I am a control freak.
I think most good chefs are. Leaving things to chance is how you get in trouble in the kitchen- so I’m an avid organizer, chronic double checker and maniacal listmaker.
But food is funny about control. I am not a machine that orders chemically processed and manipulated items into submission. The best ingredients we all cook with are fluid, not static. They come from the land, sky, soil and sea. As much as we understand the science behind nature, it’s important to remember its unpredictability.
And that, your honor, is the case for the defense.
Perfect food presentation is my Achilles heel. I fantasize about serving scrumptious morsels of food that no one wants to touch – let alone eat- because they are just so beautiful. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen with my inner critic (I call her Martha, for pretty obvious reasons) telling me I’m not good enough.
. 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
Where I live, it is very, very cold. There are icicles on the trees, cars must be started at least 10 minutes before one actually wishes to make the first foray of the day, and everyone has boots with tread, a shovel, and backup pair of gloves. This morning, sidewalks and streets were covered with a sheet of ice, and we semi-seriously contemplated getting to church by sliding down the hill from our house. (Not that my life is all that Norma Rockwell-ian, but we actually do live at the top of a hill, and our church is more or less at the foot of said hill).
Now, I generally steer clear of plastic cooking tools that look like the crap sold on tv at 3:00 am. It dices! It slices! Hey, guess what? I do too! But a client of mine had ripped a page from her Williams Sonoma catalog with a picture of a vegetable extruder and I was intrigued. I did some investigating and found one a little cheaper on Amazon made by Bitoni with the magic words… lifetime replacement warranty. Now we’re talkin’.
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.