Lisa on January 11th, 2012

Who says you can’t have a fiesta in the wintertime? (Especially when it’s 48F outside. It’s like spring in the winter!) Unlike mexicanized restaurant food in the U.S., actual food in Mexico is fresh, vibrant, and light in a satisfying and hearty kind of way. Case in point: a crisp, refreshing version of pozole, served [...]

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Lisa on August 22nd, 2011

This post is a two-for-one deal: it’s a continuation and an introduction! The continuation is the part where you make darned tasty use of your leftover high-quality, no-mess, baked bacon from the previous recipe. The introduction part is to let you know about brown rice maifun noodles. I stumbled across them at Westborn lately and [...]

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Lisa on August 19th, 2011

Yesterday, I raided my garden and pantry for what turned out to be one of the tastiest and easiest dishes I’ve made in a while. It was all the more stunningly easy because of its main flavor: bacon. Yep. Completely non-messy, completely crispy, completely delicious. If you start with bacon from pastured hogs (which has [...]

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Lisa on January 26th, 2011

Carbonara is a classic Italian dish that’s surprisingly easy to make … assuming, that is, that you start with top-notch bacon and eggs.  There are several pluses to top-notch bacon: it tastes savory and rich rather than greasy and tough, you only need one strip per person, and top-notch bacon won’t splatter all over your [...]

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Lisa on July 30th, 2010

Bacon.  Potatoes.  Sublimity. Those were the guiding principles behind a recent bacon-infused dinner.  After cooking my two strips of bacon, I knew I was going to have plenty of tasty bacon grease happily burbling away in the pan.  Why throw that out when you can cook something in it…say, something that would absorb that luscious [...]

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Lisa on July 21st, 2010

Good bacon goes with everything — I have a sneaking suspicion that bacon ice cream would be a hit.  (Especially if you paired the bacon with pecans.)  When I say “good” bacon, I’m referring to bacon from pastured hogs that snort and snuffle about on an actual farm.  You can find this kind of bacon [...]

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Lisa on March 15th, 2010

Last summer, my mother (a.k.a., the original “Cultured Cook”!) and I headed west across the mitten of Michigan to attend one of the nation’s top culinary events, the Epicurean Classic.  We got to see and occasionally sample everything from organic, Michigan-grown white tea to an array of top-notch estate olive oils.  Plenty of chefs, cookbook [...]

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