How to Cut Up and Prepare a Pineapple

Today I'm going to share a convenient and easy technique you can use to slice up and prepare a pineapple.

This is a particularly timely subject for us here at Casual Kitchen because we're planning to spend a meaningful portion of the coming year in Hawaii. And during my stay there, I fully intend to eat so much pineapple that I actually get sick of this healthy, antioxidant-rich, and surprisingly inexpensive fruit.

Unfortunately the instructions (if any) that come with a typical store-bought pineapple tend to be cryptic and with little detail. But it's actually fairly easy to deal with this fruit, and after today's post--and a little practice--you too will be able to reduce a pineapple to a pile of delicious, bite-sized chunks in short order and with little mess.

Let's get started!

First, start by cutting of the top of the pineapple.

Then hack off the bottom with a clean and straight cut, so our topless and bottomless pineapple will be stable can stand up firmly on its own.

Now it's time to remove the outer husk. Make your first cut down the side of the pineapple, cutting away the outer skin. You have to cut in far enough to remove the "eyes" of the pineapple, but not so far in that you waste too much of the fruit.

Continue to work your way around the sides of the pineapple, letting the pieces of the outer husk pile up on the side of the cutting board.

After you're down to the bare, huskless pineapple, clear up your workspace a bit and get rid of all the detritus. We're about to get to the really fun part.

Pick a place about 1/2 an inch away from the core and make one cut straight down the entire pineapple:
Then follow it up with three more perpendicular slices around that core:



















We're almost done! Now you'll have four pineapple slabs of varying sizes laying about your cutting board. Lay each one flat-side-down and make cuts lengthwise....


And then cut them crosswise to make cubes of whatever size you prefer.

Repeat this with the other three slabs of pineapple and you're finished! Pile them up on a platter, take a photograph, and then dig in and enjoy.


Related Posts:
Eat Right to See Right: Foods for Better Eye Health
The Cutting Board Debate: Wood or Plastic?
Tapas-Style Potato Chips

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! Another way you can support me is by submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

The Rice Cooker: Addendum

A few extra (and scattered) thoughts on the merits of owning a rice cooker occurred to me since my initial post on the subject:

1) Different Grains
Rice cookers enable you to cook any kind or rice and still be certain that the rice will come out well. Thus you can try more dainty types of rice that might not hold up quite as well in a pan. Imagine, instead of making plain old run of the mill rice, what about beginning a regular habit of trying different rice varieties? You could try extra-fragrant rice varieties such as basmati or jasmine rice, or try the thick starchy goodness of arborio rice. Any of these rice types can be cooked in a rice cooker without difficulty.

2) Would You Like Your Rice Al Dente?
You can also make any type of rice "softer" or "harder" in texture by modifying slightly the amount of water you add to the pan. Do you prefer your rice a bit al dente? Just fill the rice cooker with water to a bit below the appropriate numbered line. Do you prefer your rice a bit mushier and softer? Fill it a bit above the line.

After you've made your fair share of batches of rice with your new rice cooker, you'll be well on your way to becoming a rice epicure.

3) Rice and Diet
A quick follow up thought on using rice to stretch out meals. Last time, we talked about how many of our favorite recipes, like Groundnut Stew and Crockpot Chili, could be served on top of rice. This extra serving of rice was a great way to stretch out meals as much as 30% or more, making meals all the more laughably cheap and letting us cook a little less often. The problem is, if you're the type of person who eats 30% more food at every meal as a result of using a rice cooker, all of my savings assumptions obviously collapse in a heap of pure white carbs. White rice is not necessarily a healthy food when eaten to excess.

4) An Irrelevant Comment on Outsourcing
Back when I got my rice cooker, the consensus opinion was that you had to get a Japanese-made rice cooker. Amusingly, even my Chinese classmates had Japanese rice cookers and viewed them as superior and much more reliable.

Now, of course, all of the Japanese rice cooker makers outsource their manufacturing to China. So I suppose these distinctions are meaningless now.

But I think I can still safely say my rice cooker, which was a college graduation gift dating back more than 17 years ago, turned out to be the most reliable item in the entire history of our kitchen. It's paid for itself dozens of times over.

Now that's a worthwhile kitchen tool.




* Full disclosure: if you enter Amazon via a link on my blog and buy something, I'll get a small commission on that purchase. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support.

What's the Most Heavily Used Tool in Our Kitchen? Our Rice Cooker.

It's about time I wrote about the most heavily used tool in our entire kitchen: our rice cooker.

If you don't already own one of these, consider getting one. Rice cookers are 100% idiot-proof, and making rice with them is such a snap that you'll want to have rice with practically every meal.

Have you ever bungled a batch of rice made in a pan, or worse, suffered through eating a batch of Uncle Ben's? With a rice cooker, there's absolutely no risk of having the rice come out poorly: just dump in a measured amount of rice (they even give you a little plastic measuring cup) and then fill the dish with the corresponding amount of water.

And there's no need to watch the clock either--the rice cooker will shut itself off automatically when the rice is ready. Flick the switch, go do something else, and before you know it, you'll have perfect, delicious rice waiting for you.

Parallel Processing
The rice cooker is also a great tool for multitasking. Fire it up and you've just bought yourself 20 minutes of time to work on other food prep. That's parallel processing at its best and it can make you a faster, more efficient cook. In fact, my Chicken Mole recipe, once you get the hang of it, can be made in exactly the amount of time it takes to fire up a batch of rice in your rice cooker. That can't be just a coincidence--it has to be fate.

Here's yet another advantage: if you have leftover rice after a meal, not to worry. The rice cooker pan is a perfect storage container. Just put the lid back on and put the whole thing in your fridge. You won't have any extra storage containers to wash, and you can use the remaining day-old rice for a quick mini-batch of fried rice.

A Laughably Cheap and Easy Side Dish
How about using your rice cooker for a mindlessly easy side dish? Flavor the rice with some cayenne pepper and a bouillon cube or two, or try a little olive oil, a couple of pressed garlic cloves and 1/2 teaspoon of coarsely ground black pepper. Just drop your spices into the rice cooker along with the rice and water, and in just 20 minutes, you'll have delicious side dish with almost no effort.

What to Buy
What's the best kind of rice cooker to buy? My advice is the same as I give for crockpots: go for simple. If you see a rice cooker with fancy dials and knobs and all sorts of settings, put it down and slowly back away. Instead, get the kind with exactly one switch that lets you choose between on, off and warm. I've linked to a good example of such a rice cooker below.

