→ May 27, 2008
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Radio etc.

I’ve been slacking on the blog here as I write predraft content, but I’ve got some radio coming up – today at 4:15 on our Nashville radio affiliate, at 4:40 on our Madison (WI) affiliate, at 6:15-ish on ESPN 890 here in Boston, and at 6:30 on the FAN 590 in Toronto (that’s for my buddies at DrunkJaysFans). I’ll be on AllNight tonight with guest host Amy Lawrence. I’m also trying to schedule something on Bernie Miklasz’ show in St. Louis for Wednesday.

In the meantime, check out one of the best food blogs, I’ve ever seen, Chocolate and Zucchini, written by an impossibly cute Parisian native who worked as a software programmer before becoming a full-time food blogger and author. The post to which I linked is about her loathing of hotel breakfasts, which you all know I share, and her makeshift solution to the problem, which I admire but refuse to follow on grounds that one of my rewards for taking business trips is bacon.

And if I catch my breath, I’ve got some eats to write up and that Calvino book too.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ May 23, 2008
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Germinal.

The Novel 100 author Daniel Burt described Emile Zola’s Germinal as “perhaps the angriest book ever written,” and it’s hard to deny that anger – or perhaps rage – is the fuel on which the book’s engine runs. It’s also a riveting novel, a highly readable novel, and a complex novel that is expertly plotted and contains within it stories of unrequited love and deep suspense.

Germinal, which is present on the Novel 100 (#66) and the Bloomsbury 100, is the story of a conflict between the poor laborers of a coal-mining town in 1860s France and the bourgeois management and owners. The workers live in grinding poverty, barely earning subsistence wages, dying in the mine or because of it, and ultimately living lives devoid of meaning. Ownership pits worker against worker to drive labor costs down, yet points to the subsidized housing it provides as evidence of its beneficence. Zola doesn’t exonerate his laborers, showing how their infighting and ignorance hold them back.

The plot centers around Etienne, an unemployed mechanic who finds work in the mine but, discovering the appalling conditions and dead-end wages, decides to put his knowledge of Marxism to use and organizes a general strike. The strike has severe consequences for everyone in the town, and to some degree for ownership, and precipitates a spree of violence punctuated by one of the most vicious scenes I can recall in a Western novel.

Buried within the greater story is a for the time progressive view of women’s rights and role, by way of a savage depiction of the women in the mine, including Catherine, who captures Etienne’s heart but instead chooses to be with the violent man who first “takes” her virginity by force. Zola attacks nearly everyone and everything by distilling them into sharp and unappealing characters, from abbes more interested in peace than helping the poor to shopkeepers who prey on customers near starvation to the idle rich who own the means of production.

The primary literary criticism of Germinal seems to be its inaccuracy. Zola introduces early-1800s working conditions into the latter half of the century, but adds Marxist ideas and organizations before they could have reached France. I have less of a problem with this, since the novel is functioning on some level as satire, and satire works via exaggeration.

Next up: Italo Calvino’s short work Marcovaldo, or seasons in the city.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 18, 2008
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A new trend this year for America: wasting food!

Quick note: I’ll be on ESPN Radio’s Gameday in about 20 minutes (1:20 pm EDT).

Found this interesting article in the International Herald Tribune via Gmail on how much food we waste:

In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

I have to admit that nothing makes me more upset than throwing food away. In the past few years, I’ve decreased my food purchases to more or less just what I know I’ll use, making more trips to the store (which isn’t feasible for everyone) and, for ingredients that can’t be purchased in small enough quantities, planning several meals around them to avoid waste. I also convert foods that maybe are past their primes for eating straight and convert them into other foods, like using fruit to make pies or cobblers or jams, or taking stale bread and making fresh bread crumbs by tossing it in the food processor. And yet I still find myself tossing, usually via the garbage disposal, way more food than I’d like – leftovers usually.

Unfortunately, short of tailoring your purchases to more closely fit what you eat, which isn’t easy for people who shop for food once a week, there’s not much you can do to reduce the impact of what you waste. Composting isn’t for everyone, and with skunks and raccoons in our neighborhood, it’s definitely not for us. There’s just no way to get the food I’ve bought and won’t or can’t use into the hands of someone who needs it.

