Fried Eggs

dishes. If you don’t want to grow your own, most grocery stores stock a variety of fresh herbs.

And here’s another trick. Don’t toss the root ends when you chop scallions. Stick them into a shot glass full of water on the kitchen counter. They will grow three or four times, and for weeks you’ll have fresh scallions at your fingertips for the price of one bunch! Sprinkling chopped scallions on top of a dish immediately gives it a boost of color and a pop of flavor.

I’m a big fan of mise en place. For the uninitiated, “mise en place” is a French term that means “put in place” or “everything in its place.” In cooking or baking it refers to assembling your ingredients before you even turn on the stove. It’s good practice to gather, measure, and prep (chop, peel, slice, etc.) all your ingredients before you start cooking, using condiment dishes, measuring cups and spoons, and so forth. This is important for two reasons. First, you will know you have all the ingredients you need for the recipe before you get started (or can look for substitutions for those ingredients you don’t have!). There’s nothing worse than getting halfway through a recipe and realizing that you don’t have a critical ingredient. Second, when you get to the end of the recipe, you will know by your empty prep containers that you’ve added the correct amount of each ingredient and haven’t missed a step! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered if I’ve already whisked the salt into the flour—for example, as I’m pouring it into my cake batter.

Speaking of cake batter, when measuring flour for a recipe you’re baking, weighing your flour is the most accurate way to be sure you’re using consistent amounts. But short of that (I’ll admit that while I have a kitchen scale, I almost never use it), spooning the flour into your measuring cup—instead of scooping out the flour with the cup, which can pack it more tightly—and then leveling it off with a butter knife or chopstick is going to net you the most accurate measure.

When I bake, I use my stand mixer 99 percent of the time, so that’s what I’ve used for the recipes in this book. If you don’t have a stand mixer, you can use a hand mixer in all of the recipes. My mom always used a hand mixer and would give my brother and me each a beater to lick when she was done mixing cake or cookie batter. I wonder what

mothers do these days. Let the kids fight over the lone paddle of a stand mixer? Or maybe eating raw cookie dough has gone the way of riding a bicycle without a helmet or drinking out of a garden hose.

One final note: Despite the times listed for the recipes in this book, a cook or baker needs to recognize that a dish is done when it’s done. Learning what dishes should look, feel, and smell like is a far more valuable skill than being able to set a timer and walk away. A famous chef once said he hated being asked when a dish is done. “It’s done when it’s done” was his reply. Sage advice that does, however, take practice.

EGG SAFETY

Before we start cooking, I need to address egg safety. You likely have heard that raising chickens or eating raw eggs can lead to salmonella poisoning. Although fairly rare, this is the most common egg-related illness, and some eggs can—and do—contain salmonella, which passes from an infected hen to her eggs. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), approximately one in every twenty thousand eggs could be contaminated with the bacteria.1 Salmonella poisoning is a very real illness, which in an otherwise healthy individual might manifest as little more than a bad case of food poisoning that causes stomach upset and diarrhea, but it can be serious for the very young, the elderly, pregnant women, or those with compromised immune systems.

Some of the recipes in this book do call for uncooked or partially cooked eggs. Those with compromised immune systems or those who are concerned about food poisoning

1. Eric Ebel and Wayne Schlosser, “Estimating the Annual Fraction of Eggs Contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis in the United States,” International Journal of Food Microbiology 61, no. 1 (October 2000): 51–62, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168–1605(00)00375–5.