Retailers always offer an overly-complicated version of even the simplest tool in order to capture the so-called high end customer. Avoid the $183 computerized rice neuralizer, and stick with the $29 simple version* that actually won't break. Don't get needlessly separated from your money.

Even after the recent price increases we've seen across many foods, rice remains an inexpensive staple that complements almost any dish. And eating rice with your meals can be a meaningful money-saver. Here at Casual Kitchen for example, we eat many of our favorite laughably cheap recipes like Groundnut Stew, Crockpot Chili or Garden Gumbo on top of an extra serving of rice. Doing this helps us get at least 30% more mileage out of the typical meal. Not only do many of our recipes go from being laughably cheap to being preposterously cheap, we get an extra side benefit of not having to cook quite as often!

Thus, a $29 rice cooker can bring you and your family some compelling economic benefits. Those extra servings leave you with more food for other meals, extra leftovers to bring to work for lunch, and of course more money saved at the grocery store. Under my "30% more mileage" assumption above, just a month or two of regular use should be enough to recover the full cost of a reasonably priced rice cooker.

So if you don't own a rice cooker already, consider getting one! Make this tool one of your critical few.

Related Posts:
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
How to Make Fried Rice
How to Make a Mole Sauce: Intense, Exotic and Surprisingly Easy to Make
Eight Tips to Make Cooking At Home Laughably Cheap: The Economics of Cooking, Part 2
The Rice Cooker: Addendum



* Full disclosure: if you enter Amazon via a link on my blog and buy something, I'll get a small commission on that purchase. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support.

Cooking Like the Stars? Don't Waste Your Money

Is celebrity chef branded cookware worth the extra money? This was the subject of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

The article raised two thought-provoking questions:

1) Is it worth it to pay up for a cookware set endorsed by celebrity chefs like Rachel Ray or Emeril Lagasse?
2) What do you really get for your money when you buy chef-branded cookware?

The surprising answers to these questions were 1) no, and 2) surprisingly little.

"A star endorsement doesn't mean stellar cookware."
The anecdotes from the article are depressing. The silicone handle on Rachel Ray's frying pan catches fire during a test use. Emeril Lagasse's 8-inch frying pan bends "like an accordion." And Marcus Samuelsson's 10-piece set, while of solid quality and design, retails for $500.

Tales like these make me want to crawl into my cupboard and hug my humble Revere cookware.

Neither I nor the WSJ mean to pick on these great celebrity chefs who collectively have done so much to bring great cooking to the masses. But let's be reasonable about the relative value of the products they hawk.

If you're trying to cook on a budget, or if you're trying to build out your kitchen at a reasonable cost, don't trip yourself up with a large capital outlay for overpriced cooking gear. And, most importantly, don't pay up for suspect merchandise. If you buy poor quality cookware, or pay too much for what you do buy, it can suck all the fun out of cooking for years.

Instead, stick to a basic but high-quality set of cooking gear that doesn't include extra branding and advertising costs. In our kitchen we've been overjoyed with the quality and durability of our reasonably priced Revere and T-Fall cookware, which we've been happily using for nearly two decades.

You don't need the stamp of approval from a celebrity chef to cook exceptional meals at home.

Related Posts:
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
When High-Fat Food ... Can Actually Be Healthy For You
The Crockpot: A Siren Call for Single People
How to Modify a Recipe

The Limping Dinner: Spicy Brown Rice

We usually keep a pretty disciplined household here at Casual Kitchen, and we make a point of eating home-cooked food most nights of the week. But there are days when the idea of cooking is just a little bit too much to bear. Coming up with a recipe to make, heading to the store to buy the ingredients you need, and then actually making the dish—it all just seems too monumental a task.

Last Saturday was one of those days for us.

So we made what we call a "limping dinner"--a laughably easy-to-make (and coincidentally, laughably cheap) meal that can be made with basic staples that you typically always keep on hand in your home. It's not a meal that's going to win any awards, but it is the kind of meal that will get you back on the couch, fueled up and feeling full, with an absolute minimum of effort.

Let’s face it: cooking isn’t always going to be an act of glorious personal expression. You will have occasional days when you just need to get some serviceable food into you and your family’s bodies as expediently as possible. Thus the ability to make a limping dinner, when necessary, is a valuable skill to add to your cooking arsenal.

Today I’ll share with you my recipe for Spicy Brown Rice, which (along with other preposterously easy-to-make dishes like Mock Wild Rice or Pasta with Ken’s) are typical limping dinner fare here at Casual Kitchen.

***************************
Spicy Brown Rice

Place in a medium sauce pan:
1 cup brown rice
2 1/4 cups water or vegetable stock
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil

Then add any (or all) of the following as your mood strikes you:
2 teaspoons of dried chives
cayenne pepper to taste
black pepper to taste
garlic powder, pressed garlic, or onion powder to taste
1 bouillon cube (optional)
dried oregano or dried basil leaves
Tabasco, to taste

Bring to a boil, cover, and turn down heat to low. Simmer for 45 minutes. Fluff with a fork and eat.

Feeds 2+; can be doubled easily.
************************
Two final thoughts:
1) Sure, brown rice might not be the most aesthetically pleasing dinner ever, but it is simple, healthy, and loaded with a surprisingly wide variety of nutrients.

2) Finally, it’s worth thinking about what kind of inventory of food staples you might like to keep in your home at all times so you can always feed yourself your own limping dinner when necessary. At Casual Kitchen, we generally keep potatoes, rice, brown rice, pasta and eggs in our kitchen at all times. Pasta, rice and brown rice have a nearly infinite shelf life; potatoes, onions and eggs will last for several weeks in your fridge.

Related Posts:
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings
Mock Wild Rice: An Insanely Easy To Make Side Dish
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating
Top Ten Most Popular Posts of Casual Kitchen

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs

One of the best foods to start off a high energy day is the humble egg. And on many mornings at Casual Kitchen, we regularly boil up one or two eggs apiece for a quick, efficient and energy-dense breakfast.

The only problem is you can only eat eggs prepared the same way for so many days in a row before you start to feel like Cool Hand Luke (remember the scene where Paul Newman eats fifty boiled eggs in one hour to settle a bet?).

My goal with today's post is to bring you seven quick and easy egg-jazzing suggestions, so you'll never get sick of eggs--one of nature’s most efficient foods.

One brief note before we get started: I want to go beyond too-obvious solutions like suggesting the various basic egg prep techniques (e.g.: sunnyside up, scrambled, over easy, etc). Rotating through basic egg prep techniques like this doesn't exactly qualify for “jazzing up” in my opinion, and in any event each of these techniques, if overused, can quickly get boring too. At the same time, I want to avoid highly complex solutions like egg frittatas or eggs Benedict that are outside the scope of what I’d call a quick and efficient meal.

