CogniCuisine

09/09/2026

Most spice guides stop at description and traditional use. I want to go one step further: identify the job a spice performs in food, then carry that flavor logic into new dishes. That is Flavor Liberation, and ajwain is a perfect example.

09/08/2026

Ajwain Part 2

Ajwain gets even more interesting once it hits butter and heat. On smashed potatoes, that thyme-and-oregano character turns intense, a little spicy, and unmistakable.

09/07/2026

Dinner was imminent. I had three ingredients I wanted to use: canned corned beef, canned roast beef, and pearl barley.

I asked AI to help me create something unexpected from them.

That single dinner question became seven stages of recipe development. Ingredients changed. The flour system changed. Technical problems were caught. One prediction failed completely. And once I started cooking, the physical food began making decisions that no written recipe could make for me.

The biggest discovery turned out to be the kofta themselves.

Pearl barley, teff, cassava, and oil produced a dense, moist, chewy texture that was extraordinarily meat-like, even though there was no meat in them at all.

These images document the progression from the first recipe to the final dish.

The idea survived. The recipe did not.

09/05/2026

Today on Bob Tastes, I tried ajwain for the very first time.

My best description?

It’s like thyme and oregano had a baby, times five.

It started out reminding me of thyme and oregano, but the longer I chewed it, the stronger it got. This one really surprised me.

Next up, I’m trying ajwain in a finished dish.

08/31/2026

Wattleseed, Part 2.

Last time I tasted wattleseed straight from the package for the first time. This time I baked it into a traditional Australian bread and wanted to find out how much of that earthy, almost chocolate-like flavor would survive the baking.

So I tasted the bread three ways: plain, with butter, and with butter and honey.

The bread itself was delicious. Butter? Surprisingly, it didn’t need it. But honey? That changed everything. It actually brought the earthiness forward and made the chocolate notes even more noticeable.

This is exactly why I love trying ingredients I haven’t cooked with before. Sometimes you don’t really understand an ingredient until you see what happens to it in food.

Would you try wattleseed?

08/25/2026

CORNED BEEF HASH GNOCCHI WITH RAVIOLI RAGÙ

Who hasn't had two cans of corned beef hash and ravioli lying around? Each is not enough for a dinner, but together, what in the world do you do with them to make a delicious meal?

Here's an idea - make gnocchi out of the corned beef hash and a delicious tomato ragu from the ravioli. It turned out surprisingly delicious after a few tweaks. I am including the recipe for anyone adventurous enough. I can share that making homemade gnocchi is less difficult and putzy than you think!

08/23/2026

Bob Tastes #1: Wattleseed 🇦🇺

I’m starting a new tasting series built around ingredients I’ve never tried before, beginning with roasted ground Australian wattleseed. Straight from the package, I found it aromatic, earthy, a little grassy, and surprisingly chocolatey.

Next, I’m baking it into wattleseed damper to see what happens to those flavors once it's cooked. Part 2 will be the finished bread tasted plain, with butter, and with honey.

08/23/2026

My new Hawaii Reimagined collection is now available on Fine Art America.

The full collection brings together 54 works created from my original photographs made across the Hawaiian Islands, then transformed into entirely new works of fine art.

This is Part I, featuring the Big Island, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi, and Kauaʻi. In the video, each finished artwork is shown with the original photograph that became its foundation. Ferns become a fragmented mixed-media painting. A Molokaʻi shoreline is reconstructed through textile and stitching. Lānaʻi becomes a bold graphic mural. The Nā Pali Coast is rebuilt stone by stone as a gemstone micro-pavé mosaic.

The photograph always remains at the heart of the work, but color, line, texture, material, and abstraction take it somewhere new.

Hawaii Reimagined is now available through Fine Art America.

08/17/2026

I have finally crossed the Rubicon and written my first work of fiction!

**TEMPERED MOMENTS: A Story and a Play, Tethered by Poems** is now available on Amazon.

One story. One play. Poems between them. All circling the same question: how differently can two people understand the very same past?

At the center is Bellamy’s, a third-generation candy shop where precision, craft, desire, jealousy, memory, and power begin to blur together. “The Candymaker” tells the story through one man’s carefully controlled recollection. Then the one-act play **TEMPER** reopens that same year through bodies, dialogue, silence, and competing points of view. The poems surrounding them deepen the fractures between what happened, what was felt, and what people need to believe.

I built this book deliberately as a single literary composition rather than a collection of separate works.

And now, after a long road, it's out in the world.

**Tempered Moments** is available now in paperback on Amazon - link in the comments.

07/27/2026

“Turn the Night Around” is officially out now.

The song began with a Psaiku I published years ago:

The moon’s gentle glow
Swaddles Earth beneath her folds
Comforting the night

That image became the center of a 1976-inspired pop-funk and soul duet about two people finding each other through music.

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/track/6nm8I2MMnXEqXavzwAhaec?si=a0d32cf51a1b41e7

Plated Jams · Turn the Night Around · Song · 2026