Cooking Techniques and Kitchen Gadgets

During my first fall as a single person, I started eating fried fish for dinner a few nights a week. I cooked it with ingredients I bought at M2M, a Korean bodega across the street from my apartment building in the East Village. M2M sold three types of fish: salmon, sole, and basa. The salmon was bright orange and fat, the sole was thin and yellow with odd raised bumps like pores, and the basa was light pink and smooth-fleshed. I have a bourgeois distaste for salmon stemming from a childhood vacation to France where it had was served at nearly every meal, and I feared the wan, pebbly sole. So I always bought the basa, despite the fact that before moving across the street from M2M I had never heard of this fish.

Each package of basa contained two fillets; when I cooked dinner for myself, I used only one, leaving the other piece in its yellow Styrofoam tray and covering it with cellophane wrap to spend another night in the refrigerator. I rinsed the basa fillet under the water, sometimes squeezing the juice of half of a lemon onto the slippery flesh. Then I traced the seam that ran down the center of the fillet with my small ceramic knife and divided the fillet in two parts. There were no bones. I cut each of the twin pieces into smaller chunks, then broke an egg into a bowls and beat it. In another bowl I mixed together equal parts flour and cornmeal with half-teaspoons of black pepper and oregano and a pinch of salt. I dropped the pieces of fish into the beaten egg, rinsed them around with the fingers of my left hand, and then dropped them into the flour mixture. I tossed them in the flour with the fingers of my right hand.

I had the world's strangest roommate. We were best friends in college and she seemed like  the perfect person to live with. She was a great listener, she was obsessed with Clive Owen and her purse was always stocked with remedies to just about anything – creams, lotions, pills, even powders. Everything was going great, until one day, it just wasn't. Her once mild room-dancing had started to rival the sound of a herd of elephants, her attempts to match our outfits had turned from sort of cute to sort of single-white-female (except that she's five feet tall and Asian) and she had invited her new best friend to come live with us for a month, without consulting me. She finally decided to move out, taking her friend with her. And they went amicably enough.

I came home with my friend Amanda that night to cook dinner, so excited to have the place to ourselves. We skipped around the apartment, lay down on the floor of the now empty second room and made our way into the kitchen to create a culinary masterpiece to celebrate our freedom. That's when we found out that she'd decided to take all of our utensils with her. Every last one, except . . . my dainty, little, silver cake knife.

From the Huffington Post

The flame war between charcoal grill purists and gas grill hotheads burns brighter than the debate between Mac and PC users. You should read some of the slop slung on the barbecue message boards. On second thought, don't. Let me try to sort it out for you with a few inflammatory thoughts.

Grills are used mostly for three types of cooking:

1) High heat direct radiation cooking when the food is placed directly above the heat source for things like steaks.

2) Indirect heat convection roasting for things like whole chickens and roasts when the heat source is off to the side and the food cooks by warm air circulating around it.

3) Indirect heat smoke roasting for things like ribs when the warm air is heavy with flavorful hardwood smoke.

Let's see how each fuel performs at these tasks and all the other factors.

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I am a Toaster Oven Top Chef. I’m by no means a professional like the wunderkinder you see on Bravo’s reality TV cooking showdown. I don’t have a fully stocked kitchen. I only own four knives. And although technically my kitchen has a real oven, it’s so marred with unidentifiable char no amount of Easy Off cleaning products could restore it to a serviceable condition. What I do have is the heart of a champion, and the spirit of a competitor.

My cooking challenges may not be as fancy as Bravo’s “Cook the Last Meal of a Master of the Culinary World” or “Imitate the Delicate Flavors of a Fish Dish from Le Bernardin” (though I did enjoy the episode when the Top Chefs had to cook a holiday meal using only a convection oven—been there) but they are very real. It’s the end of the week and your grocery supply is dwindling. All you have are 3 eggs, wonton wrappers, the stale end of a sourdough baguette, 1/3 cup shredded cheddar, frozen soy sausage, spices, olive oil, and a tomato. Okay. Go.