Recipes

Those who know me know I love to cook and to eat. Few things make me happier than starting a big pot of soup, or lying in the tub reading a cookbook. There’s a reason I spent three years designing our kitchen in East Lansing! Here’s the during and after images from that 2005 renovation:

The old kitchen with the reno crew behind tarp, getting ready to bust out the old wall to expand the kitchen. The kitchen was in terrible condition. But we could afford the house when we bought it (1998) and then we saved up for and dreamed about the new kitchen.
Looking out the old back sliding door with the new walls (expansion) and new windows on the right.
Gutting of the old kitchen. The stove at the right was new and we kept it. (The tarped door to the left of the stove goes to the dining room.) The original kitchen floor was birds’ eye maple; of course we kept that! A beam was raised into the ceiling (seen in the foreground), with the house lifted (yikes) for the process.
Purposely done in the style of a chem lab: maple cabinets, lab faucets, soapstone counters. (Note the emergency “shower” on the left; it’s rewired to be a lamp for a fold-down laundry table. The washer and dryer are hidden under the counter at the far end.) Still beautiful, still perfectly functional 17+ years and so many parties later.

So, below are some recipes that friends have asked me to post. There’s no rhyme or reason to this list; it’s just stuff I’ve made for friends who later asked for me the recipes. (I make a lot of stuff from cookbooks, too, but these are the recipes for which I can’t just point you to a cookbook.)

One note: I’m allergic to milk proteins, so all the following recipes are dairy-free. In the rare recipe where I use margarine, you can substitute butter. Same deal with soy milk and cow milk. Generally I avoid doing non-dairy substitutions by simply avoiding dishes that call for dairy, because non-dairy substitutes don’t taste as good as dairy. And I like food that tastes great.

In early 2011, I realized I had also become gluten intolerant, so recipes posted after that date are either gluten-free or make notes about how to make them gluten-free.