Welcome to the new Blog

This blog was founded with academic intentions, to be used as a final project for one of my classes (there'll be more on that later), but I intend to use this project as an outlet for my own culinary devices, opinions, machinations, adventures, readings, stories, tales... I'm starting to run out of synonyms, but I think you get the idea. I'll include, in the coming posts, pictures of food that I make, what I'm making, why I'm making it, what it means to me, its history, where I got the recipe from and, if I can, the recipe. I often find myself in the kitchen not knowing what I'm doing, but relying on certain innate talents that I don't understand. In the past few months I've been trying to help myself grow in the kitchen.

There are already 3 or 4 months (edit: it's actually just 2) of Cooking Without Pants on Twitter and Facebook, and I regret to inform anyone following on either of those mediums, that the first couple days of posts will be regurgitations of those to get this medium up to speed. Here's the Twitter account, be sure to follow, as that gets more odd updates than this one does. The Pantless Cheff

Even though this is being used as a School Project, I'm planning on continuing after the project is done. I imagine I'll probably fizzle out like my last blog, Late to the Game Reviews, which hasn't seen a post since my Fable III review in November. Who knows, maybe I'll bring that back.

But, to describe myself in a culinary way... well, I'm not trained. I never paid a whole ton of a attention to my mother in the kitchen, but I was raised on fresh food and know how much better a fresh made soup is than a can of Campbell's or how much better scratch made Sloppy Joe's are than a Manwich. When I left for school my mother bestowed upon me two Revereware 1qt Copper Clad Sauce Pans (both of which I ruined by forgetting I was boiling water), one Revereware 3qt Copper Clad Sauce Pan (Those Reveware pans had been in my family for over 30 years) and a Calphalon Non-Stick Skillet (which I completely destroyed by not understanding that it needs to be taken care of, it's since been replaced by a set of Calphalon Non-Stick Skillets). I don't cook with much more than that in terms of pans, so I generally have to pay attention to how many vessels I need and I don't have the nicest kitchen equipment (my wafflemaker takes about 15 minutes per waffle) because of my lack of money, but I do the best that I can. I'll include as many step-by-step pictures as possible. There will more than likely be a list of cookbooks that I turned to for inspiration, as well.
Totally hard to get any sense of Mise En Place going on in this kitchen

In anycase, welcome to Cooking Without Pants, the journey of Thom in the kitchen.

And, yes, I really do cook in my underwear. I harbor a deep seated hatred for pants. I personally believe they were invented to make use suffer as people and I don't want that kind of hatred in my kitchen.