I want to teach YOU how to make vegetables taste good, so I put my very best veggie-cooking tips into my new free cooking training: Make All Vegetables Delicious. Packed with video lessons, cheat sheets, and cooking charts, this master class will take your veggie-cooking skills to pro-chef levels, and you will actually LOVE the vegetables on your plate.
Why you’re NOT doing the best you can with what you’ve got
When it comes to flavor, there are two primary factors: 1) What we have, and 2) what we do with it. We may have a pantry full of goodies, but if we don’t know how to use them — or better yet, how to enhance them — then what good are they?
Eleven 5-minute Cooking Lessons to Up Your Cooking Game
For a while there I was posting mini cooking lessons on Instagram, but people who read my site here weren’t seeing them in IG. In an effort to keep everything educational in one place, I’ve copied my best quickie cooking lessons over here as well. These are super short, bite-sized cooking tips that will change the way you cook if you put the concept into practice. Never underestimate the power of a simple change when it’s implemented regularly.
This is why most of your sweets fail
Every time I make this cake, people raise an eyebrow at the addition of oats. They don’t consider them a dessert ingredient outside of oatmeal cookies. That’s too bad, because when tossed with butter and honey, then toasted, oats take on a super crispy, crunchy texture that’s missing from the vast majority of the desserts I’m served. The lesson here? There are two:
The Fearless Cooking Club Is Here!
The Fearless Cooking Club is a video training program that includes tons of printable cooking charts and a 24-7 cooking support community. New modules with 10-20 videos and cheat sheets are released every single month. The FCC contains everything I wished I had when I wanted to learn to cook, and again wished for when I was determined to up my cooking game. Instead I had to go to culinary school. Now I’ve put all of my knowledge into the FCC, just for you. Basically, I’m going to turn you into a ninja cook. You’ll have me by your side, personally, every step of the way.
The Last Few Weeks of Winter
We’re in the homestretch of winter, inching into what looks to be a dreary spring time that will hopefully yield a profusion of flowers and produce come summertime. As someone who suffers from seasonal depression (AKA Seasonal Affective Disorder ) this time of year is especially tough for me. ??
Flavor Factors: Time as an Ingredient
This is my favorite pizza, a pizza Margherita. It’s seriously one of the most delicious things in the world. Look closely and you’ll notice there are really only three ingredients besides the crust: tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, and basil. How can three ingredients bring so much flavor?
Cooking as Ephemeral Art
This shot is from the photo shoot of my cookbook, Melt: the Art of Macaroni and Cheese. Me looking over proofs shot by Matt Armendariz and styled by Adam Pearson. It’s a week I go back to in my head often — I dream of having a studio filled with dishes and fabrics, but more important, I miss the energy of that week: a handful of passionate people working together to cook, style, shoot, and eat. Creating art and then immediately letting it go.
Flavor Factors: Pickled Vegetables
An easy way to cut through all of that fat and salt is… a huge pile of pickled carrots, daikon, and cabbage. Plus a creamy cilantro dressing with lots of green flavor, a fluffy cloud of cilantro greens, and an extra lime wedge to push it over the top and into #flavortown.
Flavor Factors: The Two Most Important Things
Ok, let’s talk salt and acid… two of the most important tools in your cooking arsenal. They bring simple ingredient to life. They transform any dish from “meh” to “WOW.” This dish, a basic red-braised pork from the cookbook Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees, is a perfect example. It’s flavor profile comes primarily from shaoxing rice wine (acid) and two kinds of soy sauce (salt + #umami). And of course, slow cooking — which is a HUGE flavor factor in and of itself.