The Bare Necessities Part 1 - Ingredients

I love cooking. I love the whole process, from picking out ingredients at a market all the way to plating the dish and making it look pretty before digging in and destroying any semblance of presentation. I don't always have the time to take all the steps in sequence and let's face it: sometimes it isn't about crafting a gustatory masterpiece for the ages.

Sometimes it's Wednesday night and I've got maybe 30 minutes if I'm lucky and I'm hungry. When this happens, I've got to have the basics on hand or I'll be stuck with a protein shake and a banana. When I say the basics, it's those items that I find myself using more than half the time. They change dinner from simple sustenance to enjoyable eating.

Lets look at just a few to start:

1. Oil: It's the starting point for so many quick and dirty meals. First thing into the pan (or wok or pot or baking sheet). It's that little buffer between some nice browning and burnt. It doesn't

Whatcha Got?

Sometimes you have a plan. Sometimes you actually decide on a protein, a starch, and a veggie while planning a meal. Sometimes (ok, a few times) you follow a recipe exactly as you find it.

This is not one of those times.

"Whatcha Got" is the evolution of the broke college student attempting to make dried ramen noodles into something a bit less banal by adding whatever they can scrounge, whether it is a sliced up hot dog, the last egg in the mini fridge, or just a handful of croutons. It is often soup, chili, or something in between. It most definitely sits comfortably under the category of One-Dish Dinners and can feed anywhere from just you to everyone who followed you home from that crazy night that started with karaoke and ended by lurching into the Uber driver's Escalade.

I slapped together a single serve Whatcha Got a few weeks ago.

Step 1: Just open the cupboard and pull out cans. I found red and white kidney beans, a small can of

Don't Name Your Business After a Pepper

Amish. Hipster. Burritos. If that doesn't give sufficient hints as to which quick serve restaurant I worked for, nothing will. Since I'd been eating at this tasty local chain for years, when a friend told me he could pretty much hand me a job there, I jumped on it. I figured it'd be a cool environment and the shop had a far better kitchen than my apartment, so I would have a chance to experiment with recipes. Having done retail and service before, I was expecting the usual hassles and patterns, but I planned to move up and have my own shop. I did.

Tangent time: If you haven't worked on the other side of the counter at a food service job, there are a couple things you should be aware of.

1. Asking the near minimum wage employee "How fresh are your ingredients?" is not only a hassle during the 16 seconds she has to construct your meal during the crazy pressure of the lunch rush, it is also a somewhat unanswerable question. Without specifically naming an ingredient, she has no idea what sort of answer you will be satisfied by. The tomatoes are fresher than they will be tomorrow;

Interlude - Scorpion Oil

Not in any way like snake oil. All I did was cram 5 dried Trinidad moruga scorpion peppers and 4 fresh garlic cloves into an empty vodka bottle and fill it up with medium quality extra virgin olive oil.

That was 3 days ago. I've been dipping baguette bits into it all night. Just right.

Before the Meal, Before the Prep

Welcome to the newest and most honest food and cooking, self-teaching and innovating blog yet. I'm going to let you all in on the dishes I love and the attempts I make to go further than I have with making them. I'm not going to hide the failures; I just hope the successes are tasty enough to make them better.

For those who know me IRL or from social media and ended up here: Thanks for showing up! I'll try to keep it interesting. For those who have no clue about who this Professor Maybe guy is, I'll give some quick history. I grew up on my dad's small but functional farm in Massachusetts and I know this influenced the sort of foods that I go to reflexively. When your dad has a deal with the local donut shops to pick up their day olds to feed his drove of pigs, you learn to love pork and donuts. Fresh goat's milk and eggs that were inside a hen until this morning were an everyday thing as was