Let’s begin:

1) Tabasco
Instead of seasoning your eggs with run-of-the-mill spices like salt and pepper, why not shake a generous splash or two of Tabasco sauce on them? You can do this with eggs prepared in almost any conceivable way, fried, boiled, scrambled, etc. It will add a little fire to your morning and can make a boring egg seem a lot more interesting. You can also try Chipotle Tabasco--or if you have a truly asbestos-lined mouth, Habanero Tabasco.

2) Creative Spices
But why stop with Tabasco? Consider even more creative and unusual spices for your eggs. How about adding a few shakes of ground paprika? Or sage and marjoram--or even nutmeg? What about a ground hot curry powder? Eggs can be a vehicle for any of these spices. Try a few and see what works for you.

3) Fried Eggs, Spanish Style
I learned this technique from the blog In Praise of Sardines: In a small nonstick frying pan, add 1/4 inch of olive oil (preferably extra virgin) to the pan, and heat the oil until almost smoking. Crack the egg into the pan, turn down the heat to medium, and using a spoon, baste the top of the egg with the hot oil.

Essentially you give the egg third degree burns from the top down, while it also cooks in the pan from the bottom up. Season with a little salt or black pepper, and serve on a piece of toasted bread. Delicious!

4) Master a New Way of Preparing Eggs
Everyone has a cooking comfort zone, even with a task as basic as preparing eggs. But part of the mission of Casual Kitchen is to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and learn new recipes, cuisines and cooking techniques. So how about mastering a technique for preparing eggs that’s outside of your comfort zone?

For example, I’ve always considered poached eggs to be way out of my comfort zone. But the other day I found a site containing instructions on how to poach an egg that made me realize that it’s not as hard to do as I thought. So while you’re mastering your own new way to cook eggs, I’ll be attempting to master the art of the poached egg.

5) Add Beans
Let’s let Trent from the Simple Dollar take us to school on how to add an interesting tweak (and some extra protein) to simple scrambled eggs:

Beans and Eggs
“Easy as pie. Just crack four eggs, add half a teaspoon of milk and some pepper, and beat them rapidly until they’re consistent in texture. Pour the egg mixture into a skillet and add half a cup of cooked black beans (or a bean mix, if you prefer). Scramble the eggs by repeatedly moving the eggs around in the skillet as it cooks until it’s nice and fluffy and full of beans. Put some cheese and salsa on top and you have one of my favorite breakfasts in the world - plus it’s an ovo-vegetarian dish.”

6) But Why Stop at Beans?
Once again, let’s not just stop at simply adding beans to scrambled eggs--let's go further: How about adding chopped jalapenos? Fried onions or peppers? Or fresh herbs like parsley, dill or cilantro? What about something more exotic like avocado, or olives, sun-dried tomatoes or even nuts? Don’t let your mind stop at the conventional ideas.

7) The Omelet
Finally, let’s consider the blankest of all egg canvases, the omelet. You can put practically anything in an omelet. Let’s consider some ideas:

a) Dump a couple of tablespoons of hot salsa in your omelet.
b) Make a Fire Omelet with a lot of hot cayenne pepper or Tabasco sauce.
c) How about a four cheese omelet with a separate zones each of brie, swiss, cheddar and feta cheeses?
d) And last but not least: one of my favorite omelets is the Greek omelet, but consider a greek omelet not just with spinach and feta cheese, but with additional ingredients, like dill, olives and even cucumbers. You could call it a Greek Salad Omelet.

What are your favorite ways to prepare eggs?

Related Posts:
How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time
The French Press
The History of Tabasco
When High-Fat Food ... Can Actually Be Healthy For You: Diet and Athletic Training Part 1

The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy

My goal for today’s post is to help you with cooking for company, and to share tips and advice that I've picked up over a couple of decades of hosting home-cooked dinners for groups large and small.

Maybe you'd like to invite a few friends over for a casual dinner at home. Or perhaps you need to scale up a huge meal for a large family reunion. Either way, preparing food for company can be one of the most satisfying things about learning how to cook. It's where you take everything you've learned about cooking and put it all together.

Best of all, throwing a dinner party is a heck of a lot easier on the wallet than eating out, especially in a major metro area like New York where we live. If you do things right, you can cook an entire multi-course dinner for four to six people for less than your portion of the check if you went out to eat.

That’s the good part about cooking for company. The bad part is that cooking for guests can be surprisingly stressful. Not only does the food have to come out right--you have to get the timing and rhythm of the entire meal right as well. If you choose a too-ambitious menu or have a logistical snafu with your preparations, you can really ruin the experience.

One of the primary goals I set when I started Casual Kitchen was to share ideas on how to make cooking less intimidating, less stressful and more fun. So with that goal firmly in mind, I'll share with you some advice that has worked for me over the years on how to make it fun and easy to cook for company:

1) Do Almost Everything Ahead of Time:
One of the best things you can do to make throwing a big dinner an easy job is to do as much of the work ahead of time as is reasonable. Certainly you can do basic, but time-consuming jobs like setting the table long before dinner time. You can make a big salad earlier in the day and have it sitting in the fridge, ready to go.

But let’s think a little bigger here: Can you actually make your main course a day or two ahead of time too?

You certainly can. Certain dinners, like chili, Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce or my own Chicken Mole sauce actually taste better the next day, leaving you only with the staggering responsibility of firing up your rice cooker when the guests arrive. Pasta sauces, like my Pasta Puttanesca, can also be made a day or two ahead of time, and then only the pasta has to be cooked fresh for the guests.

Obviously this logic breaks down at certain points. For example, nobody should serve their friends two-day-old pasta. Or a wilted salad made yesterday. Or guacamole made six hours ago that's turning a distinctly unappetizing brownish color. Some dishes simply must be made fresh. Just don't center your meal around too many of them.

2) Cook Scalable Meals:
We've talked about this concept ad nauseum in this blog, but it remains one of the most time-saving cooking techniques I've found: If you’ve ever made a double batch of anything, you’ll find that for many dishes it does not take twice as much work to make twice as much food. Instead, it's more like 1.2 times as much work to make twice as much food. That’s a huge incremental benefit in terms of food made per unit of work, and this can save you tons of time if you are making a meal for a large group of guests.

Don't make dinner a nightmare of painstaking prep work. Try and find recipes that can be doubled (or even tripled) easily so that you can capitalize on this scale benefit.

