I happen to be an avid gardener and this year I intend to have a champion garden out back. As much as I love having a wide variety of flowers, there is one category I have never considered planting. And as Chef Jerry Pellegrino points out, a family’s garden isn’t limited to the great outdoors… you can put it on a plate and bring it in for dinner.

We’ve got a bag of corn meal in our pantry that gets used not all that often. But when we do use it, it’s ordinarily for that delicious side dish polenta. As simple as polenta is, it can be amazingly versatile. We wonder what will happen when Chef Jerry Pellegrino gets it in his hands.

The warmer Spring weather has us thinking ahead to all the barbecue dinners we want to have this year. While burgers and hot dogs certainly have their place, sometimes we want something a little more substantial. And Chef Jerry Pellegrino has a very solid idea in mind, the good old pork shoulder.

The phrase “gluten-free” has become thoroughly commonplace these days, but what does it mean and who should be paying attention? And if you have to pay attention to it, how do you cook around it? These are questions I think Chef Jerry Pellegrino is prepared to answer, so let’s give a listen.

I was doing some cooking last weekend and I found myself perusing my spice rack looking for ways to kick up my stew. And I had to ask myself, “how often do I really use all these herbs and spices?” Not often, I had to confess, and then I remembered something Chef Jerry Pellegrino once told me: spice blends are a very efficient way of handling your spices.

Every now and then I feel ambitious in the kitchen and I buckle down to try something a little challenging. One dish that I’ve been able to pull off is the soufflé. And as Chef Jerry Pellegrino has pointed out, a soufflé does need to be made “just so” but no single step is really all that hard.

One of the simplest foods we have is also one of the best-liked and most useful. Butter has been around a very long time, and it’s no surprise that over the millennia we’ve figured out a million ways to use it. So we asked Chef Jerry Pellegrino, just what exactly is butter and what can we do with it?

With all the delicious red wine we’ve been drinking this winter, it’s always nice to have a little cheese on hand to top off the meal. While I do have lots of favorites, I have to admit that few things go with red wine as well as blue cheese. Chef Jerry Pellegrino told me, blue cheese is one of the more complicated cheeses to produce.

As winter slowly slips away, a lot of us are looking for ways to keep from going crazy during these final weeks of cold and darkness. One traditional outlet has been bread-baking, but even I’ve gotten discouraged by all that proofing and kneading that lead all too often to disappointing results. But Chef Jerry Pellegrino has a counter-proposal: quick breads.

The original version of goulash was created in the frozen fields of Medieval Hungary when hard-working shepherds, known as “goulyas” created a simple stew out of beef and onions. And as Chef Jerry Pellegrino will tell you, this is a simple enough dish, but when a spice called paprika arrived on the scene it was transformed into the dish we know today.