Man in the Kitchen with Wit and Ambition

"Jeff the Chef," from Make It Like a Man!

Maybe you figured Make It Like a Man would be about hunting deer, carving out steaks, and cooking them over a campfire. Or maybe you came looking for a way to convert your snow blower into a pasta machine. I mean, in theory, that thing ought to be able to spit out pasta and land it on a plate 20 yards away. And you should be able to convert it with just a screw driver or something. Amiright?

Sad fact is, I’m dangerous when I’ve got a screwdriver in my hand – especially when I also have a screwdriver in my other hand.

Make It Like a Man is about this: increasing numbers of men are taking on the role of home chef, but because food prep wasn’t part of their childhood, and because halftime conversation is more likely to turn to beer than croquembouche, they can find themselves at a disadvantage. I’m an early adopter of this shifting role, and have been the primary cook in my family right from the get-go. I’ve learned how to put dinner on the table after I come home from work, and still have time for American Ninja Warrior.

I like to find ways to use on-hand ingredients. I also cook from recipes and spend a lot of time searching for good ones. My interest in cooking stems from an even stronger interest in eating good food; dining out is part of my regular diet. Make It Like a Man stems from those three things.

Jeff the Chef: Chief Writer and Editor, not an actual chef – but can cuss like one

Entourage:

Randy the randy IT Consultant-to-the-Stars: IT, Contributor
Keith: Aesthetics Adviser/Art Production, currently on assignment in Rio, New York, Indianapolis, South Bend, New York again. Detroit: Rock City, – or, to be more precise, Romulus. Jolan tru, Keith. Viva Las Vegas, New Orleans
Kristin: Café Aficionado; the End-All, Be-All on Everything Cocktail; and now Jeff the Chef’s manager
Cookie: the Artist Adjunct
Mario: the Muscle, personal security
Miguel: event lighting
Andrew: taste tester
Chris: taste tester



CONTACT US: Make It Like a Man! (miLam) is produced in Chicago, by Cubs fans. To contact us, hang around on the Addison ‘L’ platform just as a game is getting out, and ask around for us. Wear a Sox cap, so we can easily pick you out in the crowd. As an alternative, please attach a comment to this page. We will not post comments that you attach to this page, but instead will respond to them via the email address that you attach to your comment. We’d love to hear from you, probably.

WORK WITH US: We love it when someone takes an interest in us. We’re very interested in working with people who are trying to promote their products. If what you’re making is delicious and what you’re doing is amazing and you seem so cool that we’d love to hang out with you just as friends even if this weren’t all about business, we’re open to helping promote you – but it’s got to be honest and organic. We’re very good test subjects. If you want to have us taste your food, we’ll taste it, and well tell you what someone who gets off on craft beer, knows all the best places for brunch, can tell a real cronut from a fake one, and yet has a secret obsession for fast food cheeseburgers thinks about it. When it comes to testing kitchen appliances, or food services, we consider ourselves quite representative of the food-interested consumer demographic – except we have an uncanny ability to string coherent sentences together in print.

DISCLAIMER: Make It Like a Man! (miLam) is a delicious blend of entertainment, social commentary, and casual gastronomic information. As such, it makes no claim or guarantee with regard to the accuracy or validity of content, sources, information and links within its posts and pages. MiLam regularly uses images to link to off-site content. Clicking on those images will often link the reader to the site of origin; otherwise miLam will indicate the origin by way of a caption, hover pop-up, or explicit citations. Should the reader find an error in this regard, please inform miLam and miLam will make every ASAP effort at a correction. MiLam links to other websites it finds interesting, but it does not thoroughly research them, nor does it guarantee that you will find them interesting, valid, or accurate. Furthermore, it rarely monitors these links for changes that may occur post publication. The Internet is fast. Linked targets may change seconds after posting. MiLam has no idea what it’s talking about, even when it makes statements about foods that are good for you or bad for you; it wishes to stress this in no uncertain terms. In fact, in the back of miLam’s mind, it fears that everything it puts in its mouth carries some kind of risk, but in the end, miLam just throws up its hands and goes, “Fuck it.” MiLam encourages you to use its tags and keywords to execute internet searches and to consider miLam content in the context of what others have written on relevant subjects, both pro and con. Certainly do not take miLam’s advice at face value. Do not consider miLam an authority on any subject (although, it is very often spot-on when it comes to verb conjugation). MiLam recipes include serving sizes, but these sizes are NOT based on nutrition. They’re based on how much miLam likes to eat in a single sitting, like, if miLam went to a restaurant and ordered something, and when it arrived, it clearly wasn’t paltry, nor was it obscene, but instead it looked like a ample-yet-sensible portion. This is completely based on perception, but it is a perception at which miLam excels. Just don’t mistake it for nutrition, because, unless you somehow missed it, everything miLam knows about nutrition it learned from 30-second segments on the local news and the occasional infographics it stumbles upon in Details magazine. MiLam bloggers are really good at irony. They also love hyperbole so much that it consumes them. MiLam bloggers continually argue about the merits of negative capability, but they feel that these arguments are unsolvable and therefore admit the use of this device in some of miLam’s posts. 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ACCOLADES: we’re pumped tp report that the Male Pumping Forum linked to our report on banana holders. We think we may have been featured on Tattoo Donkey, but we’re not sure. If someone out there tattooed one of our Valentine pics onto themselves, we would love to hear about it! Seriously, we will bake you a personalized Doughnut Cake and hire a stripper to deliver it. We can neither confirm nor deny that our Dates with Goat Cheese were featured on Xhorni, but just the thought of it kind of makes us feel desperate to rethink that title. That is not what we mean by “dates.” On yet another porn site, one of our lovely pictures of strawberries with a dusting of sugar found a home in a category they call “strawberries iz a rockstar.” We would have paid money to be in a category called that. However, we suggest that adopting the technical title we gave that image, “Eggs With Veggies, Avocado, Italian Sautéed Kale, and Strawberries” is decidedly not sexy. Especially when in the blog post itself, we captioned that image “Strawberries Awaiting Cream.” Come on, porn people … it’s low-hanging fruit.

 

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