Trailer Park Cooking Show

Finally a celebrity chef I can relate to. Jolene Sugarbaker describes her style as "White trash with class." She is the purveyor of a cuisine that is much more attainable than that snooty Barefoot Contessa and her luncheons in the Hamptons. I like Jolene's personal sense of style and her quiet, understated use of cosmetics. I like that she pronounces tortilla correctly (tor-TILL-ya) and to heck with what anyone from Mexico or that has a Webster's dictionary might say.





Note to the Food Network: Enough with the painfully dull cooking shows and rigged Next Food Network Star "reality show". Y'all need to hire Jolene! That's a show I would watch.

Adventure Dining at Home: Chicken Piccata

Chicken piccata may sound like a fancy dish but it's rather easy to prepare and will impress your friends. It consists of chicken breasts in a lemony butter sauce, with capers. Capers are a pickled, salty, flower bud that are sold in a small jar in most supermarkets in the US, on the pickle aisle. I made this dish for a friend's birthday based on a recipe from the Food Network (click here for the recipe). I substituted four already thinly sliced chicken breasts, which saved a little work because I did not have to butterfly the chicken breasts as called for in the recipe. I paired it with a simple chopped salad with red wine vinagarette, and a very easy to make zucchini and pasta toss.

I tried a new desert, a ricotta cheese with honey, cocoa powder, and fresh raspberries, eaten with chocolate biscotti. Very easy to prepare but I didn't like the ricotta cheese as a desert. Perhaps it would be better with mascarpone.

All in all, it took maybe 45 minutes to prepare the meal and I think my friends appreciated that I made the effort to cook rather than just making dinner reservations.