I've spent the last 15 years lining up secret cooking weapons across the USA. Bourbon barrel aged vanilla is my latest treasure.

At the dawn of my cooking career, I pulled down my grits and greens money via working as an overnight baker in Birmingham, Alabama.

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We've been on a Vietnamese jag of late. This used to mean multiple trips to Tam Deli and Baguette House, but nowadays we content ourselves with hitting the test kitchen to develop formulae for our recipe binder.

After the runaway success of our Vietnamese Collard Greens article, we realized that we needed to be cooking and writing about more southeast Asia cuisine.

Enter the Vietnamese Bison meatloaf:

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We waded into battle with 120 lbs of Peeler Farm's chicken recently at our big, East Austin food party.

36 young hens received a variety of treatments, but our personal favorite was a riff on Texas Red Chili where we substituted chicken for beef, and ended up with a competition-caliber kettle of some of the finest Texas chili we ever had the pleasure of eating.

It's not everyday you get to enter a recipe into the culinary canon of the Great State.

Texas White Chili (recipe number 100 in the archive)

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Growing up on a farm in the Cumberland Highlands means you have easy access to fresh vegetables year-round. What vegetables our family didn't eat at-the-moment-of-ripeness were canned or vacuum-sealed via a magical apparatus known as the seal-a-meal.

Collard greens are one of the South's epic brassicae. Most southern, soul food chefs put them on the stove-top early in the morning with a ham hock, and a cup of bacon fat, and let them cook for 3-4 hours before they're finally served as a glorious "mess of greens."

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When your eaters come in giant waves you have to be locked and loaded in the kitchen. At our most recent pop up restaurant event we prepared a mammoth batch of Johnson's Backyard Garden organic sweet potatoes in hopes of being able to feed the crowd.

Mission accomplished.

This was the recipe that was the most requested as the event wore on. Folks repeatedly walked up to the counter proclaiming that they "normally don't like sweet potatoes" then begged for the formula.

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Kentucky Derby season is in full swing as natives of the Commonwealth lay in big supplies of bourbon for mint juleps; cured meats for biscuit-stuffing; sacks of walnuts for Derby Pie-making, and critters from the hardwood forests to construct mammoth kettles of Burgoo.

There are plenty iconic dishes in Kentucky but perhaps none more so than the Hot Brown. Putatively, a simple sandwich consisting of only a handful of ingredients, the dish has taken on a mythos over the near century since its invention, and now food pilgrims travel from all over the globe to sample this delicacy.

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We frenzied on this fresh loaf of bread that we scored at a Scrumptious Chef cook's meeting this past weekend.

Hope to have the recipe, and possibly a back story, up later today. Ok, it's later today and we can post this formula from our buddy Paul, the newest member of our cook team:

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We were always in the plain Rice Krispies camp.

Versatility rules when you're a young, cold breakfast cereal gourmand, and once you commit to the cocoa there's no going back. The "chocolate" suffuses the flavor profile of the whole bowl, and add-ons are next to impossible to integrate into the dish.

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Time to pay the devil his due.

The gods of Chili making must be appeased so we've given Chili its own category. We're introducing our latest addition with an omnibus of all our Chili articles gleaned from our nearly 2,000 article-strong archive.

Submitted for your cooking and eating pleasure: The Art and Science of Chili

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We make chili year round in Texas. It's what sustains us. 110 degrees in the dead of summer? Time to make chili. Leaves a falling in East Austin? Time to make chili. There is simply no food that nourishes the soul and feeds the spirit like a kettle of chili.

We make all kinds: Texas Red, Kentucky White, Mexican brown...you name it. If it involves chile peppers and few hours on the stovetop we'll tackle it and wrestle it around til it turns into food.

It's alchemy. Texas style.

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This site began its life as a recipe database. Friends and family encouraged me to start Scrumptious Chef so they could rifle through an online resource from time to time when it came time to marshal their reserves and hit the kitchen.

Little did they (or I) realize that Scrumptious Chef would take on a life of its own and turn into the media empire that it is today.

Five of the ten most popular articles in the history of the site are all recipes.

These are the five most popular recipes we posted in 2012:

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