Last night saw me craving for some Thai food, which meant that the whole family ended up in the local Thai restaurant. Of course, when it comes to Thai food, the best kind you’ll get will still be straight from the experts – the street vendors. Unfortunately, that would mean having to fly over to Thailand just to get my favorite Thai dish – the Pad Thai.

If you’re craving for Pad Thai though, you don’t even have to go to fly to Thailand for an authentic tasting dish. I’ve found one of the best Pad Thai recipes that you can try at home. If you do it right, you’ll end up with a dish that tastes just like the best that Thai chefs make. Just make sure you always prepare the sauce first, because that’s how any self-respecting Thai chef does it!

Ingredients for Pad Thai Sauce (makes four large servings)

• 1/4 cup palm sugar
• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon tamarind concentrate
• 1/4 cup Sriracha sauce

Directions for Pad Thai Sauce

• Put tamarind concentrate into a measuring cup, and add enough water to make 1/4 cup, stir, this is your tamarind juice.
• In a small sauce pan, put palm sugar, fish sauce, tamarind juice, and sriracha sauce. Cook on low heat until the palm sugar dissolves, then increase heat. Let it start to boil, then quickly remove from heat, and set aside. You can make this Pad Thai sauce ahead and put in a jar in the fridge up to a week.

Ingredients for Pad Thai (makes 2 servings)

• 1 egg lightly beaten
• 3/4 cup (or more) fresh shrimp, uncooked
• 1 tablespoon sliced shallot
• 1 tablespoon chopped salted radish
• 1/4 cup diced firm tofu
• 1 handful rice stick noodle
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water
• 1 cup fresh bean sprouts
• 1/4 cup fresh chives, cut into one inch long pieces
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons chopped roasted peanut
• vegetable oil for frying

Directions

• Rinse the radish several times under cold water, gently squeezing off the water. Chop it and add a little bit of sugar to sweeten, mix well.
• Soak the rice stick noodle in warm water for about 15 minutes, leave in water until you are ready to use.
• Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a wok at medium-high heat. Add egg and cook it quickly, scrambling into small pieces (see video below). Remove, set aside.
• Add 2 tablespoons of oil in the same wok. Add shrimps and cook until done. Transfer to a bowl, set aside.
• Add 1 tablespoon of oil to the wok. Add shallot, radish and tofu fry until aromatic. Increase the heat of your wok. Add a handful of soaked noodles followed with water. Stir-fry this mixture for about 5-6 minutes. The noodles will start to get soft. Add 1/4 cup of Pad Thai Sauce and mix well. Add sugar, cooked egg, bean sprout, chive and cooked shrimps. Stir well for another 1-2 minutes until everything blends together. Turn off heat, transfer to serving plate with sliced fresh lime, roasted peanuts, and more bean sprout on the side.

Christmas Day may have come and gone, but the parties are far from over. With New Year’s Eve approaching, you can bet that the drinks will be flowing again in abundance (if it has stopped for you) in a few days time.

If you’re looking for some posh, but simple cocktails to serve during your party, why not give these three cocktails that chefs’ themselves swear by:

The Red Hook (Blake Royer)

Ingredients:

Key ingredient of the first two cocktails

• 2 ounces rye whiskey
• 1/2 ounce Punt e Mes or other sweet vermouth combined with Campari
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur

Directions:

Pour ingredients into a shaker with a generous handful of ice. Stir briskly until well chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass and serve.

The Aviation (Blake Royer)

Ingredients:

• 2 ounces gin
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur
• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

Directions:

Pour ingredients into a shaker with a generous handful of ice. Shake well until your fingertips ache. Strain into a martini glass and serve.

Grand Champagne Cocktail

Grand Champagne Cocktail (Chef Bobby Flay)

Ingredients:

• 4 shots orange-flavored liqueur (recommended: Grand Marnier)
• 4 teaspoons honey
• 4 fresh strawberries, tops trimmed
• 1 bottle Champagne, well chilled
• Special equipment: 4 chilled Champagne flutes

Directions:

Add the orange-flavored liqueur, honey and strawberries to a food processor and process until smooth. Fill the chilled glasses halfway with the strawberry mixture and then fill the rest of the glass with Champagne.

Each of the cocktails above offer a very different taste so you can choose whichever will suit your palate best. The Red Hook is “dark, seductive, brown, and just a little bitter”, while the Aviation is “bright, gin-y, and tart with lemon juice.” The Grand Champagne Cocktail, on the other hand, is pretty sweet and probably has a more universal appeal.

Recipes and images via ThePauperedChef and FoodNetwork

Still haven’t perfected the art of boiling eggs? You’re not alone.