3) Write down a Schedule:
If you’re a beginner at hosting dinners, a written schedule is a must. It simply makes the whole event less complicated and less stressful.

Here's what works for me: a day or two before the dinner, I'll write down on a piece of paper a detailed schedule of the logistics of the evening. I'll list when I expect to start the prep work for each dish, when they go into the oven, and even who does which job. This helps me work out all the details of the evening ahead of time, so I can be confident that all the food can be ready at the right time.

When you work out your own schedule, be as detailed as you think you need to be to help you stay organized and on time. When the guests arrive you won't be scrambling.

And don't think that this is a procedure only for beginners. Even though I have years of experience serving dinners to groups of all sizes, I still write down a basic schedule and keep it nearby on the counter for reference. I’m sure this single step has saved me from plenty of dinner party disasters.

4) Bake In Some Margin of Error:
It’s rare that any dinner party comes out perfectly. You’ll inevitably have some problems that come up: a main course that takes longer to make than expected, a side dish that comes out poorly and isn’t fit for guests, a shortage of beer or wine (tragedy!), etc.

So don’t plan on perfection when you map out your dinner. Instead, leave some margin of error for things to go wrong.

Here are a few examples: First, when you’re making up your schedule of events, add a few 10-15 minute blocks of extra time here and there, sprinkled throughout the schedule. This way, even if you get behind in your preparation, you know you’ll never run out of time before the guests show up. Also, be sure to make extremely generous assumptions about how much your guests will eat and drink. If you guess too low and run out of food or booze, the results are catastrophic. But if you overestimate massively and there’s too much food, well, then you have leftovers and you don’t have to cook (or buy beer) for a few days.

Finally, if you're a serious pessimist and you really want to protect yourself from a worst-case scenario, consider making a back up side-dish and have it sitting in reserve, just in case you have some colossal food failure and you need a last minute substitution.

5) Ply Your Guests with Alcohol and Easy-to-Make Starters:
The minute your guests arrive, instantly begin plying them with alcohol, and set out some easy-to-make appetizers for them to nibble on. A simple cheese tray with a few varieties of cheese and an assortment of crackers would be perfect here.

This “plying method” serves a few useful purposes. First, everybody will have more fun. Second, if dinner runs a bit behind schedule, nobody will ever notice. And having some finger foods and various lubricating beverages available for your guests will make them all the more comfortable.

6) Delegate:
In our home, I typically do most of the cooking. But I’m not above outsourcing some responsibilities to Laura, such as making a salad, setting the table, or making a side dish. Another one of her jobs is also to "run interference” for me and protect me from distraction by chatting up our guests and refilling their wine glasses while I do a few finishing tasks in the kitchen.

Think about ways that you might team up with your spouse, kids, or significant other to put dinner on the table.

However, if you live alone, not to worry: you can always…

7) …Exploit Your Friends!
If you didn’t have any friends, you wouldn’t be hosting a dinner party in the first place. So ask one or two if they’d like to come a bit early to pitch in on the cooking. If your friends enjoy cooking or want to learn more about cooking, they’ll probably be pleased to be asked. Of course, be sure to offer sufficient rewards so that it’s worth it to them (free beer always works with me), and don’t give them only the crappy prep work jobs to do. Remember, you want to keep these people as friends, so don’t take me too literally when I say to “exploit” them.

Also, be sure to put some thought into the best ways to allocate jobs and cooking tasks--it can be quite challenging to figure out how to divvy up cooking jobs without turning your cooking space into a complete free-for-all. If you want more advice on this subject, take a look at my series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen.

8) Never Cook a Dish for the First Time for Company:
If there is one rule in this list that you must follow, it is this one. Trying a brand new recipe out on company is a rookie error. There's no other way to say it.

Whenever you try a new recipe, there’s always something unpredictable that happens. The dish takes longer to make than you expected, or there are extra steps that aren’t clearly described in the recipe. And of course, imagine the worst case: what if you make a mistake and the dish comes out totally wrong--or even worse, what if the recipe simply tastes terrible even when made correctly?

Do not do this. There is no greater source of dinner party stress. There are enough things that can already go wrong with a dinner party--don’t add the risk of a failed main course to the list of potential catastrophes.

9) Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew:
Hosting a dinner party is an art that can be done at many levels, ranging from the “Casual Kitchen level” where you concentrate on preparing scalable, straightforward and relatively easy meals, all the way up to the “Martha Stewart level” where you can greet your guests with hand-made party favors, blow your friends away with a flawless meal (set under diffuse lighting of course), and then send everyone home with a hand-crafted wicker basket.

But if you are relatively new to hosting dinner parties, consider leaving the pressed-flower party favors and hand-crafted wicker baskets aside for now. Remember, Martha has a huge staff of people who can do these things for her. You don’t want to put a 20-hour workday in just to nosh with some friends. And if you try for that much overkill in your first attempt, you might be burned out from ever hosting a dinner party the rest of your life.

Instead, concentrate on the important stuff. Will people have enough to eat and drink? Will dinner be ready on time? Should I cook one or two things? No need to wow people with six different appetizers and a seven-course meal. What’s important is the quality time you spend with your friends.

10) Practice:
Our final tip is probably the most obvious one: Practice.

Practice on a sympathetic audience, like your best friends or a few close family members. And start with small groups, maybe dinner for two or three guests to start.

As you grow in cooking experience, you can take on new challenges, like cooking more complex meals with more courses, or hosting larger groups. And that's the fun part about cooking--at every level there are always new things to try, new dishes to cook and new challenges to take on.

This is why one of the best ways to get better at hosting dinner parties is to, well, host dinner parties. Invite a few friends over for dinner, plan a menu, and see how it goes. It’s a great example of outflow, where you give your time and energy to your guests and enjoy their company in return.

Good luck with your future dinner parties! And please feel free to share your experiences (or war stories...) in the comments section below.

Related Posts:
Seven Rules to Ensure Mistake-Free Cooking
Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking
Eight Tips to Make Cooking at Home Laughably Cheap
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking

How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking

Applying 80/20 thinking to cooking can help you get far more enjoyment out of your culinary efforts, and it will ensure that you don’t get bogged down by the drudgery that can often make cooking a chore rather than a pleasure. Put these tips to use in your kitchen to get better results for much less work.

For those of you unfamiliar with the 80/20 rule, it says that the bulk of the output of a system typically comes from a very small number of inputs. Usually people think of this concept in business examples, like how 75% of sales come from 25% of a company's clients (so you should either spend more time on those clients, or find more clients like them), or 90% of defects in a manufacturing plant might come from a very small number of causes (thus you only need to fix a few critical problems to reduce your defect count substantially).

