On a few things I've learned over the years.

I feel like babbling today. So I'm going to just rattle off a couple of tricks that I've picked up cooking and hope that some of them will be useful to you.

1. Wash your damn hands.

2. While you're at it, use your hands more. There is no tool in the kitchen as versatile as the ones at the end of your arms. They can smash, scrape, stir, fold, peel, and form. Get in there and play with your food.

3. Sure, you could put a towel under a bowl, pull out a whisk, blend vinegar with mustard and seasoning and spices and carefully drizzle oil while whisking constantly to build a properly emulsified salad dressing, or you could just put all that shit into something with a screw-top and shake it like a British nanny.

4. Just use a bigger cutting board, man. C'mon.

5. Why buy tupperware when you can just order too much soup from a Chinese place?

6. Onions make you cry because the sulfur you release into the air when you break their cell walls is mixing with the moisture in your eyes to make sulfuric acid. If you have four onions to chop and you do them one at a time, you're going to be sobbing uncontrollably by Onion #3. Halve and peel all the onions. Then score all the onions. Then chop all the onions.

7. Get a bunch of very, very large bowls. Nothing's sadder than trying to mix something in a bowl too small for the job. You wind up being too gentle to mix properly and shit winds up spilling over the edges anyway. At most, the material inside the bowl should be around half the carrying capacity of said bowl.

8. Get a tablespoon, a teaspoon, and a half-teaspoon. Measure out salt in each, then dump it in the palm of your hand. See how it looks, how it feels. Do that every time you measure spices. After a while, you'll be able to freehand measurements.

9. If you have two cast iron skillets, you have a panini press. You also might have one too many cast iron skillets.

10. Save the waxy butter wrappers in a zip-top bag in the freezer. They're shockingly useful when it comes to greasing pans.

11. If you keep your cooking oil in a squeeze bottle, you'll save yourself the trouble of brushing oil onto crostini or glopping too much into a frying pan. What's that? You don't have a squeeze bottle? How about one of those fifty thousand water bottles you picked up from all the 5Ks you've run and expos you've gone to for work?

12. Do you have a food processor or a blender? Then stop buying hummus, you dumbass.

13. Mise en place, motherfucker. Learn it. Love it.

14. Bacon makes everything better because it drowns out all other flavors and replaces them with bacon. Take it easy there, cowboy.

15. Everything is more flavorful than water.

16. Taste as you go. Don't just wait until you get to the finish line to discover you've created a hot steaming bowl of shit.

17. Use thermal mugs for soup. Or hollandaise. You get the extra bonus of surprising the fuck out of whoever tries to steal a sip of your coffee.

18. If you drop something in the kitchen, don't try to ninja-catch it. Either it's really sharp or really hot (or both!) and you're only going to severely wound yourself, or you'll fumble it and make the mess that much worse. Just step back. Caveat: kicksaves are acceptable when it's glassware.

19. Don't try to grab anything hot with a wet towel.

20. If you fill a jar halfway with milk and shake it until it doubles in volume, then drop it in the microwave until it hits around 155F, you can mimic steamed milk. Think about that the next time you're thinking of springing $3 for a cafe au lait.

21. Acidic things like vinegar and tomatoes will dissolve aluminum over time. It is less dramatic than it sounds, but it is exactly as gross.

22. The more moving parts a kitchen tool has, the less useful it will be in terms of multitasking. Also, the more pain in the dick it will be to clean.

23. Be aware of what the stuff around your kitchen actually is. Your salad spinner is a colander and a bowl. Your 8oz. coffee mug is a measuring cup. Your shot glass is two tablespoons. Your high-end rotary foamer is a weak paperweight. Your dog is a mop.

24. If you double-wrap your sheet pans in foil, you'll never have to clean them again.

25. Macerated fruit and sweetened whipped cream in a martini glass is an easy dessert for a dinner party that is also classy as fuck. Don't forget to put a sprig of mint on that shit. 'Cause garnish is real, son.

26. Store leftover guacamole in zip-top bags. It's crazy easy to keep properly deoxygenated.

27. Just toss your stale bread into the freezer. You can toast it off and make bread crumbs out of it later. And then you can look back on how much you've spent on bread crumbs in the past and weep.

28. Every time you open your oven door, you're losing like 100 degrees. Turn on the goddamn light and look in the window like a civilized human being, you ass.

29. Cutting a whole lot of shit over an extended period of time is like driving. It feels monotonous, and you want to distract yourself by having a conversation or letting your eyes wander. But the instant you stop concentrating, boom, there's blood everywhere and everybody's screaming. Pay attention to what you're doing.

30. When you love what you do and take pride in your work, it shows in the final product. Don't just treat cooking as something you have to do because you'll die if you don't eat. Treat it with love and respect, and it'll pay you back every day of your life.

All right, guys. This seems like a good place for me to stop for now. Take it easy.


Oh, hey. Bonus tip: When in doubt, put an egg on it.