Anyway, it was an interesting read for me, because I’m conscious of what I waste. Just the other day, my wife and I both bought strawberries without realizing the other had done so, and one batch (mine, I think) had mold on half the berries by the next day. With a two-year-old in the house, it wasn’t worth taking chances on the “clean” berries, so out they went. It’s just a shame.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ May 17, 2008
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Pittsburgh radio.

All you Yinzers can hear me on WEAE 1250 AM today at 11:20 am with Joe Starkey.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ May 16, 2008
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The Boston Herald/Spygate affair.

So, as a friend of beleaguered Boston Herald writer John Tomase, I’ve been wrestling with how I might address the topic without coming off as too biased on John’s behalf. Seth Mnookin spared me the trouble with his excellent post on the subject today:

But the vitriol and derision being directed at Tomase is over-the-top. (And getting angry at him or at the Herald is a bad way to displace frustration/anger over the Pats slightly-less-than-perfect season.) He had what he thought was a big story, and he thought he had made the limitations of his story clear in the piece itself. The allegations contained therein logically followed from what was already known. And nobody he interviewed would say, flat out, that the piece was wrong.

This was, more or less, going to be my main point. The calls for Tomase’s firing – there’s even a Facebook group dedicated to it – don’t make much sense to me. Is he accused of malfeasance here? No one seems to be making a credible accusation along those lines. He got a scoop that appeared legitimate, and ran with it. One would assume that at least one Herald editor knows about Tomase’s source(s), and was sufficiently satisfied with the sourcing to green-light the story.

Is he accused of frequent mistakes along these lines – viz, running a story without giving the target(s) enough time to respond? To my knowledge, this is the first time John’s been charged with this kind or, in fact, any kind of journalistic error. So what is the justification for calling for Tomase to lose his job? Doesn’t some of the responsibility lie with the editors, as Seth says, to rein the writers in?

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 15, 2008
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Georgia eats.

On the first season of Feasting on Asphalt, Alton Brown and his crew stopped at a tiny place in Toccoa, Georgia, called Shirley’s Sole Food Café. Ethan Martin, a likely first-rounder in this year’s Rule 4 draft, goes to school in Toccoa, and when I finally put two and two together the night before I flew down there, I figured I had to eat a meal at Shirley’s as sort of a pilgrimage. Unfortunately, I was there on a Friday, which is all-you-can-eat fish fry night at Shirley’s, meaning I didn’t get the menu that Alton et al got on their visit. The meal was slightly disappointing, although I was impressed that nothing tasted fishy. The fish is fried in large batches and placed in warming trays up front; you walk along the counter and point to what you want. The fried shrimp were the best option, in a crunchy crust (like panko, but can you really get panko bread crumbs out there?), while the fried tilapia ended up a bit chewy. It was $12 for the fish fry, plus another $8 if you wanted fresh steamed crab legs … which I did, receiving more crab legs than I could eat. They were fresh and had a lot of meat, but the meat itself was a little bland, lacking that distinctive undertone of sweetness that, for me, has always separated crab from lobster.

This week, I was driving down 19/41 to Griffin to see Tim Beckham when I passed McGhin’s Southern Pit Barbecue and saw the parking lot was pretty full for lunchtime on a weekday, so I pulled in. It certainly looked the part, and the menu was pretty straightforward without a lot of descriptions – the type of place that assumes you know your Q. However, it turned out to be more evidence that, as JC Bradbury told me last year, there is no good barbecue in Georgia. I went with a pork/beef platter, which came with piles of shredded meat plus two sides and “cracklin’ cornbread.” That cornbread was the only item on the plate to which I’d give an average grade (it was plus, plenty of fat in it and no sugar). Both meats were very dry and more chopped than shredded; I hate to be forced to add sauce to pulled pork or beef because it needs the moisture, and it was worse because the sauce was North Carolina style, heavy on the vinegar, which to my palate means one-dimensional. The baked beans were also too vinegary and more like a soup than actual baked beans. I didn’t even touch the coleslaw because it was sitting in a pool of a mayo-based dressing; God only knows what microbes might be living in there. For dessert – I had room – I got the peach cobbler, when in Rome, etc. It was more of a deconstructed peach pie, with a pie crust mixed in with the filling of a peach pie. (A cobbler dough is more akin to a biscuit dough than a pie crust dough, lighter and a little cakey rather than the flaky and tender and very fatty characteristics of pie dough.) The filling was overcooked and had way more cornstarch than needed to thicken it. I have to give the waitress credit, however; when I said I didn’t know what Brunswick stew was and, after she described it, decided not to order it as a side, she brought a tiny dish of it to me anyway so I could try it. I wish I could have said better things about the food, but I’m not going to lie to you – it just wasn’t good.