In its most basic sense, the 80/20 rule suggests that for every situation, there are a few critical inputs (the "critical few") that you should pay a lot of attention to, and many unimportant inputs (the "trivial many") that you can ignore.

My goal today is to help you get thinking in 80/20 terms when you cook. I’ll go over several ways you can apply this powerful rule and accomplish a lot more in your kitchen--even if you have limited time and resources. With any luck, this post will stimulate you to think of even more 80/20 applications unique to your own cooking habits.

1) Cookbooks
If you take a hard look at your cookbook use, you'll find a clear manifestation of the 80/20 rule: Most of the recipes you cook will come from just a few of your cookbooks, and most of the rest of your cookbooks will sit on your shelf, underused. This conclusion actually has some surprising implications.

First, you don’t really need that many cookbooks. You just need a few really good ones.

Second, when you are considering buying a new cookbook, you should ask yourself, “will this cookbook be a part of my ‘critical few’ or will it be part of my ‘trivial many?’” Asking that simple question should go a long way toward helping you decide if a cookbook is worth buying. In the next couple of weeks I hope to use the collective expertise of some of my favorite blogging colleagues in compiling just such a list of really good "critical few" cookbooks.

Third, take your best cookbooks--the ones you really use heavily--and exploit them for everything they have. Chances are the recipes you've overlooked will be exceptional too.

But if you happen to be a cookbook packrat, fear not: 80/20 thinking doesn't say that you can only own a few cookbooks! In this blog I'm often encouraging my readers to experiment with new cuisines and new recipes, and it's going to be tough to do that if you're stuck with three cookbooks that you've already fully exploited. So by all means rotate new cookbooks into your collection, but consider donating some of your lesser-used cookbooks to Bookmooch, or your local library or charity. Perhaps they can become part of somebody else's critical few.

2) Kitchen Tools and Equipment
Yep, you guessed it, roughly 80% of your cooking will be done with 20% of your kitchen items.

Therefore, spend some time thinking about how your kitchen is organized. Are the high-frequency-of-use items always close at hand? You can bury the bundt pan and the funnel cake pans deep in your cupboard, but keep your favorite knife and cutting board within easy reach. Spending a few minutes organizing your kitchen around 80/20 thinking should save you untold hours from a time-and-motion standpoint.

Furthermore, just as with cookbooks, you can ask the "will this be part of my critical few?" question when considering the purchase of any new kitchen gadgets. Will you actually use that gleaming new garlic press, or will it sit unused and forgotten in a drawer--next to the fondue forks you use once every three years? Asking these types of questions before you get to the checkout counter could save you a lot of time, money and kitchen space.

3) Recipes
I can already hear you thinking, “okay, OKAY!! 80% of my meals will be cooked from 20% of my recipes. Leave me alone!”

Don't worry, I'll leave you alone after this post is over.

But here's my point: What kinds of recipes are in your critical 20%? Are they healthy? Are they easy to make? Do you truly enjoy making them and does your family truly enjoy eating them?

Ask yourself these questions and you'll arrive at a more subtle 80/20 conclusion: with the enormous universe of great recipes out there you should seek out new recipes that are not in your critical few, but should be. By finding just a few new critical few recipes, you could dramatically improve the results and quality of your cooking output.

So keep your eyes and mind open for new recipes, and use my Five Easy Questions test to help you read them more critically so you can filter out high-workload recipes without actually having to make them. For a great list of easy yet delicious recipes to consider, take a look over at CheapHealthyGood under the label 15 minutes or less.

4) Use Heavy Rotation
Once you've found a group of hit recipes that satisfies your 80/20 standards, start working them into your weekly or monthly dinner rotations on a regular basis. I call this the concept of heavy rotation, borrowing the term from the horrendous local radio stations I grew up with as a kid.

In our home, we have a list of 10 or so house favorite recipes that are on heavy rotation, and we cook 1-2 times per week from that list. With leftovers heated up for lunches or a second dinner, we can easily make more than a third of our meals this way.

Of course, nobody wants to hear Stairway to Heaven five times a day for three weeks straight. So be sure to strike a balance between making these dishes often enough that you capture the 80/20 benefits, but not so often that you get sick of the recipe.

But when you find the right balance, you'll be surprised how much faster and more efficient you will be at making these heavy rotation recipes with regular practice. It will get to a point where you can practically make them blindfolded. This is how you can really exploit a solid list of critical few recipes.

5) Make Double (or Even Triple) Batches
Close readers of this blog have heard me remark before about how when you double or triple many recipes, an amazing thing happens: You will get 2x or even 3x the food for something like 1.2x the extra work.

To put this into 80/20 terms, the extra 0.2 units of incremental work drives an enormous increase in cooking output. In fact, when you make a triple batch, you actually get ten times the productivity out of that incremental 0.2 units of work (to explain: the first unit of work makes 1 batch, but the next 0.2 units of work makes two full batches--batches two and three). That’s powerful stuff, and it’s a classic application of 80/20 thinking.

Thus if you want to maximize your time and effort in the kitchen, look for recipes that are highly scalable, and focus your cooking around them. Several recipes featured in this blog, including my Chicken Mole or Lentil Soup, fit that bill perfectly.

Closing thoughts
For those of you who want to go deeper on 80/20 concepts, I highly recommend Richard Koch's book, The 80/20 Principle.* I read it closely a couple of years ago and it helped me radically rethink how I handle many aspects of my life.

How do you apply 80/20 thinking in your kitchen? I'd love to hear reader feedback on this! Feel free to leave a comment below on any 80/20 innovations that you'd like to share.

Related Posts:
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
Seven Rules to Get Faster at Cooking
Cookbook Exploitation Month is Here Again!

Related Links:
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch
What is the 80/20 Principle?
Top 4 Misapplications of the 80/20 Rule

* Note: if you purchase this book via the amazon links provided in this blog, I will receive a small affiliate fee.

How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter

It's not often that I write complaint letters. But every once in a while, when a particularly poor product combines with me being in a particularly combative mood, I'll fire one off. This time around it was a package of bizarrely mangled bacon that got me riled up.

From the outside of the package it looked like totally normal bacon, but once I opened it up I saw that I had been tricked. The top few slices were smushed all around the rest of the bacon stack, and there was a huge gash in the middle of the stack, essentially severing all of the slices in half right through the middle. No way was I going to be able to make bacon slices here. Try bacon shreds.

Was I annoyed? Yes. Was this the end of the world? No--because I channeled my annoyance into a terse and manipulative complaint letter.

