When I was a kid, my idea of heaven on a hot summer day was fresh cut-up watermelon, Breakstone's cottage cheese, and a sprinkle of salt.
I have makeup that I can do in 15 minutes, 10 minutes, or five minutes, depending on what I'm doing that day. On a day when I'm shooting, it's 15 minutes. Five minutes is when I'm running around that day, and it's no big deal.
Sometimes there is dogma in baking and sometimes there is not - you just have to know when to break the rules and when to follow them.
Only bake one type of thing at a time. Even when it seems like you're killing two birds with one stone, baking multiple recipes at the same time in one oven presents a tricky balancing act.
The problem with traditional pie weights is you never have enough and they're expensive. Common substitutes like dried beans just aren't heavy enough to do the job. Our genius solution? Small steel balls that fit inside ball bearings and that can be purchased at any hardware store.
Turmeric or cinnamon? Nuts or raisins? The players may change, but the fundamentals of fluffy, fragrant pilaf are always the same.
You don't need a specialty lame (French for 'blade') to make professional-level bread at home, but it certainly helps in creating those telltale slash marks. You need a truly razor-sharp edge to make a clean cut; even a sharp paring knife will drag as it moves through the wet dough.
True marshmallow - and I'm not talking about those ones from a bag - is nothing more than an Italian meringue set with gelatin.
I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.
Home cooks are finding inspiration in the past, digging up centuries-old recipes more familiar to the likes of Thomas Jefferson than Thomas Keller.
When making tartare, keep everything chilled as you go, including the mixing bowl and plates. Presentation matters, too: The meat should be fridge-cold when served and cut as precisely and neatly as possible.
Heaven is a bowl of creamed herring and onions. Ditto whitefish salad. But the real object of my desire for all things gilled is gefilte fish.
Even as a little kid I knew that spinning a dreidel on the floor for literal pennies was a sad consolation for the joys of trimming a Christmas tree.
I always keep some variety of dumpling in my freezer for convenience, but frozen homemade pierogi are a special treat.
Running - it keeps me balanced, energetic, and primed for pasta intake.
Generally I don't find that basting does a lot of anything! I think what makes the most difference is treating the turkey ahead of time with a dry brine. It really does provide a very moist result.
One thing I hear a lot is that people feel less stressed out after they watch 'Gourmet Makes.' There's a transference of their stress onto me.
I love the Grub Street Diet. I am particularly fascinated by what people eat; I think it says a lot about people.
As a kid, I was overly studious, overly serious, very academically driven. It was important to me on a cellular level to do well. And then I went to college at Harvard, and I relaxed a little bit.
For a while I thought I would work in museums, so my first job after college was an internship at the 9/11 Museum. I quickly found out that I did not want to do that. So I signed up for culinary school, and directly following culinary school, I went to graduate school at McGill.
