The Chopping Block Cooking & Wine Blog

Max

Max is a self-taught cook who has been in the restaurant industry for seven years. He got his start cooking and running kitchens in Boston, and Dartmouth, Massachusetts, before moving to Providence, Rhode Island, and ending up in Chicago. Though he has had some success in restaurants, earning a James Beard Award nomination, and winning a Starchefs Rising Star award, He is now glad to be taking a step back from the kitchen to be able to connect with the passionate home cooks that come to learn at The Chopping Block.

Behind The Scenes: Prepping for a Restaurant Part II

When you work as a cook in a restaurant, getting food from raw ingredients to finished dishes can, in some ways, be more straightforward than cooking at home, or less, depending on your point of ...

Use Lard for a More Perfect Pie Crust

We find ourselves in the early stages of high summer. This unfortunate circumstance comes with many downsides if you live in upstate New York. Blistering temperatures (hotter every year!), air thick ...

How a Pro Chef Organizes a Small Home Kitchen

I’ve lived in a lot of places. Not as many as some, but I'd venture to say more than most. In the last 15 years, I’ve lived in 19 different apartments, rooms, or houses. That’s 19 kitchens I've had ...

Behind the Scenes: Prepping for a Restaurant

What goes on in the kitchen of a restaurant can be a bit of a mystery. Even if the restaurant has an open kitchen, by the time the public at large is looking on, almost all the work has already been ...

Scrambled Egg Hacks

Cooking eggs is one of those things that professional cooks tend to obsess over. Even the number of pleats in a traditional French toque (100) supposedly represent the 100 different ways to cook an ...

Ramps: Not Just a Plane With a Constant Slope Between Two Points

Spring is home to a class of plants that are perhaps the most magical we get all year: the ephemerals. These are plants that appear briefly as the weather begins to warm, then disappear into dormancy ...

Where to Eat if You Happen to Find Yourself in LA

It has taken me a little over 34 years of living to visit LA. The reasons I could give for taking so long include the fact that it is thousands of miles away from most of the places I’ve lived, and ...

New Seed Day (Best Day of the Year)

I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long for the follow up to my previous post regarding planting a delightful little garden as I know many of you were clamoring to know what seeds I had ordered ...

How to Make an Excellent Breakfast Sandwich

The breakfast sandwich is one of America’s great contributions to global gastronomy. A lot of people like to talk about the U.S. as though it has no original food traditions of its own, or if it ...

Seeds in the Dirt, Grow Grow Grow; Help Me With My Garden

It may be hard to believe, but spring is nearing. Hard to believe, not because it feels like winter just began, but because (at least where I live) it feels like it never began at all. Here in ...

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Max

Recent Posts

Behind The Scenes: Prepping for a Restaurant Part II

Use Lard for a More Perfect Pie Crust

How a Pro Chef Organizes a Small Home Kitchen

Behind the Scenes: Prepping for a Restaurant

Scrambled Egg Hacks

Ramps: Not Just a Plane With a Constant Slope Between Two Points

Where to Eat if You Happen to Find Yourself in LA

New Seed Day (Best Day of the Year)

How to Make an Excellent Breakfast Sandwich

Seeds in the Dirt, Grow Grow Grow; Help Me With My Garden

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