Whalen - Stuffed: the ultimate comfort food cookbook: taking your favorite foods and stuffing them to make new, different and delicious meals

You are totally mad, but its fantastic.

I will never know exactly how I became the mad scientist of comfort food, but when you stuff a full-size cheeseburger into ravioli and serve it on a bun, people start calling you names.

Im not a culinary trained chef, but I have cooked almost every day for about seven years. Im not a world traveler, but Ive done hours of research to ensure my recipes are rooted in authenticity.

Although in those formative years I may not have learned to cook, I sure did learn how to eat. My moms side of the family is Italian, and when it comes to eating, they are the best. Throughout my youth I learned to eat spaghetti, manicotti and lasagna. I excelled at eating pasta fagioli, tortellini and chicken Parm.

Upon arrival at college, I was on my own and began to teach myself to cook. I started watching cooking shows and reading the cookbooks written by some of my favorite TV personalities. I was getting the hang of some basic techniques and flavor combinations. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. With every step that I could drill down and master, my food became more homemade and, concurrently, more tasty.

I was cooking four or five new recipes each week and after about a year of this I started to develop recipes on my own. It happened that around this time I was trying to learn some new software for my day job in the IT field. I decided to test out my new software skills by creating my own blog. I had something to share. There was a void in the food web that I could fill. This is how The Food in My Beard was born.

Today, I am the chef for a small, independently owned burrito shop, Cafe Burrito, in Boston, for which I created the menu. I am a freelance food writer for General Mills, and of course I still have my blog, thefoodinmybeard.com, which I update with new recipes about four times a week. Although the site may have begun as a way to simply chronicle my cooking and learn some new software, it became something much bigger.

Writing a cookbook has always been something I aspired to do, and over the past two years it is has become a priority. I knew I wanted to do something unique that reflected my creative modern comfort style of cooking, and once I came up with the theme of stuffed foods, the book really started to come together.

For your browsing pleasure, I have included a heat and pig-out scale for each recipe. This should help you quickly find a recipe that suits your current needs for different levels of heat and overall gluttony. For the heat scale, once you hit around 6, things start getting really hot, and anything above 8 only serious pepper heads need apply! Now, lets get to the good stuff!