So, today I will share six tips on how to write an effective complaint letter. I’ll also share the text of my “bacon letter” below so you can look over an example.

1) Do it NOW
There are two key reasons why you want to bang this letter out now and get it over with.

First, tackling the complaint letter immediately makes more efficient use of your time. The details are fresh in your mind and the faulty product, receipts and paperwork are right there in front of you. Even the irritation and annoyance is fresh in your mind, so you can capitalize on it by channeling that negative energy into pounding out an impassioned complaint. You’d be surprised how easy it is to write when you’re truly annoyed by something, and that’s far preferable to letting those frustrations eat away at you. If you wait a few days, the details will begin to fade, the emotional immediacy is no longer there waiting to be channeled, and as a result it will take you much longer to hammer out the letter.

Note that I suggested that you write the letter right away, but not mail the letter right away. Let the draft of the letter sit overnight so you can look at it with fresh eyes the next morning. This will stop you from sending out a letter that’s excessively harsh or brutal (some people call this the “Harry Truman rule”), and you’ll be better able to catch any malingering typos and grammatical errors you’d otherwise miss.

Second, a timely complaint letter helps the company too. In our bacon example, it doesn’t really help a company to hear about a mangled bacon problem if they sold the last of that product lot off the shelves three months ago. Timeliness is especially important for mass-produced products where a production problem can quickly grow out of control and affect thousands, if not millions, of products. If your complaint gets to them in a timely manner, you’ll be alerting them in time for them perhaps to do something about it before it cascades out of control. Of course, if they choose to ignore you, that’s their own fault.

2) Start off by killing 'em with kindness
I always open a complaint letter with a sentence or two about how dedicated a customer I am. I typically don’t have to stretch the truth to say this. If I weren’t a dedicated customer I wouldn't bother to write the letter in the first place--I'd just vote with my feet and change brands. In the example letter at the bottom of this post you can see that I start of by saying how my wife and I are "happy shoppers" at the company's store. Opening with a positive lead like this makes you sound like a customer that's worth the company's time and effort to keep happy.

3) Be concise and keep it simple
Keep your letter as brief and as simple as possible and only stick to the facts. Use simple sentence structure. As obvious as this advice may sound, you'd be surprised how rarely it gets followed--in any form of writing.

You are not the Apostle Paul sending a 20-page epistle to the Colossians; you're trying to get a few bucks in coupons. You can hold back on the purple prose and you can save the tortured metaphors and multiple clauses for your novel. If you can’t state your problem in a couple of brief paragraphs (or heck, in a couple of brief sentences), you’re overthinking things and wasting what little precious time you have on this earth.

4) Include the purchase date, package code, sell-by date and any other identifying codes, and include a copy of your receipt
Believe it or not, many companies actually want to fix quality problems and make customers happy. You need to include as much specific purchase information as you can in your correspondence so the vendor vendor can identify from which lot the product came and in which factory or location it was made. It allows them to track down the origins of the problem. Thus it is absolutely critical that you supply them with all of the dates and codes that you find on the product packaging as well as where and when you bought the product.

5) State specifically what you want in return
I'm not looking for a multi-million dollar windfall here--I usually just ask for a refund of my purchase price. Usually companies have standard practices they follow for consumer complaints, and typically they will refund the price paid. Fair is fair.

But that doesn’t mean that given unusual circumstances you can’t ask for more. My all-time personal favorite complaint letter moment came several years ago, after lengthy and repeated periods of poor TV and internet service from our (unnamed) cable provider. I chose to capitalize on a moment of extreme irritation (I think we had just lost service right in the middle of a brand new X-Files episode) to pound out a particularly harsh complaint letter. And in blatant contravention of the Harry Truman rule, I mailed it out right away and left most of the vitriol in there. On top of that, I copied the letter to the state cable TV regulator's office. Talk about channeling your frustration!

I asked for three free months of cable and internet service and I actually got it. I received in that one refund more value than I'll probably get in refunds over the rest of my life. Ah, it was my finest hour, complaint-letter-wise at least. I wish I still had a copy of that letter somewhere!

6) Make it fun!
Life is too short to stay bitter for long on something like a faulty product or customer service experience. Use the complaint letter as a way to let off steam and channel your frustration. And certainly recognize that you can’t really do this to make money--you're not going to earn a meaningful return on your time if you spend it writing letters for $2.99 refunds like the one I wrote below.

Do this for fun. If the words aren’t flowing, just let it go. Obviously your time is the most valuable asset here, and if a task like this takes you an inordinately long amount of time, you have to question the point of doing it at all, unless you want to use it as an opportunity to improve at business letter writing.

Finally, I've included the text of my "bacon letter" to share with you a typical example of a complaint letter. I wrote this letter in about 15-20 minutes. You could argue, based on a $2.99 refund request and 20 minutes of time spent, that I am trading my time for less than $9.00 per hour in compensation. But let me add that in those 15-20 minutes I went from an emotional state that I can only describe as “highly annoyed” to a state of smug self-satisfaction. Heck, people pay therapists $150 an hour to do the same thing!

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January 6, 2008

(unnamed grocery store), Inc.
123 Whatever Street,
City, ST 10270

Dear Sir or Madam:

My wife and I have been happy shoppers at the (unnamed grocery store) for several years. However, I wanted to let you know that I purchased a one pound package of (unnamed grocery store) brand bacon on December 29th that was in unsatisfactory condition. I’ve included the purchase information below.

The problem was with the slicing and stacking of the bacon. First, the top two or three slices of bacon were mangled and twisted around the remaining stack of bacon slices. Second, the entire package of bacon looked like it had been accidentally cut almost totally in half, right through the middle. There appears to be some quality control problems with the slicing mechanism used by your bacon manufacturing contractor.

The bacon tasted fine and was otherwise satisfactory. However, it looked highly unappealing coming out of the packaging. Furthermore, because of the condition it was in, the bacon could not be cooked in slices. Each individual slice of bacon fell apart into multiple pieces when I attempted to peel it off the stack.

Again, we remain happy customers of (unnamed grocery store) and of (unnamed grocery store) branded products. I wanted to notify you of this one quality failure and request a refund of my $2.99 purchase price. My receipt is enclosed.

Sincerely,


Daniel Koontz


Purchase Information:
Store Location: (redacted)
Purchase Receipt Information: 12/29/07 12:48PM 284 12 329 129
(Company name redacted) Sliced Bacon Lot #: EST 7202 N2
Sell-by date: Feb 25, 2008

How to Handle Raw Chicken So That You’ll NEVER Get Food Poisoning

I've been told the way I handle raw chicken borders on abject paranoia. But I've also gone my entire life and never had, and never caused anybody to have, a case of chicken-related salmonella or food poisoning. In today’s post, I’ll share with you my routine for the safe handling of raw chicken in the kitchen.

