Local celeb chef Michael Mina has teamed up with food entrepreneur Tanya Melillo to create a new cooking website and daily email called Cook Taste Eat. The site's concept centers around a weekly, restaurant-quality menu developed by Mina himself, which is broken down into daily recipes highlighted in a cooking video, recipe, and tasting tips geared toward home cooks. This week's menu is sesame-crusted ahi tuna with fava bean falafel, yogurt tahini and grilled cucumber salad, a dish that's also on the menu at all Michael Mina restaurants.
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"The goal is about getting people to cook and eat more with their senses and not just following recipes blindly -- to really taste and think about how the different flavors [and elements like] spiciness, acidity, richness, and sweetness come together in a dish," said Melillo. The Tasting Tips element of the site under the recipes offers information that a chef like Mina knows but the regular home cook may not, like the reason tuna is so often paired with sesame seeds is because sesame brings the lean protein a bit of richness.
On Cook Taste Eat, a daily email alerts readers to the recipe and cooking video of the day, which are co-hosted by Grammy award-winning musician Michelle Branch. Upcoming menus include juicy roasted chicken breast with olive oil-poached mashed potatoes, fennel-arugula salad, and oven-roasted tomato sauce; seared scallops with a chorizo-crust and a cream-free creamed corn; and roasted duck with watermelon radishes. Mina will also feature Bay Area guest chefs, including Charles Phan of The Slanted Door, Mourad Lahlou of Aziza, Ken Tominaga of Sonoma's Hana Japanese Restaurant, and TV personality and Napa chef Michael Chiarello.
It's an interesting move for Mina, and it will be interesting to see how the menu integration at his restaurants plays out with the site's content -- we think it's smart that you could learn how to make the dish you just ate out at home, and straight from the mouth of the chef himself. The site has also partnered with fab.com, a curated sale site that focuses on quality products and design, so users can buy top-of-the-line products and ingredients with the click of a mouse.
