miia monthly

When I went to Baltimore for New Years a few weeks back, I hadn’t planned on having to do any cooking while on vacation. But as they say “duty calls”. So on New Year’s Eve I went on a trip to Wegmans out in Hunt Valley, MD with Boxcar to pick up all the main [...]

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Editors Note: This should have been posted about 6 months ago. But better late than never.
Whole chickens were on sale at the grocery store for $0.69 a lb. So I thought that it was high time to make a roasted chicken on the grill.
The cooking time couldn’t be simpler for this dirty bird. With the [...]

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I haven’t made a chicken stock at home, in at least a couple of years. With the main reason being that I usually just buy chicken stock by the 1 quart carton at Aldi, which covers most of my chicken stock needs. But with chicken bones piling up in the fridge and freezer, it was [...]

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This is totally a random creation on my part, but a pretty taste one. It all started earlier in the week, when I cooked up some green beans to go with my dinner. Which ended up being nothing more then boiling 1.66 lbs of green beans for 5 mins, then adding them to a hot [...]

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Part of the reason I wanted to try and make my own tahini, was just to see if it could be done. Since really how hard could it be to turn whole sesame seeds into a smooth paste? (see side notes) So with a little bit of searching on the interest, I found three recipes [...]

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With winter weather basically upon us, its time to start getting into soup & stew mode. So while cooking for a wedding rehearsal dinner last year with JRR & Nook, one of the items that we made was a cream of carrot soup recipe that I found in an old issue of Food & Wine [...]

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I never had shepherd’s pie as a kid of dinner, so I really had no concept of what should go into a “true” Shepherd’s Pie. So starting with a base recipe off of Food Network. Here is the heavily modified recipe that I came up with.  Since if I’m going to rework a recipe, I [...]

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I needed a quick and easy recipe to bake a fish for Christmas Eve, so I ended up finding a recipe on the Food Network website, and modified the hell out of it as usual.
My original inspiration for making this dish, was seeing Jacques Pépin a long time ago on either Fast Food My Way, [...]

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For some reason I’ve been on a kick for beef short ribs, (call it a case of having Korean barbecue on the brain.) And since there are no Korean barbecue places in town to get my fix, I quickly brainstormed on what to make as a quick substitute. And what kept popping up in my [...]

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This mac & cheese, is really the first time that I’ve made a baked mac & cheese from scratch before. I kind of had a general recipe to go by, but as you’ll see below. I kind of missed a few critical points in winging my recipe. But lets at least knock out a couple [...]

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