I was never a fan of the omelette until I tried the one at Petit Trois, Chef Ludo Levebvre’s LA-based French bistro. It is quite rich and intense - thanks to a very generous helping of Black Pepper Boursin cheese - yet light and creamy, just melting in your mouth. What other cooks call an omelette is just a dry, tasteless, overcooked travesty compared to this version. It is a simple plate of food perfectly crafted each and every time. Chef Ludo has exacting standards in the kitchen and he expects his cooks to make it the same, classic way plate after plate.
We aren’t overly talented in our kitchen, so we figured this dish would be relegated to our sporadic visits to the restaurant. Lucky for all of us, in his new video series, Ludo à la Maison, he shares the recipe and shows you how it’s done. Now you don’t have to live in LA to enjoy the Perfect French Omelette. The Boursin is a must - though thankfully widely available and inexpensive - and most kitchens should readily have the other ingredients on hand - butter, eggs, salt, pepper and chives. Only six ingredients. Totally easy, right?
After watching the video a few times - he talks you through it, but it’s still sort of freeform - we gave it a try and did, for two amateur cooks, a pretty good job. Yes, it took two of us. There were some tense moments in the middle when it looked like it was too wet and was going to color before it set, but we managed to keep it from browning (a super big no-no) and properly wrapped it. While not perfectly pretty, it disappeared from our plate as quickly as the true version does. Success!
I hate 3:00 p.m. on a school day. It means I’m a failure. Once
again, I’ve failed to come up with a “healthy snack” for my ravenous
Varsity Cheerleader. Our routine was to just go over to Chipotle which
wasn’t really great because those burritos, even though they were
pretty clean, would stuff her until around 5:30, at which time, I’ve
lost the will to live because I’m tired and I don’t want to come up
with any kind of dinner, so she’s left to forage which makes me feel
like an even worse failure. 
I think I'm taking this cooking business a little more seriously than I thought I would. You may not actually call it cooking. It's more Sandra Lee than, say, Ina Garten. But I think I am truly more Sandra Lee than Ina Garten. In the days when my kids were actually kids, I got a meal on the table every night. Sometimes I did a complicated dish, but mainly it was throw together. And they loved it. To this day, when asked, any of the three of them will point to my tuna casserole as the finest of meals.
. Peter and I took a basic cooking class right before we got married, and on the first day we both accidentally sliced our hands open and had to wear giant Band-aids. At the end of the class series, we got a little gift certificate to Surfas restaurant supply, and we bought the lemon zester, and now when I use it I think about how hard we laughed when we both sustained consecutive ridiculous kitchen injuries on Day One of cooking school. It was pretty embarrassing; no one else in the class shed a drop of blood the whole time. — Emily Fox 
, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love how you never ever get dull - never and when you do (about 1 or 2 times a year) I send you off to some strange little shop in Irvine along with $10 and you come back resharpened with all the nicks honed out. I love how you can slice a garlic clove as thin as Ray Liotta was able to in that great jail cell scene in Goodfellas. I love how I can cut perfect geometric squares out of diamond hard celeriac. But most of all I love how easy you make every single cutting job known to man. You, my black Kyocera vegetable cleaver, are even more dear to me than my 33-year-old ginsu knife. — Paul Mones
I would personally like to kiss the ring of the genius who thought of the 
. No longer do I have to execute a Grand Plié every time I need an exact 2/3 - cup liquid. Now, you just pour, look down into the cup from a standing position and watch the liquid rise to the desired line. A revelation. — Katherine Reback
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.