Enjoy Your Cooking

The keys to enjoying cooking are as following:

• Buy quality ingredients.
  
• Avoid firm commitments for a specific time later: sometimes a sandwich turns into a 3 hour stock-making project.
  
• Start with a clean kitchen and an empty sink.
• You need 1 good, sharp chefs knife. You can make do without every other kitchen gadget, but don't use a shitty knife. If you have never heard the phrase "Forged, full-tang", there is a good chance you are using a shitty knife.
  
• Mise en place - even if that place is in the back of the fridge.
• Never be a slave to a recipe book. Think about your professors' lecture on plagiarism: the way to write the 5-page paper is to read all your sources, put them away, and then start writing.
• Taste early and often. Seasoning is a tricky thing.
  
• Do not skimp on butter. It is the secret behind 75% of all the things you have ever eaten and said: "Wow, that is delicious"!
• Clean while you cook. You will enjoy the whole experience more if you don't have a lot to clean afterwords. Thanks to my Dad for teaching me this one at an early age.
• Often, making a dish extraordinary is not that much more work but people skip because, its some extra work. Yes, the dish would be fine with regular onions, but its not that hard to use shallots - why not go the extra mile? Thanks to my friend Markus for teaching me this one.
  
• Don't overlook presentation, even if you are going to devour it by yourself while standing at the kitchen counter. A little garnish can do a whole lot for your own personal happiness.
• Eat without expectation. Taste your creation for what it really is, not what you thought it would/should be.
• Share.

Joke of the Day: A guy goes to the doctor with some serious problems. After a few minutes of the doctor examining the man, the doctor says, "Sir, you are going to have to stop engaging in...um...self love." The patient replies, "Why doctor?" to which the doctor says, "Well sir, because im examining you right now."