Boiling eggs are really tricky, especially if you’re cooking for a group of people who like their eggs in varying stages of “hardness”. Add to the fact that the rate at which eggs cook depend not just on the amount of time it takes to cook them, but also the temperature at which they were stored, and also the size of the eggs. With so many factors to consider, it is no wonder that sleepy cooks end up with “wrongly” cooked eggs.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a chef to be consistent in turning out perfectly boiled eggs that will suit everyone’s tastes. All you need is to get yourself a BeepEgg, and you can relax, maybe even sing with it as you make breakfast.

The BeepEgg is an egg timer that you put in the pan with your eggs as you boil them and will tell you whether the eggs are already cooked. Fish out the eggs for the people who like their soft boiled when you hear the egg sing “Killing Me Softly” and leave the rest until you hear it start to sing “I Wish I Was a Hen”, at which point you can fish out the eggs for those who like it medium. You’ll know that the remaining eggs are already hard boiled when you the classical tune from Carmina Burana coming out of the plastic egg.

How to use the BeepEgg

While it all sounds really silly, the BeepEgg works perfectly so that you don’t even have to worry about getting your eggs to room temperature before your boil them. Just make sure that you also store the BeepEgg along with the real eggs because it works by calculating the inner temperature of the eggs based on the temperature it was stored and the boiling water.

Oh, and if you’re getting irritated with all that singing, just dunk the Beep Egg in cold water.

Image via Firebox

With just a few hours away before Thanksgiving dinner, I’m sure the turkey experts at home already busy doing preparations and cooking away. If you’ve waited till the last minute to figure out what to serve for Thanksgiving dinner though, and happen upon this post looking for last-minute turkey ideas, then I’m sorry to say that the perfect roast turkey is just not an option anymore. However, you can still serve turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.

Noemi, of Recipe Finder, compiled some of the best and simple turkey dishes on her post “7 Ways to Prepare Turkey”. None of the preparation ideas she gives will mean a traditional Thanksgiving turkey, but at least they are much faster and easier to prepare than a whole turkey roast. So if you don’t mind having turkey burgers, fajitas, or casserole on Thanksgiving, then head on to the Recipe Finder blog for some great turkey ideas.

However, if you already have a whole thawed turkey right before you that you don’t want to go to waste, then you can try Chef Gordon Ramsay’s Roast Turkey and Stuffing in a Pan. The recipe is good for 10-12 persons which means you’ll have plenty of leftovers if you won’t being having guests over for dinner. Prep time is also just 2 hours, with cooking time about the same. And while 4 hours seems like a lot of time, anyone who’s had any experience roasting turkey will tell you that this is one of the fastest recipes you’ll ever find. So if you want to get your roast turkey in time for dinner, better get started or you’ll end up with one undercooked bird on your dinner table!

Image credits:
Turkey burger courtesy of Recipe Finder
Gordon Ramsay with turkey courtesy of The Independent

Any foodie knows that it takes more than just fine ingredients to make one good tasting dish. The same is true with blogs.

If you have a food blog, it definitely takes more than just pictures of your last gastronomy high for people to enjoy your blog. You have to provide descriptions of the pictures, mix your usual food photos with other food-related content like chef biographies, recipes, and restaurant features. In short, you can’t keep on serving just one dish, no matter how good that dish may be.

You also need to think about your food blog’s design. After all, no matter how delicious something is, if it looks like something straight from the sewers, then almost no one would want to touch it. The same is true with a cluttered and tacky looking blog. If you want people to take a second glance at your food blog, then you’d better spend some time on your “plating”.

Before the food gets served though, you need people to serve it too. Sure, tasting your own creations can be fun, but not having other people to share it too and ooh and ahh over the great tasting feasts is doing yourself a disservice. Again, the same is true with your blog. You need to have guests come over to enjoy your content, and hopefully rave over your content, maybe even spread the news by word of mouth. However, to get the first guests to come, you of course need to promote your blog.

You can do this by pestering your family and friends to keep on visiting your food blog, or do it the more professional way and pay for services of portals like Blog Search Engine. Blog Search Engine will review your food blog for you, link back to your blog, and make it searchable to their users, all for $14.99. You can also promote your blog even more aggressively with their upgraded packages and so increase your food blog’s visibility, thanks to their blog network.

In the end, if you treat your food blog like you would your food, you can guarantee that you’ll have people coming back for more.

