In my opinion a great gift for the little one is a wire push type egg beater. No, it’s not too early to get that little one comfortable with kitchen chores. I say chores because if you strip away all the baggage of cooking “celebrity” and gourmandise what’s left is the truth that knowing your way around the daily work of the kitchen is a big part of a satisfying personal life.
Learning how to cook at a young age is like learning how to drive. The younger you are when you begin the learning process the more ingrained and effortless the moves will be as you mature. I use myself as an example. I don’t even remember being taught by my mother. A woman, by the way, who wasn’t by any measure a great cook. However, she did get dinner on the table every single night of my childhood with very few exceptions. So I learned the moves incrementally, effortlessly and naturally.
It started with pot banging. Raised in a household where a “toy” was anything that would entertain me, I was encouraged to open the doors to the lower cupboard that held the pots, drag them out and bang on them with a wooden spoon made available to me for this purpose. I don’t imagine mom understood that she was making a cook. She was just trying to give me something to do where she could watch me while she made dinner.
If you buy shell on shrimp or fresh shrimp with heads and shell you can make shrimp broth. It’s a very useful frozen pantry item to have for making risotto, fish soup or infusing a seafood pasta, or pan sauce with more flavor. And it only takes a half hour to make. In fact I never actually set out to make shrimp broth, it’s always a by-product of peeling shrimp for another dish, so it’s important to be flexible about what to put in the pot along with the peels in order to end up with a flavorful result.
I LOVE risotto. It's one of the many things I had never eaten before I moved to California. Never even heard of it in my two decades of growing up in Western Massachusetts. I know that seems hard to believe,
but I made my parents risotto when they came out to visit 5 years ago
and they had no idea what it was. Seriously. Italian food growing up
was lasagna, pasta with red sauce or pizza. I can't remember the first
risotto I ever ate, but I know I was instantly hooked because it's the
dish I always order whenever I see it on the menu...or hear it as the
special. I just can't help myself. I love the creamy, chewy consistency
of it, the homeyness, the endless possibilities. It's a dish I make at
least 3-4 times a month, as it's fairly simple and hard to screw up. Or
so I thought. Apparently, I've been serving it all wrong.
Let me be unequivocal here: I hate my clay pot.
", and a couple of chefs from Spain – Ferran Adrià's "El Bulli Volumes 2003-2004", and Joan Roca's "Sous Vide". It sounded like a good idea at the time – assembling courtesy of Amazon.com the modern greats for a holiday feast using the latest sci-fi techniques of sous vide (cooking food in a vacuum packed pouch) – and then having at it. 
What these chefs failed to take into account – and the cause of their ire – was that I now see I don't possess any of the tools required to cook any of their recipes. They want to know why they are in my kitchen. I don't have a Polyscience Minipack-torre Model MVS31 Vacuum Sealer ($2025.00), a 8306C Model Thermal Circulating Bath ($1799.00), or even a functional spatula. I do have, however, from a previously deranged buying spree –