It’s also time for another update on Paschal’s. I went to the original location on MLK Jr. Drive in downtown Atlanta for breakfast, and the food was generally quite good and was made to order. I decided to branch out and try the salmon croquettes, a platter that comes with two eggs cooked to order, home fries, and a biscuit. The waitress actually asked me whether I wanted my eggs scrambled hard, medium, or soft, which is the first time I’ve ever been asked that; I went with soft, and they were perfect for me, although if you like ‘em runny they may seem overdone. The biscuit was excellent, very soft, but without much of a crust – the top was golden, but it was like a thin layer of parchment paper rather than the traditional semi-hard crust. The supposed star of the dish, the croquettes, were obviously made from tinned salmon and had a fishy taste that couldn’t really be avoided.

I also revisited the Paschal’s in the Atlanta airport before my flight home, and at the suggestion of one of you, tried the collard greens. They had a strong cured-pork flavor – I’m assuming ham hock – and the sweetness of a little sugar, although nothing can disguise the fact that collard greens, even cooked properly for hours, are bitter. And this time around, I got my quarter-dark fried chicken, which could not have been more perfectly cooked.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ May 15, 2008
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The Mailbag of Malcontent, Vol. 8.

Love my readers! This was in the pool of questions for today’s chat:

(1420) Brian-Baltimore
Sorry. Definitely said it about Lincecum. I always knew you were the type that weasles out of his off base projections. You are too smug for your own good. That makes the whole blog you wrote about being true to your readership hollow.

The best part here is that Brian misunderstood what I was saying, and his mistake means that I’m a smug weasel! Excuse me – weasle. Although he was better than the reader who called me a “shitbag” because I didn’t answer his question.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ May 15, 2008
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A Dance to the Music of Time, completed.

UPDATE, December 2010: The University of Chicago Press has made volume one of the Dance available as a free e-book on amazon.com and on their own site.

—

Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is a masterwork of dry English humor and brilliant characterization. Part of both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (where it ranked 43rd), Dance is told by Nick Jenkins over a period of nearly fifty years as he moves through the social circles of interwar London, serves in a rather low-risk infantry unit in World War II, and then becomes a distinguished writer after the war and returns to many of the same characters who populated the earlier books. It’s a popular series in the United Kingdom, but it’s not well-known in the United States.

Nick himself is a wry observer but a milquetoast character, and his wife, Isobel, is a phantom in the stories. The main character and antihero is Kenneth Widmerpool, a climber lacking in social skills but not in confidence who always seems to find himself in the right situation, exasperating anyone hoping to see him fail. The series is full of funny, well-drawn secondary characters, from Nick’s alcoholic school-mate Charles Stringham to the “mobile laundry unit” head Bithel to the ice queen Pamela Flitton, who destroys every man on whom she sets her sights. The narrative greed that I look for in every novel isn’t strong here, but the reader is drawn forward simply by the music of time: We’re following Nick as he goes through life, seeing the world through the lens of his professional and personal lives.

Powell’s observations on the rhythms of life display Nick’s interest, but with a surprising bit of dispassion. Broken marriages, personal setbacks, and even deaths are reported as facts intrinsic to life, but by and large unworthy of comment; by the last book, where secondary characters are dropping like flies, their deaths become parenthetical phrases, a reflection (I suppose) on how we perceive the deaths of those with whom we’ve lost touch as we ourselves grow older. Instead, Jenkins (whom Powell admitted was based on himself) prefers to find interest in small stories and little scandals, although as the series advances the scandals do become proportionally bigger and Powell’s writing veers somewhat more towards the risqué and sensational, perhaps a reflection of the various time periods covered by the series.

