Guest Star!

My friend Sam came to visit! This is regular great because Sam is awesome, and double great because he promised to cook me dinner. He is a master chef and I can't read his blog before meals because it makes me too hungry and sad that I don't know how to cook, so he kindly narrated his whole cooking process so I could learn. I learned many things from him, including:

• What blanching means, and how to do it.
• What brown butter is, and how to make it.
• How to not be scared of chicken bones and use them to make delicious stock.
• That the list he keeps of mean things I've said isn't just in the back of his head, but is actually written down for posterity.

I had always thought that Sam's drool-inducing food pictures were a result of some fancy food camera he had, or at least some fancy food photographing technique. But it turns out you just need a regular camera and regular photographing techniques, because his food really is that beautiful:

Have you ever seen such good looking brussels sprouts?

What a perfect chicken!

Sam is an expert chicken carver.

Can you believe I got to eat this for dinner? At home? On a Tuesday?

I think the limiting factor in these pictures is that I don't have fancy enough plates to properly showcase Sam's work.

After we ate, he put the bones and a bunch of random food scraps in a pot and cooked it overnight to make stock.

Even Sam's food scraps look great!

Now I have frozen stock to eat in Sam's absence, and my whole house smells like magic. Thanks, Sam!