1988 SigEps are completely normal 1988 Cornell University students.  Nice suits, nice ties, neat hair and a pleasant frat-boy smile.

Not Toast.

First of all, his real name is John Santos, but doesn’t go by that.  He is the only one on the composite with his nickname included and the only one rocking a mullet and those fly 1988 sunglasses.  He is just so FRESH!

Steven and Brad were immediately drawn to this fly mentor-from-another-generation and started using “Toast” not just as a nickname, but as a real way of life.  Words like “Toast-mostest” were added to their vocabulary.  I have Toast coasters (Toasters.  Serious.) in my apartment.  Toast became an icon among all who knew them.  How did he come to be so fly??

Believe me, we have done many a late-night intoxicated Google search to try and find out more about this man of mystery. You know, just to see where all that freshness got him.  And to see how much more fly he could have possibly gotten after graduation.  I bet he wears Louboutin slippers and a velvet robe and just smokes cigars all day.  And I bet he NEVER takes off his sunglasses.  I mean, just LOOK at him!

I wish they had Facebook back in 1988, because no one can find Toast.

My little sister, Nicki, has been to the Chapter House and knows all about Toast.  She can find anything online.  Stuff that I wouldn’t even know could be online, she finds it online.

Nicki couldn’t find Toast.

But one day she was at a coffee shop in Delaware where they happened to have a few old Cornell yearbooks laying around.  There he was – Mr. Toast – in the black and white pictures with his other Sig Ep brothers in a Delaware coffee shop.

My faith in Nicki’s searching abilities were restored with that picture message.

Sadly, I am lead to believe Johnny’s freshness didn’t last too much longer after his freshman year.  We don’t really like to admit it, but this picture of Toast hangs at the Chapter Room also.  It’s from 1991.

Still rocking that party-in-the-back hair cut, but maybe he was over the shades by ’91.  And what happened to the “Toast”?  Is this the more mature Toast?  More undercover?  Was it just cloudier that day?

We will never know.

We pretty much gave up our search when Steven’s mom, who works at Cornell, couldn’t even find him through alumni records.  And after Nicki’s failed Googling, we put our search for John “Toast” Santos on the back burner.

I think at one point we were looking to send him an invitation to our wedding.  I had probably been drinking when that decision had been made.  He never got his invite, but don’t worry, he was definitely there in spirit.  The boys made sure of that.  No mullets (or pants, apparently) required.