The twelve novels, comprising roughly 65-70 long chapters over about 3000 pages, don’t quite match Wodehouse for laugh-inducing content, but Powell infuses the writing with wit. His characters names can totter on the line between the ridiculous and the plausible, from the Walpole-Wilsons to Flavia Wisebite (and her ex-husband, Cosmo Flitton) to Scorpio Murtlock. When books written by some of the secondary characters are mentioned, they have glorious titles like Camel Ride to the Tomb and Dogs Have No Uncles. The punch lines, when they do arrive, are funny because of the context; having one character pour the contents of a sugar-bowl over another’s head is not intrinsically all that funny, but when it happens in Dance, it rises to another level of humor. Jenkins plays the Bob Newhart role of the one sane or normal person surrounded by wackos on lunatics, leaving him, with some later help from Isobel, to offer his commentary.

I have a strong feeling that J.K. Rowling has read Powell’s series and paid homage to it through two minor characters in the Harry Potter series. One minor character in the series is a mystic and spiritualist named Dr. Trelawney, who speaks in aphorisms and vague pronouncements, greeting people by saying, “The Essence of All is the Godhead of the True,” and expecting (but rarely receiving) the reply, “The Vision of Visions Heals the Blindness of Sight.” The similarity to Professor Trelawney in name, in bent, and in obsession with visions is unlikely to be a coincidence. I also saw similarities between Powell’s character Sillery and Rowling’s Professor Slughorn; both are slightly unctuous men who ran salons in their college’s houses and seemed to devote significant energy to determining whom to invite, measuring their gatherings’ success by the names and status of the attendees.

If you enjoy English writing, Powell’s depiction of upper-class English society from the immediate aftermath of World War I into the turbulent 1960s is worth the significant time investment. Next up for me: I’m already a third of the way into Emile Zola’s seminal socio-political novel Germinal.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 11, 2008
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Zeno’s Conscience.

Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, listed in the Bloomsbury 100 and in the honorable mentions in the Novel 100, was Svevo’s third and last novel, published shortly before his death in a car accident and resulting from a lengthy professional relationship with James Joyce.

Zeno’s Conscience, previously translated as The Confessions of Zeno, is a modernist comedy, narrated by the neurotic, duplicitous Zeno, looking back on his life and his marriage, his affair with a young singer, his business partnership with his brother-in-law, and his interminable attempts to quit smoking. Zeno’s analyst has asked him to write down his “confessions” as part of his therapy, and the short introductory note from “Dr. S” says that the therapist is publishing them as a sort of revenge against his former patient, who has revealed that not everything he wrote therein is true. Because the story is told from Zeno’s perspective, it’s full of amusing rationalizations and subtle attempts to shift blame on to the people around him.

Zeno’s antics and his descriptions of them are amusing for about 300 pages, but halfway through the book’s longest section, the description of his partnership with brother-in-law Guido, the narrative begins to drag, and the fact that that story offers a distinct conclusion doesn’t help the fact that the path there was aimless. Guido is, himself, a fraud, but I could never be sure how much of Zeno’s written treatment of him was real and how much was projection. The strongest section is the story of Zeno’s courtship of the beautiful Ada, who spurns him for Guido, and how he seems to enjoy watching Ada deteriorate physically in middle age.

If this seems like a more indifferent review than I normally give, it reflects my uncertainty over whether or not I liked the book. I tore through the first three-fourths of it, then stumbled to the finish line as I lost interest. The introduction labels the book as a commentary on the idle rich of pre-War Trieste, which may be true but might be too far removed from us to have as much impact as, say, Fitzgerald’s portraits of the idle rich in America in his books.

Next up: I’ve just finished the last book of A Dance to the Music of Time, and will post my thoughts on the whole twelve-volume series shortly.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 10, 2008
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The top ten home cooking mistakes.

I did promise this post in my Thursday chat, so here you go. I apologize if some of the formatting doesn’t work, but I’m posting this between flights from O’Hare and I’ll clean it up later on.

