Cooking Tips
I love to cook, but I am the first to tell you I’m no expert. Fortunately, I know where to go for expert advice, tips, and tricks.
You’ll find some of the best cookbooks and cooking magazines available here. If you want a peek into the life of a professional chef, check out my Chef Interviews.
Not only will you learn a bit about what it’s like to work in a restaurant, but most of the chefs I’ve interviewed have generously offered some pro tips that home cooks will find helpful.
If you’re going to be a good cook, it helps to know the language. To that end, you’ll find a good glossary of culinary terms and techniques, information on measurement conversions, ingredient substitutions, photography tips for the budding blogger (I’m still learning), and helpful cooking videos.
Conversions
Here's where you'll find my collection of conversions to help you with your daily cooking. You'll find conversions for grains, herbs, spices, pasta, ingredients, beans, tomatoes, and more.
Tips & Food Facts
This is a catch-all category, but one thing all of these articles have in common is that they all give insight into particular cooking challenges that can help us all become better, more efficient cooks. From how many ways to use a pizza cutter to setting a romantic table setting to how to clarify butter, many of these articles were inspired by readers’ questions.
Chef Interviews
Learn how to cook from professional chefs. - I have always been curious about what it must be like to be a professional chef. Whether they are a famous TV Celebrity chef or the owner of a small restaurant in a small town in the middle of the country, they all have extensive knowledge I can learn from. So I decided to send a few chefs I've met or found on the internet some questions in the form of a chef interview, and their responses were outstanding. These chef interviews give you a glimpse into their worlds and offer numerous tips that can help home cooks to be better cooks.
Ask a Chef
Many of you send me questions about your cooking at home, and although I try to answer what I can, I often have to refer to one of my chef friends for a better answer. This page will highlight some of the questions I get from you and the answers I receive from the chefs. Here are some of the questions and answers I've received.
Cooking Mistakes & How to Avoid
Here's where you will find a collection of cooking tips and fun food facts I've been posting over the years. You will find them both informative and useful, and of course, I always like to hear from you with your tips.
Cooking Terms
This is a roundup of all the terms a novice home cook should know but might not. From ingredient components like bouquet garnis and gremolata to cooking techniques such as resting and mise en place, learn the terms--and their meanings--so you can hold your own both in the kitchen and at your next foodie gathering.
Cooking Videos
If a picture is worth 1000 words, a video is worth 100,000. When I need to learn how to perform a cooking technique, I spend a lot of time reading about it, but if I find a video, I find that any questions I might have during my reading are answered just by watching. Here is a collection of videos I found particularly useful in learning cooking techniques. I’ll be adding to them as I find more. I hope you find them useful.
Photography
The more I write about cooking, and the more cookbooks, cooking magazines, and food blogs I read, the more I realize that good photographs can make or break a recipe or recipe post. We eat with our eyes first, so it pays to take the best pictures I can. As I learn more about photography, I’ll post it here so that all the information is in one place.
Restaurants
I only write about a few restaurants; when I do, I only write about restaurants I enjoy. I'm hoping that now that the kids are getting older, Meg & I can get out more often to try new restaurants here in Philadelphia and the suburbs. So, over time, I expect this section of the site to grow substantially.