People tend to have mixed feelings about the expletive-spurting, highly demanding chef who reached pop culture fame in television shows like “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.” Hell and nightmares? Notice a pattern here? Many people seem to think that Chef Gordon Ramsay is a real pain in the expletive. But I’m different. I love Gordon Ramsay – his directness, his honesty, his tough exterior, and his sensitive interior (I’ve actually seen him cry on more than one episode of Kitchen Nightmares). As a matter of fact, Ramsay’s complexity is what makes him so great, if you ask me, and I’m sure there is more to him than most people know. Here are five things you didn’t know about Gordon Ramsay:

The long and winding road. Being a chef was not Ramsay’s first choice. He was actually a very talented soccer player who was on the Glasgow Raiders team for three years before a knee injury forced him out of the game and into an entire new lifestyle. It would be years later that he would discover his life’s purpose . . . only after going to college to major in hotel management. Continue reading »

Marco Batali, the celebrity chef and co-owner of co-owner of Tarry Market and Tarry Lodge in Port Chester, has been forced to make an apology following his comments comparing the banking industry to Hitler and Stalin.

Batali made his remarks in front of the panel deemed responsible for choosing Time magazine’s Person of the Year award. Various sources quoted Batali as saying “The way the bankers have toppled the way that money is distributed — and taken most of it into their own hands — is as good as Stalin or Hitler”. Batali was forced to make a groveling apology earlier this week, stating that “it was never my intention to equate our banking industry with Hitler and Stalin, two of the most evil, brutal dictators in modern history.” Continue reading »

If you are an amateur chef who has been pinned with the holiday cooking this year for the very first time, then it is understandable that you might have the pre-feast jitters. After all, cooking for an audience is intimidating, especially when you are still green. Fortunately, celebrity chefs have a lot of advice to offer to those in your situation. Here are some holiday cooking tips for amateur chefs:

Planning and organization. Ask any celebrity chef what the single most important holiday cooking tip is and you will no doubt hear something related to preparation. At the recent LA Food and Wine Festival, a number of celebrity chefs turned out to offer some sage advice when it comes to cooking for such a big occasion as the holidays, and most of that advice had to do with planning to cook, rather than cooking itself. Chef Giada advised people to “plan in advance,” Wolfgang Puck echoed that sentiment, saying, “you have to plan ahead . . . . have everything ready so when you’re ready to cook, you know it’s there,” and Chef Daniel Boulud further reinforced the need for proper preparation, saying, “my top cooking tip is, first, be organized.”
Continue reading »

Christmas is always a key period for the retail sector and with all the eating and drinking that goes on, celebrity-penned cookbooks are usually a popular gift item. However, the state of the market is causing some consternation this year as titles from top level TV chefs are being sold for as low as a third of the recommended retail price.

Titles such as the upcoming Jamie’s Great Britain from internationally acclaimed star Jamie Oliver are being sold on Amazon for £10, rather than the RRP of £30. Heston Blumenthal is another heavyweight name whose titles are being heavily discounted, with his latest Heston Blumenthal at Home being sold in places for less than half the recommended price of £30.

This heavy discounting is causing problems for many smaller independent book retailers, who simply cannot compete with the lower priced offerings of major sellers like Amazon.

Rosamund de la Hey was the former children’s marketing director at book publisher Bloomsbury, although she now owns and operates the Main Street Trading Company bookstore in Scotland. She commented on the state of the market: “It has got to a point now where it is becoming ridiculous. It puts us on the back foot because it makes us look like we are ripping people off – that’s the most frustrating thing.”

It is not simply large online retailers like Amazon that are adding to the difficult situation – mainstream supermarkets are also heavily discounting major cooking titles in order to attract custom. Supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsbury’s all sell major new releases for a fraction of the recommended price.

It is thought that cooking titles are particularly susceptible to the discounting because of their immense popularity. Major retailers are well aware that the titles will sell and so drop their prices in order to entice consumers into their own shops. Continue reading »

Anthony Bourdain, the infamous traveling chef now on almost every lifestyle channel in existence- had quite a story to tell in one of his first bestselling books: “Kitchen Confidential“. Finally, after many trial and tribulations, he had found his sous-chef extraordinaire, Steven Tempel, for the Supper Club in New York, where Bourdain had just been made head chef. To say that Steven was eccentric was, according to Bourdain, putting it mildly…

Nevertheless, Bourdain reveals in the very frank and no nonsense book (as in how it really goes down in the restaurant business), Steven was somewhat of a genius. It turns out that Bourdain had recruited Steven from Casa Nostra Restaurant, in Northern California, where he had been working in the kitchen with “idiot savant” and “baking genius” Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown!!

Kitchen Confidential is an excellent read and here at Celebrity Chefs we highly recommend it. As it turns out, the owner of Casa Nostra Restaurant (which was known for serving the best italian cuisine in town)- Joey Velardi, has recently opened up a branch in Manila, Philippines- where it is receiving rave reviews from the locals and in fact Bourdain recently visited for his show “No Reservations“.

Let’s hope Bourdain doesn’t steal the chef again