1. Salt. The food police have everyone running scared of good old sodium chloride, but it’s incredibly important from a culinary perspective as a flavor in and of itself and as a flavor enhancer. Salt intensifies other flavors in every dish by hitting the fifth taste known as umami; without salt, most foods will taste bland, flat, or even stale. Salting foods early in the process allows you to use less salt in total because you can often infuse your foods with salt by dissolving salt in the cooking liquid. Pasta water should always be heavily salted, and the cooking liquids for small grains like rice, barley, or quinoa should also have salt. Seasoning the exterior of meats helps prepare the surface for the Maillard reaction that occurs during the application of direct heat on a grill or on a stovetop pan, producing that brown crust that, for me, is the #1 argument against vegetarianism. I prefer kosher salt for most applications because it doesn’t dissolve too quickly and is easily pinched due to the coarse grain size, but I use table salt for baking because kosher salt will not integrate evenly in most doughs and batters.

Someone asked in chat what I would recommend for someone with high blood pressure who has to limit his salt intake. The best answer is an unfortunate one, but the reason that monosodium glutamate originally became popular is that it’s a tremendous flavor enhancer that delivers that same umami hit that salt does, perhaps even more powerfully. MSG has a nasty reputation and can trigger a fatal reaction in a person allergic to it (a close friend of our maid of honor’s sister died of anaphylaxis after eating MSG), so it’s not for everyone, and I personally don’t use it because I don’t need to, but it will do the job. Failing that, there are some potassium-salt products that can be used in moderation as salt replacements, and using acids like lemon juice, vinegar, onions, and citrus fruits can also help fill the no-salt gap.

EDIT: A few commenters have said that salt and umami hit different receptors on the tongue. I remember reading in a technology magazine – might have been Red Herring seven or eight years ago about umami, where the writer identified salt as the primary flavor enhancer and thus primary umami delivery mechanism in our diets.

2. A real knife. You can do a lot with a good chef’s knife, and you can’t do shit without one. It doesn’t have to be an expensive model; America’s Test Kitchen has recommended this Victorinox 8″ chef’s knife (or its 10″ version, about a buck cheaper!) for years, although I have grown accustomed to the handles on my Henckels Four-Star knives. Buy a good chef’s knife that feels comfortable in your hand, with a blade 8 to 9 inches long, and buy a honing steel to keep it sharp. Avoid home sharpeners, though, which “sharpen” your blade by destroying it.

3. Cooking by temperature. Most recipes say “bake for 20 minutes” or “grill for 15 minutes,” but those directions assume a median size and shape for the food being cooked and a degree of consistency in ovens and grills that simply doesn’t exist. The food you’re cooking is dead – even lobster dies when it hits the boiling water if you haven’t already killed it – and doesn’t know when the timer goes off. Your roasted chicken breast is done at 161 degrees, whenever it gets there, and you’re not going to know when it gets there unless you check it with a thermometer. I keep two in the house: A cheap instant-read thermometer (also useful for checking the temperature of water for green tea, which is best brewed at 160 degrees) and a probe thermometer with an electronic alarm. I wouldn’t roast a turkey or a pork loin without one of the latter.

4. Using fresher spices. If you’ve got a cheap $10 coffee grinder with a rotating blade, I have two things to say to you: It’s useless for grinding coffee, and it’s great for grinding whole spices. Buying spices whole and grinding them yourself is cheaper two ways and maybe three. One, the whole spices tend to be cheaper per unit of weight. Two, they’ll last far longer than ground spices, which go stale in six months to a year; a whole nutmeg will last for several years, while ground nutmeg is sawdust in a few months. And three, if you’re buying your ground spices at a regular grocery store, there’s a chance you’re getting fillers in addition to your chile powder or allspice. Buy your spices whole, toast some before grinding (cumin, coriander, and fennel seeds in particular), and grind them as you need them. I recommend Penzey’s for mail-order spices, although I may be biased because I have one near my house. I’ve been very happy with their quality and prices on almost everything they sell. A corollary to this rule is to use fresh herbs when you can, especially in season. A $1.29 package of thyme from my local farmstand will keep for two weeks if left in its plastic box in my vegetable crisper drawer, and the volatile oils in fresh herbs give them a deeper, richer flavor than dried herbs can provide. This also means that those spice mixes you buy in stores are a particularly bad deal – they often contain fillers, they nearly always contain salt as the first ingredient, and they take the control out of your hands. Make your own spice mixes in small batches as you need them.

