Kristine Cocchiarella
Classically trained Cordon Bleu chef turned anti-GMO, pro-organic, food hippie blogger with a passion for REAL food.
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Homemade Potato Chips with House Seasoning
The humble potato is hands down probably the most favorite vegetable of every person I know. They are so versatile. There isn’t much you can’t do with a potato. You can make it into flour, into a pancake, you can mash, fry, slice, dice, grill, roast, puree and make them into soup. You can even make pasta with them. A potato is a pretty amazing little veggie! The Stud Muffin love potatoes. He’s the stereotypical meat and potatoes kind of guy. You’ll never catch him complaining if I don’t feel like making a green veggie to go with our meal as long as their is meat and some type of potato. Potato chips…
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St. Louis Style BBQ Ribs on the Grill
It’s a fingers only meat buffet at Real Food Girl: Unmodified today! We’re grilling Ribs! As far as I’m concerned, ribs could easily be categorized as one of the really good things about life. Whether they’re baby back, St. Louis, Country Style or beef ribs, they are just darn tasty. I love that you don’t need silverware and it’s acceptable to get stupid-messy while eating them. I just plain love good BBQ ribs. Don’t you? We’re either not exploring enough or we’re looking in the wrong places here in SC, because we’ve yet to find one BBQ joint that we want to “write home” about. We were told about this one place that we…
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Real Food Girl BBQ Spice Rub
I’ve got some sad news my friends. It’s so sad I actually cried. It could possibly be hormones, but we’ll just play along and say it is because of sadness. After years of tinkering I finally created what The Stud Muffin and I felt was my best BBQ Spice Rub. That stuff was Da Bomb! I slapped that rub on chicken, ribs, pork chops, and that meat was happy! Heck, WE were happy. Happiness all around. Happy meat, happy wife, happy life. And life was BBQ’y and good and happy. Then, one day, I decided it was time to organize my desk and purge papers and things I’d had for years that were…
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Almost Famous Real Food House Seasoning
Almost every restaurant that I’ve worked in has had a special house seasoning. They put it on virtually everything. I’ll spare you the colorful language that a kitchen full of prep-cooks and chefs use when referring to applying the seasoning to stuff, but suffice it to say, they love their house seasonings and they use them liberally and with enthusiasm. It got me to thinking- why don’t regular home cooks use house seasoning? How much tastier would things be if we had a little house seasoning to sprinkle on things? Tinker Bell has Pixie Dust, and Emeril has his famous “Kick it up a Notch” spices, so why not something special for…
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Brown Sugar Maple Baked Beans with Bacon
Several weeks ago my grandkids came over for the weekend. I spent most of my time in the kitchen and my granddaughter, Little Miss B. helped me out. One thing she was particularly interested in helping me with was a baked bean recipe that I had found in one of my many cooking magazines. We were going to grill hamburgers one night and I thought baked beans would be a nice addition. Turns out I should have just opened a can. Kidding! Sorta. Let me explain… We followed the recipe to a ‘T’. Those beans soaked for at least 12 hours, and they baked in my oven for 7 hours, were lovingly tended…
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Easy BBQ Chicken on the Grill
Grilling chicken has always been a frustrating endeavor for many people. You either end up with charred outsides and dry insides, or perfectly cook outsides and raw insides. Neither of those is good eating in my opinion and I don’t blame people for getting frustrated with grilling. Now if you happen to be the ultimate grill master, this post isn’t for you. This is for those of us who have struggled to get perfectly cooked chicken from our grill. Over the years I’ve developed a few tricks that have helped me out tremendously. I’m sure if we had a charcoal grill I might not have to put forth such an effort to ensure…
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Grilled Parmesan Herbed Potatoes
It’s grilling season. A time of year that I used to love because that meant TSM was going to be cooking most nights. Now, somehow, since graduating from culinary school I seem to be cooking 99.5% of the time and TSM has turned the grilling over to me. I think it’s time to save up and buy him a smoker. He can be in charge of smoking and then maybe I can take part of each summer off while he experiments with smoking various meats. Sounds like a plan to me! Just for the summer I’m going to be taking a break from 30-Minute Monday Recipes. Don’t worry, I’ll still have plenty of…
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Lemon Blueberry Loaf Cake
I had in my possession, for about 20 years the most amazing lemon bread recipe. It was from one of my mom’s old friends, Mrs. Bratnober. That woman could bake. Over the years, each time that I made this bread I fought all urges to eat the whole loaf myself without sharing any. However, I wasn’t raised by wolves, so I shared it with The Stud Muffin. My mother would be so proud. About a month ago I went to my recipe box to grab the card and make this so I could feature it during my week of “All things lemon“. I kid you not, I went through every single card in…
