About Blue Kitchen

Blue Kitchen is about food. Making it, eating it, thinking about it, talking about it. It’s not about precious food, though. I love to cook, but I’m not obsessed with it. You won’t find recipes here that involve two dozen esoteric ingredients or require you to start making something three days before you plan to serve it.

Sure, some weekend kinds of dishes may take a couple hours of cooking. Many, though, will be things you can throw together after work in about the same time it would take the pizza delivery guy to get there—okay, or maybe a little longer.

For beginning cooks, I hope you’ll find recipes, techniques and ideas that sound doable and worth tackling. For experienced cooks, I hope that at least once in a while I can make you think, “wow, I didn’t know that” or “hey, that actually sounds good.” For everyone, I hope you’ll find ways of making good—and occasionally, great—meals.

Who’s in the kitchen?

I’m Terry, an amateur in the best sense of the word. I cook because I love it. Not only have I never cooked professionally, I’ve actually had to overcome a childhood in which bread was invariably squooshy and white, and the most used utensil in the kitchen was the can opener. In our Midwestern household, frozen vegetables were deemed too exotic. But perversely, fish was always frozen. And breaded. And dreaded.

I started cooking when I was out on my own, out of necessity at first. Then I found I enjoyed it. Still, like most guys who sort of dabble in the kitchen, I developed maybe a half dozen dishes that were pretty good and coasted on them. But one day, I happened to look at a recipe and realized that [a] I could do this and [b] I had a pretty good idea what it would taste like. A real “Aha!” moment for me, the first of many. And the beginning of going from liking to cook to having a real passion for it.

Sometimes I turn the kitchen over to my wife Marion, a truly great cook who inspires and encourages me in so many ways pretty much on a daily basis. When she gets into the kitchen, you’re in for a treat.

What’s with the name?

Blue Kitchen is the name of the mythical restaurant I will never open, because I’m smart enough to know that it would be punishingly hard work. The name Blue Kitchen evokes visions of a romantic, bohemian place—chalkboard menu, little wooden tables and mismatched kitchen chairs, art on the walls, candles on the tables and jazz on the sound system. But where the name actually comes from is that when the wheels start falling off things in the kitchen—both measuring cups are in use and I need another one, I can’t find the right pot lid, the pasta’s done and the sauce isn’t—I start cursing up a storm. The air in the kitchen can become quite blue on a bad night.

It used to be when I let loose with a string of expletives, Marion and our daughters would come running to see what was wrong. Now they just laugh, knowing that it’s business as usual in the kitchen and whatever the problem is, I’ll figure something out.

Stick around—and come back often. You’ll like Blue Kitchen. I swear.

A special thanks to my friend Rich Meyer, principal of Swell Advertising in St. Louis, for the superb Blue Kitchen masthead/logo design. I’m responsible for all the words and photographs on Blue Kitchen, unless otherwise noted. All content is copyrighted and all rights are reserved, of course.