…but excited nonetheless!

Excited, that is, to introduce the first Comfort Brothers cookbook–hand held version–by way of an i-phone application and available for immediate purchase and use, directly from this site.  Now, in my world (see old guy references above) cookbooks, good ones, are expensive, heavy and you have to turn pages to find something.  So at $2.99 for all that Comfort Brothers goodness, I am, yes amazed.

Over the years, Bill and I have fielded numerous requests for recipes.  Unfortunately, most of ours are written on the walls of the inside of our heads and not on paper.  Well, they still aren’t on paper, but they are available to you and your friends who have an i-phone or i-pod touch.  Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

Click on the tab above or the App Store box to the right and follow the path to begin your own journey to fearless home cooking.  The recipes we included are our favorites to cook for ourselves and our families.  As such, they are simple to read, simple to follow and simple to prepare. Some long-held secrets in there as well.  And for fun we added a comforting “yummy” sound effect when you use the random feature.  Too cool.

A gift to our friends and fans, check it out and enjoy, and let us know what you think!

But let me expand on that thought which on the surface seems so damn negative.

CBJ and I have spent years cooking in each other’s kitchens for our families. We have also been cooking high end dinner parties for clients since 2004 (as the observant visitor will notice in our snappy logo at the top of the page) and we have a point of view about how food should be prepared and served. We will not, for instance, repeat, will not join in the shrill condemnation of a waiter or sever who tells a diner that if the chef had wanted the dressing to go on the side he would have served it that way. Hell yes! We love a chef who won’t cook tuna to a dry, slate-like hue. Over many discussions on this basic point, about a point-of-view in the kitchen, CBJ and I have dreamed of one day running a brick and mortar joint that brings to life that thought, and it’s called Jim and Bill’s Get Out! Pretty basic. At the Get Out we are going to do our level best to serve you great food prepared well with attention, care and love. Just don’t ask for the dressing on the side, or to remove the head of a beautifully grilled whole fish because it’s “looking” at you, or to carbonize a double cut pork chop. And if you break a tooth on a black olive pit? Sorry. You should know olives have pits. Do I sound cranky? Not really. I am over stating the case to make the point that the Comfort Brothers really care about you and they care about the food and if you put yourself in our hands we will take care of you.

(Best you ever had…I digress: One summer, 1969, as a college student working a summer job in the kitchen of a small and somewhat seedy casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, I had my first, real, professional kitchen experience. It made such an impact on me that years later I used it as the basis for a novel called A Gambler’s Feast. ((More on that later.)) In that steamy kitchen populated with college students, drunks, drifters, head cases and assorted other marginal characters I labored under the rheumy eyes of an alcoholic chef named Lee. I think I remember his last name and he is probably passed from this earth but let’s stick with Lee. Dead or alive I don’t want to impugn him unfairly after all these years. But Lee was a real sport and the kitchen crew loved him because he wasn’t a screamer like Tony, the mean little Italian who ran an earlier shift. Lee had a soft, albeit shaky touch managing the staff of professional misfits and junior adventurers, and in return for his kindness in the kitchen, we all happily looked out for him. We protected his booze, shielded him from management, and when he couldn’t remember where he had parked his block long Cadillac Deville after a night of black out, very professional drinking, we would canvas the area the next morning until we found it. I guess the word we would use today to describe our behavior then is enabling. Hell, yes, did we ever enable.

But before I go too far down this rabbit hole, a little hooker history. In 1968, I think, Nevada legalized prostitution. The Mustang ranch, one of the first brothels, was over near Reno, an hour or so from Tahoe. Every Wednesday night on his one day off, Lee would dress to the nines, if he wasn’t wearing spats he should have, and glide over to the Mustang in the Deville for some action with a regular whose name I can’t recall. And the next shift, on Thursday evening, as he recovered from the night before, shaky, the Cadillac retrieved and safely moored in the casino parking lot, he would laugh about the “old gal,” who according to Lee, drank as much as he did, but fancied herself the queen of the sack. To hear Lee tell it, after we had dosed him with paregoric and red wine to even him out to a minimum level of functionality, he would like a cigarette, gather us around and dramatically describe how after their drunken sexual antics she would look up and say with a post coital, alchy purr, “ Lee, baby…ain’t that the best you ever had?”)

So I would submit to you that words and phrases, just like food, can ignite a sparking fuse trail that can transport you back minutes, miles, days and years to connect with memories that might be temporarily beneath the surface of you conscious mind, but brought back in an instant with a certain aroma, word or phrase.

Which brings us back to the question at hand: Just what IS a Comfort Brother? For now let’s just say that CBJ and CBB are food mediums available to you here at comfortbrothers.com and/or in your kitchen, ready as always to create an indelible food memory with your family and friends that will be with you forever, and ready to sneak up in surprise without warning, hug you and put a smile on your face