Essentials

When cooking—or doing anything else, for that matter, it’s helpful to have a foundation of solid information. Following are posts dedicated to the fundamentals of a working kitchen.

Recipe: How to prebake a tart shell

11 May 2012

I’ve always turned to the pie and tart crust recipes from Jim Dodge’s baking books. He gave them to our family before I learned how to drive, and I’ve been loyal to them ever since. First experiments were shaky, but consequent efforts paid off. I’ve made so many fruit pies that I’ve committed Jim’s piecrust [...]

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10 Home Cooking Trends for 2012

1 December 2011

Restaurant trend predictions are all well and good, but what about predictions for home cooking in 2012? After reading about the latest crop of cookbooks by chefs who now cook at home, I composed this list of ingredients, techniques, and tools that we’ll likely see more of in 2012.

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Chicken Soup to Conquer the World (or at least a cold)

14 March 2011

It happens to the best of us. One day, you’re proudly living up to resolutions you set early in the year—you know the ones—to exercise regularly, drink less coffee, cook more, and stay on top of work. Then you wake up with the faintest scratchy throat. It proceeds into a full-blown, real-world cold, the kind [...]

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Rescuing Beans from Disaster

13 February 2011

Who knew that burned cannellini beans smelled like coffee? While lost in recipe editing one afternoon, the smell of malty coffee filtered into the room. This was unexpected.  I was the only one home, and I hadn’t made coffee. Upon entering the kitchen, the source was obvious. I had scorched a pot of cannellini beans. [...]

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Preheating plates: worth the effort?

5 January 2011

Whenever a server warns me that a plate is hot, like a reflex, I can’t stop myself from pressing the tips of my fingers against it. I rarely find the plate as scorching as warned, but I don’t frequent steakhouses. There, the china is hot enough to sear a porterhouse. Getting plates to the right [...]

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A Tale of Two Vegetable Peelers

24 November 2010

Forgive the clichéd headline. This isn’t a Dickensian tribute to vegetable peelers, which would be a stretch. Rather, it’s an apology of sorts. A couple of weeks ago, I declared the superiority of the Y-shaped vegetable peeler over the more traditional peeler with the swiveling blade (pictured at the right). I even emphasized it in [...]

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How to Survive Thanksgiving

22 November 2010

Port Washington, New York-based market research firm NPD Group reports that the average size of the Thanksgiving dinner table is 9.3 guests.  (For anatomy’s sake, let’s round and say 9.) But how to put a meal together on time that is at once hot, satisfying, and balanced for 9 people, or more? The answer is [...]

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Top 10 in Kitchen Gear

9 November 2010

People who like good food also like to make the quality v. quantity argument. Eat less but eat better. I wish the same approach would be applied to how we purchase kitchen equipment. Buy fewer but better gizmos. Scratch that—don’t buy any gizmos. There are too many examples of odds and ends that don’t have [...]

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How to Clean a Leek

12 October 2010

When I sit down to write recipes, I often don’t know how far to take the instructions. For instance, is it enough to say “bell peppers, sliced,” and assume a reader will discard the stem and seeds, or do I need to write “bell peppers, cored, seeded, and sliced” to be absolutely clear? I typically [...]

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The What Not to Buy Guide for Your Pantry

29 June 2010

Nights when I’m feeling beat, when even a good hour of Law & Order SVU appears to be too much work to sit through, I tune into What Not to Wear. (Hey, we all have our guilty pleasures.) But it got me thinking: what if WNTW hosts Stacy and Clinton ransacked fashion victims’ pantries instead [...]

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