And by bang, I mean me, a guy named Greg and a bottle or four of bubbly red.
After a brief hiatus, the best cooking-dating show to ever hit the internet is back and badder than ever.
Watch, enjoy and remember that the camera adds ten pounds (twenty if you take into account I’ve lost ten since this was filmed). So does lots of casserole.
Check it out here.
Emily Farris' Beefy Mac
Days before my book, Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven, hit the shelves, the lovely Cathy Erway of Not Eating Out in New York came by for an evening of casserole and conversation.
We decided to make Beefy Mac from Casserole Crazy and I made one little substitution that may have changed my life forever…
My book, my book!
Hey everybody, it’s Tuesday, October 7. Do you know what that means? It means my contemporary casserole cookbook, “Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven” is officially available wherever books are sold. I hope you’ll buy it, and try a few of the recipes that seem appealing, maybe even a few that don’t. It’s a great engagement or holiday gift, especially when paired with a vintage Pyrex dish.
I’ll tell you what I say in the introduction: this is a book for people who love to eat. It is not a book for people who like to make elaborate culinary presentations or impress dinner guests with knowledge of exotic vegetables or cuts of meat. This book is about taking ingredients that you know, that you love, that you can find, and baking those ingredients into one dish you can share with friends over an expensive bottle of wine or live off of for a week when you’re waiting for your next paycheck. And I’m not going to lie: the recipes are damn good.
If you doubt my culinary abilities (which you have every right to, but should not when it comes to casseroles), the book is full of recipes from friends, family and even a few celebrity chefs, including Bobby Flay, Paula Deen and Donatella Arpaia. The foreword is by Julie Powell—my friend and the author of Julie & Julia—who tells the story of how I stalked her.
If you’re still not convinced, check out all the great press I’ve gotten so far. And then buy my book!
Thanks to everyone who came out for my first-ever everything (reading, signing, cooking demonstration and book sale) at the Baltimore Book Festival on Sunday. Considering I sold about 20 books and didn’t lose a knuckle while chopping onions in front of 100 people, it was a huge success in my book.
Perhaps more exciting, however, were the two Crabby Mary’s I had on Saturday night at Olbricky’s Crab House.
I’ll be at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend. Come find me at the Food for Thought tent Sunday at 4:30. I’ll be cooking, sampling recipes and selling advance copies of my upcoming cookbook, “Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven.” Oh, I’ll apparently also be talking for an hour and a half. Come ask me questions!
My book, my book!
In case you don’t live in Baltimore or aren’t actively stalking me and didn’t listen to my first ever (book-related) radio interview online this morning, you can hear me on Baltimore’s 93.1 WPOC.
Over at Laurie DeYoung’s show, they’ve even set up a friendly little casserole competition.
While this was the first radio interview I’ve done for the book, I’ve gotten lots of great press so far, which can all be found on the press page of this here website.
Hopefully there’s more to come. Because I’m going to cry like a baby when I get my first bad review.
Saturday, my friend Lacey and I entered The Brooklyn Kitchen‘s Anything But Apple Pie cooking competition, the goal being to cook with apples, making anything but apple pie, natch. The event, which was a great way to ring in the fall, was a benefit for the Greenpoint Dutch Reform Church’s Wednesday Soup kitchen (which I’ve cooked for in the past).
At first, we had the idea to deep fry apple slices and bake them with fontina and gruyere, making an apple parm kind-of dish, but considering neither of us has extra money to toss around, we opted instead to use what I already had on hand which happened to be egg noodles, shallots from the green market and about five ounces of goat cheese. I also had eggs and five medium green apples, making a noodle kugel the obvious choice. Other than picking up some extra goat cheese (more on that later) and Lacey having to run out at the last minute to get vegetable broth—she’s a vegetarian and all I had was chicken broth—we used only ingredients that were already in my kitchen.
The dish was wonderful; we couldn’t help picking at it before we left the house. I even garnished it with some green apple skin. I was sure we’d win. But when we got there, we quickly realized the competition—even though we only had three competitors—was fierce. One entrant had made apple turnovers (close to a pie, yes, but absolutely delicious) one had made a turkey meatball and apple soup and another made pulled pork, Memphis style (with slaw on top) with apple slaw. Anyone who knows me outside of this blog knows that pulled pork, Memphis style, on a sesame bun is my favorite thing in the entire world to eat. You also know that I believe the apple is the most perfect fruit in the world.
Well, the judges didn’t agree with me, on either count. Their top two favorites were the turnovers and the soup—both wonderful, I’ll admit. They loved our kugel, and said it was everything a kugel should be, but that the goat cheese overpowered the apple. But hell, we’d gone out to get more goat cheese, because as far as Lacey and I are concerned, there’s no such thing as too much cheese—especially goat cheese.
If you agree, try our Apple and Goat Cheese Kugel, after the jump.
emily farris does tv dinner better
For those of you who live in New York, I’ll be on Fox5′s “Good Day New York” at 8:39 a.m. on Wednesday, September 10 (yes, that’s this coming Wednesday), to show the world how to fix up a microwavable TV dinner. Catch me if you can at 8:39 a.m.
It’s true: my cookbook, Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff For Your Oven! is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. But do you know what’s even better? You can probably also pre-order it from your local, independent bookstore, and I know you can pre-order it from my local, independent bookstore (no matter where you are, they ship!), which I highly encourage you to do.
Or, you can do what (hopefully) millions of Americans will do, and buy it when it’s released on October 7.
However you do it, buy my book! Pretty please? With a layer of crusty cheese on top?
That’s right casserole competitors of past and future, the Fourth Annual Casserole Party will descend on Brooklyn Label Tuesday Monday, November 10. Get your appetites and your recipes ready. Like last year, all recipes this year must be original. Details to follow soon.
"Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven" is available everywhere books are sold. Get your copy from an independent bookstore today. Or Amazon, if you must. There's also Barnes & Noble. And Borders.
