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.
Recent Posts
Do Yourself a Favor and Buy Fancy Chocolate
I definitely understand why people buy the cheapest, or maybe even more frequently, the second cheapest chocolate at the grocery store for baking. The price difference between that and the really ...
I’ve been getting some good traction on these book roundups, and maybe if I can make the case that the book collection can be routed into a productive outlet, I’ll be allowed to continue to purchase ...
Lunar New Year is coming up fast, and though many cultures have and still do celebrate a lunar new year of some kind, in the U.S. it has largely become associated with Chinese culture and typically ...
Carbonara is one of my wife’s favorite pasta dishes, and I’m happy to make it for her whenever she requests it because unlike some of her other common requests it doesn’t take multiple days to ...
Top Ten Fancy Chef Books for the Fancy Cook in Your Life
If you’re one of those among us who celebrates one of the winter gift giving holidays that terminate near the end of December then by the time this post comes out you will technically still have some ...
It can hardly be denied at this point that winter is upon us. Where I live in upstate New York, we have just gotten our first winter storm warning (make sure you have plenty of flashlights, ...
Welcome back to another exciting installment the story of how to make your own duck confit. In my previous post, we walked through the simple steps required to get your duck leg confit to the point ...
In my experience, many people tend to think of French food as "fancy" food. It's true that a lot of classic French preparations are complex or labor intensive, and it's easy to think that because of ...
The Best Dish for Clearing Out Your Fridge: Fried Rice
Fried rice has a lot going for it. It's fast, it can be made with just about any set of ingredients, it's cheap to make, and—above all—it's totally delicious when made well. Unfortunately, I find ...
The time has finally come for most of us in the northern U.S. to harvest the last of what we can from our summer garden. Personally I pushed it as far as I could (to the extreme detriment of our ...