5. Fry – or, as Alton Brown’s plastic chicken once said, “fry some more.” Everyone’s afraid of frying just as they’re afraid of salt, but if you fry right, the fried food will absorb very little of the cooking oil and will amaze you with its texture and moisture. When you keep the oil hot and remove the food before it’s overcooked, the food’s exterior (usually a batter or breading) won’t absorb the fat in which it’s being cooked. The keys to frying are simple:
* Use a huge pot of oil or fill your electric fryer. The more oil you use, the faster the oil temperature will rebound after you add your cold food, which can easily knock a small pot of oil down fifty degrees.
* Use a frying or candy thermometer and monitor it. Too low and you’ll get greasy, undercooked food. Too hot and you’ll get smoke and eventually fire.
* Keep an eye on the food. If it stops sizzling or emitting steam, it’s probably starting to overcook. The force of the food’s internal moisture escaping as steam prevents oil from seeping in, but when the steam stops escaping, the food is dry and will start to suck up oil from the pot.
* Use a fire extinguisher. Duh.

6. Brine. I’ve preached the brining gospel here plenty of times, but here it is in condensed form: Brine lean meats before cooking them. That includes most pork, chicken, and turkey, and you can brine shrimp as well. Brining infuses water and some salt into the meat, helping prevent the meat from drying out as it cooks, which lean meat does tend to do, especially if you like to push your pork past medium.

7. Using proper heat. You need to learn your stove over the course of many meals to understand where “medium-high” really lies. On medium-high, a chicken breast seared in a hot pan in a little bit of oil should develop a nice brown exterior in under three minutes, but more than two. A chicken cutlet (sliced and/or pounded to ¼” thick) should cook through in two minutes per side, and a properly seasoned piece of salmon should have a slightly crispy brown crust in about two and a half minutes. Cooking over heat set too high will result in uneven cooking, with a raw interior and a perfectly-cooked exterior, or a perfectly-cooked interior surrounded by leather.

When the recipe says “simmer,” that doesn’t mean “boil the shit out of it.” Turn the heat down until the bubbles are small and aren’t coming too quickly. When the recipe says “sweat,” don’t sauté. Stir the cut aromatics in the hot oil, sprinkle with salt to draw out moisture, and let the mixture sit over medium to medium-low heat for six or seven minutes until the onions are translucent and golden.

When pan-frying, use plenty of oil and add the food when the oil starts to shimmer, which may mean starting on high or medium-high heat and backing it off as the oil heats. If it smokes, it’s too hot – and yes, I know ATK likes to talk about wisps of smoke, but they’re wrong, because smoke means the oil is breaking down. You might consider a splatter-screen if you pan-fry often, and always remember to turn the gas off or take the pan off the burner before adding any alcohol to a hot pan. (I have, in fact, ignited a few pans, and am fortunate that alcohol burns at a pretty low temperature.)

Remember that long cooking times typically mean indirect heat. On a grill, that means putting the food on a part of the grate that isn’t directly over the heat source.

8. Buy better ingredients. It depresses me to walk into the local Stop and Shop and see the sad excuses for fruits and vegetables offered in that section of the store, especially since a mile away is one of the best farmstands in the area (Wilson Farms), selling superior-quality produce at comparable prices. Food is no different than anything else in life: garbage in, garbage out. If you start with bad produce, no amount of cooking skill or seasoning is going to create a great salad or pie or contorno. Some basic rules of thumb when shopping for fresh produce, meats, fish, and cheeses:
* Produce should be brightly colored and, with a few exceptions like basil, stored in a cool area. Leafy things shouldn’t be wilted or have brown spots, and if any part of a leaf has started to break down into a slightly oozy green substance, then it’s gone bad. Solid fruits and vegetables should be heavy for their sizes, indicating the presence of plenty of moisture in the fruit. Buy whole when you can, as it lasts longer and avoids risk of cross-contamination at the store. Carrots with the leaf stems on top are better than trimmed carrots, which are better than peeled carrots, which are better than the fake “baby carrots” sold in bags (nothing more than peeled, cut full-sized carrots tumbled to give them smooth, rounded exteriors). Fresh beats frozen, and the only acceptable foods in cans are beans and, if the quality is high enough, pears, which are nearly impossible to get out of season because they store and travel poorly.
* Fish shouldn’t smell fishy; if it does, it has already gone bad, and no amount of seasoning will get rid of that taste. Don’t be afraid to ask the monger to let you smell the fish before you buy it. Fish should be stored on ice, and the monger should provide ice for the trip home if you ask for it. In warm weather, bring a small cooler to the store. Color is not an indicator of quality in salmon, since salmon farms can alter the fish’s coloring by changing the feed. Shellfish can make you extremely sick if it’s not handled properly, and salmon can even carry a rare but dangerous parasite that’s killed in cooking.
* Meats and chicken are easier to pick out, as long as they’re stored properly in a cold case and there’s good turnover at the meat counter. As with produce, the more it’s been handled, the greater the risk of cross-contamination, and the less you know about what’s in the product. If you’ve got a good knife, especially a sharp boning knife, buy whole chickens and butcher them yourself; you’ll get more bang for your buck and can save the bones (and wings, if like me you find them to be a waste of time for eating) to make stock. Remember that seasoned or marinated meats rob you of your chance to give the meat a visual inspection before buying. When buying steak, more marbling will mean a more tender end product (and higher cost, but it’s worth it). And try duck. Not only is the meat delicious, if you render the subcutaneous fat, you get one of the greatest cooking fats on the planet.
* The flavor of cheese is entirely determined by what the cow, goat, sheep, or water buffalo eats, so that “Parmesan” cheese from Argentina or Wisconsin isn’t going to rival the Parmiggiano-Reggiano from Italy. Buy cheeses from the right places, looking for an official seal if it’s from Europe (Denominación de Origen from Spain, for example). A good cheesemonger should be willing to give you a taste of any cheese you want, and be willing to cut to any size you’d like. Buy in small quantities that you expect to use in a few days; soft cheeses go bad quickly, hard cheeses can become too hard to eat out of hand, and all cheeses are prone to absorbing other flavors in the fridge. Wrap your cheese in waxed paper to give it some room to breathe, then plastic wrap to keep off flavors out. Shredded or grated cheese is halfway to stale when you buy it, and any cheese can be dismantled quickly with the use of a good box grater.

9. Sauce. I’m not suggesting that you whip up a hollandaise every time you poach an egg or steam some asparagus, but any time you sear meat in a pan, you’re halfway to a pan sauce. Deglaze the pan with some wine, beer, chicken stock, or chicken broth, then return to the pan to the heat and simmer most of the liquid away, scraping the pan bottom to dissolve the brown bits (known as fond) into the liquid as it thickens. Boost the sauce with a little cognac, some chopped shallot, some Dijon mustard, and chopped fresh herbs (or a pinch of dried); you can add a few tablespoons of heavy cream if you’d like, or even full-fat coconut milk. Remove from the heat and mount it with two tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes, and season with salt and pepper. I’ve also shown you how easy it is to make a beurre blanc, which is great on fish, white-meat chicken, and many vegetables. Hoisin is one of the few jarred sauces I’ll use, but you can build a simple pseudo-Asian sauce with soy sauce, honey, a pinch of dried chili flakes, some cornstarch dissolved in water (which will thicken the sauce when heated, so add this to the pan with the vegetables still in it), and a shot of toasted sesame oil right before serving. You can get a lot of extra mileage out of a simple dish like sear-roasted fish or steamed broccoli by saucing it properly.

10. Play with your food. I know it’s trite advice, but it’s true. You may not feel up to experimenting right away, but there are little things even the novice cook can do, like altering or adding herbs and/or spices to dishes, or adding extra flavors when the food is off the heat, like the toasted sesame oil I mentioned above or some toasted sesame seeds, or a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, or some slivered toasted almonds or ground peanuts. There are, unfortunately, some bad combinations of foods, but it won’t take you long to understand what foods play nicely together to encourage you to experiment more, until you get to the point where you can devise your own recipes from scratch or recreate something you ate in a restaurant just by figuring out the ingredients as you eat it.

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