Even a cursory look at large scale chicken processing techniques reveals them to be pretty messy, to put it diplomatically. And this recent data on salmonella prevalence isn’t exactly encouraging. The bottom line is that salmonella and other food-borne bacteria are commonly found in and on raw chicken.

My goal today isn’t to disgust you so thoroughly that you’ll never eat chicken again (although some of the links above might do exactly that…). Instead, I want you to have a good grasp of how likely it is that you’ll meet up with microorganisms when you handle raw chicken, or any raw meat for that matter. Hopefully, this will give you all the reason you need to apply the following seven rules of chicken-handling safety. You too can have confidence that nobody will get sick on your watch!

1) Thaw Carefully
It goes without saying that if chicken isn’t all that clean when it comes out of the processing plant, it can become a perfect culturing medium for bacteria if you don’t take precautions when you thaw it.

Usually the best way to thaw frozen chicken is to put it in the fridge overnight. If you must speed things up, you can leave the chicken out on the counter for a few hours at most. Certainly never leave raw chicken out at room temperature for much longer than that. It’s never a good idea, for example to put raw meat out on your counter in the morning, take off for work, and then come back in the evening to cook it. That’s simply too long for uncooked meat to sit out at room temperature. Don’t risk it.

2) Rinse the chicken thoroughly in extremely hot tap water
Chicken, especially when it is mass-produced, is often sprayed with disinfectants or detergents and then rinsed (hopefully rinsed well) before being packaged for consumption. So we don't just have salmonella or e. coli to worry about--we also might be ingesting cleaning chemicals along with our chicken too.

You never know for sure how clean your chicken is. I solve this issue by running hot water (as hot as I can stand it) out of my kitchen sink tap, and I rinse each individual piece of chicken well under the faucet. Then I’ll place the fully rinsed chicken on paper towels on a plate before seasoning them and cooking them. If I’m cooking a whole chicken (or turkey for that matter), I run hot water in the inside of the bird too, just to make sure there aren’t any pockets of bacteria or anything else where I might put stuffing.

You’re never going to sterilize a piece of meat perfectly. We ingest bacteria all the time by eating all sorts of foods. What makes you sick, however, is when you get exposed to a critical mass of bacteria at one time. Rinsing under hot running water is a great way to kill off and physically remove most (if not all) of the bacteria so that this can’t happen.

3) Pay careful attention to everything the chicken touches
There’s a scene in “The Bourne Identity” that (weirdly) describes my philosophy on handling raw meat. It’s the scene where Jason Bourne and his girlfriend Marie wake up after spending a night in a youth hostel in Paris:

“You've already cleaned the room?”
“I wiped the whole place down for fingerprints.”
“Can I walk around or is that gonna leave any footprints?”
“You can walk around. It's no problem. But we'll just keep track of everything we touch. I just think it's better if we leave a room that we're not gonna leave a trail.”

Setting aside all my personal issues with paranoia about being chased by bad guys, I actually think it helps to think about raw meat in this way too. Any time you take meat that might be contaminated, touch a surface with it, and then touch that surface to anything else, you risk spreading food-borne bacteria. Therefore, I pay careful attention everything that the chicken touches and everything that the packaging touches. I also try to limit the workspace area I use when I’m handling raw meat of any kind. And then I carefully wash with hot soapy water (see #7 below for more on this) every surface, every dish and every utensil that came in contact with the raw chicken. I don’t want to leave a trail of food-borne bugs.

4) Be an obsessive hand-washer
Of course you should always wash your hands before beginning to cook any food. You should also wash your hands immediately after handling any raw meat, and before touching any other food or utensils. And then, I suggest you wash your hands one or two extra times, just for kicks, at various other times while preparing the meal. Here’s one instance where Lady MacBeth had it right. Of course, use hot running water and lots of soap.

5) Use high heat to sear the meat
When I’m making my house favorite Chicken Mole recipe, or searing the chicken pieces for Thai Pasta Salad, I of course want to cook the meat thoroughly enough so that I kill whatever hardy bacteria might survive steps 1 through 4.

But I don’t want to have to gnaw on dried-out, overcooked chicken. So I needed to strike a reasonable balance between healthy cooking and tender meat. I think I’ve found it. If it’s a dish where I need chunks or pieces of chicken meat, I sear it for a short time in very hot olive oil.

Here’s my technique: I heat up a quarter-inch layer of olive oil to high heat on the bottom of a non-stick pan. Once the oil is good and hot (at this point it will just be starting to smoke a little), I’ll dump in the chopped chicken pieces, cover it, and let it sizzle violently for 3-4 minutes. Theh, I’ll lift up the lid and flip over the chicken pieces so they can have both sides directly exposed to the hot oil. The process is a bit splattery, so I suggest using a deep non-stick pan if you have one. Searing chicken meat at high heat will kill ALL the bacteria, but it will also seal the juices into the meat and prevent it from tasting dry.

Granted, not all recipes allow for cooking chicken this way. If I’m broiling chicken parts, or roasting a whole chicken, I’ll make sure to follow the old adage: cook until the juices run clear. But I’ll also use a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken is at least heated up to 185F in the center, just to assuage my paranoia and make sure I kill off any potential bad guys in there.

6) Dispose of everything carefully
Once again, you need to pay attention to everything the chicken touches, and this means everything. Put all remaining chicken parts, disposable packaging, paper towels and any other disposable items that came into contact with the chicken into a grocery bag, tie a knot in the top of the bag, and then put that bag into the garbage. Now you and anybody else in your household will have absolutely no risk of inadvertent contact with raw chicken, even if you need to reach into the garbage can! Total safety.

7) Clean and sterilize your workspace
Remember, we’re being paranoid here. Everything that the chicken touches could potentially have bacteria-laden chicken goo on it. This is where we take Lady MacBeth to a new level and clean everything that the chicken may have touched:

a) Wipe EVERYTHING down with hot soapy water.
b) Wash EVERYTHING that touched the chicken in hot soapy water.

You can see now why I told you in step #3 to minimize your raw chicken workspace, right? The more space that you use, the more surface area that needs to be carefully washed. Finally, all you need now is a last, careful wash of your hands in hot soapy water.

Congratulations! You can enjoy your chicken with complete safety and confidence that you’ll never get sick.

Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies

This is the fourth and final part of my series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen. Be sure to take a look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

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Part 4: Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies

Today we’ll cover the final step that will help you leap across the threshold from kitchen friction mode into well-oiled machine mode. We can reduce it into one simple concept: Pay attention to who does what well.

There are so many specialties and subspecialties in cooking that anyone can find cooking tasks or recipes they are drawn to. Do you have a natural gift for preparing certain favorite dishes? Does your significant other have a personal interest in learning how to cook certain types of ethnic food? Perhaps you are a Zen-like machine at prep work with a spouse who takes naturally to leading teams?

As you and your cooking team come into contact with new recipes, cooking styles, and food preparation tasks, all you have to do is watch what happens. I know it sounds almost too easy to be true, but this is the first key step toward developing everyone's core competencies in the kitchen. When anybody finds a type of dish they particularly like, or a cooking skill they show aptitude for, it's your job to encourage it. You’ll get the vicarious pleasure of watching your kids or your significant other instinctively develop skills and talents in the kitchen. As they develop their palette of core competencies, they’ll get the pleasures of becoming enthusiastic and skilled cooks!

In our home, Laura's core competencies are grocery shopping, clean-up detail, crockpot recipes, fish dishes, Indian food, and, most unforgettably, pie crusts. My core competencies are micromanaging, delegating, and most importantly, being king.

Whoops! That was the old Dan. Actually, I tend to specialize in high-speed prep work, soups and stews, vegetarian meals, and general menu-preparation and cooking idea generation.

Keep in mind that your core competencies will develop gradually and organically. That's what happened with Laura and me. We didn’t force things; we just gravitated to tasks we were good at and dishes we enjoyed making. It wasn't long before we had a pretty keen sense of each others’ strengths and weaknesses. Don't try and oversteer the process.

Let's face it, there is a simple truism at work here: the more you do something, the better and faster you’ll get at it. Seems kind of obvious, right?

Well, it's less obvious than you might think. In fact, if you take this truism a logical step or two further, you’ll arrive at four significant conclusions:

1) It is a heck of a lot easier to divide and conquer your labors if each person on the team can lean toward the specific tasks they enjoy or do best.

2) Once you figure out who is best at which types of labors, then it becomes easy to determine who should be the king, and who should be a serf for any given recipe.

3) After you've made a recipe a couple of times and have established a routine for who does what, you and your cooking team will see more and more opportunities to play off of each other’s core competencies. You'll be surprised how everybody quickly settles into their respective workspaces and gets right to work.

4) Finally, and best of all, taking advantage of this process will not seem like work. On the contrary, it will be fun as hell, and you’ll eat well, enjoy quality time with your family, and even become a good cook in the process.

If you make a habit of developing your team’s core competencies, it will bring together all of the various tactics and strategies we've been discussing in this four part series. This is the process by which enthusiastic cooks are made, and it will mark the beginning of your family team’s ascent into "well-oiled machine mode." You’ll truly be teaming up in the kitchen.

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I hope this series will be useful to readers out there who are trying to make cooking a bigger part of their lives. As always, I appreciate your comments and suggestions. Good luck teaming up to tackle your next meal!

Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen

We continue our four-part series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen with Part 3. Be sure to take a look at Part 1 and Part 2.

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Part 3: Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen

Okay. You’ve decided on a dish to cook, you’ve chosen your King, and you’ve figured out how to divide and conquer the various tasks that need to get done to complete the meal. Congratulations, you’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting towards teaming up and getting dinner on the table!

However, you’re still left with a key potential source of kitchen friction which comes (both literally and figuratively) from everybody trying to get at the same counter space or use the same tools at the same time. Instead of cooking, you’re climbing all over each other and getting in each other’s way.

Once again, the crown weighs heavy, as it is the king’s job to solve this problem of too many cooks and not enough space. So today I’ll share with you three strategies to help make sure everybody has plenty of room to work in the kitchen.

1) Establish Separate Workspaces

Let’s face it: you can’t add a lot of value preparing dinner if you're waiting to use a given cooking tool, or if you’re spending all your time and energy getting in and out of the way of other people. If you are king, you must be mindful of this when you delegate cooking tasks to your team.

First, you should give each serf a dedicated workspace, even if it’s not technically in the kitchen. Second, why not lay out tools, cutting boards, or whatever equipment each job requires, in each of the separate locations for each person? If you follow these two steps you’ll right away pre-empt a lot of crowding.

Most importantly, however, you should think about how best to break down the work such that it can be done well at separate workstations. And this brings us to our next strategy:

2) Keep the Tasks Discrete

Before you dole out any tasks to your team, you should make sure each task is specific, clearly defined, and has an obvious beginning point and ending point.

Good examples of clearly defined, discrete tasks would be things like “make the salad,” “set the table,” “prepare dessert” or “wash/rinse the produce and set it out to be prepped.” These are classic dinner building-block jobs that can be divided up easily among a duo or even a team of cooks.

Granted, I know some of these tasks may seem a bit mindless, but that that can actually be a good thing, depending on what kind of serfs you have working for you. I know I have days when I really want to leave the higher-order tasks to somebody else--let me do something mindless like cutting up veggies! Therefore, be sure to think about what kind of temperament your cooking counterparts have and plan accordingly.

What you don’t want to do is allow tasks to blur into each other, or give one task to two people unless it can be easily and obviously broken down. For example, don’t assign two people to do prep work unless you have two sets of knives, two cutting boards, enough room, and an obvious way to divide up the produce that needs to be prepped. And don’t try to have multiple people washing or rinsing produce, unless of course you have two or more kitchen sinks (which we certainly don’t!).

One other thought: If your serfs already know a lot about cooking and are ready and willing to handle more complex tasks, consider delegating the entire prep work process. Give your serfs the whole job and endow them with wide latitude to complete it the best way they see fit. This is a surprisingly good example of a discrete task, although depending on the recipe it can be an admittedly big and complicated task too. See if your serfs can rise to the challenge.

Also, if you have older children who are truly beginning to display some skills and interest in cooking, delegating complex responsibility like this is a great way to engage them creatively in the cooking process.

Let’s move on to our final space-creating strategy:

3) Use “Temporal Space” If You Have a Shortage of Physical Space

In the New York City metro area where we live, kitchen space comes at a premium. If you have a small kitchen or cooking area, I encourage you to think of workspace in both spatial and temporal terms. What do I mean by that? I simply mean you don’t necessarily have to have everybody working at exactly the same time in exactly the same place.

Instead, have one serf do a task, set it aside, and then have another serf complete the next task immediately afterward. Repeat as needed. Your team does the work in the same physical location, but at different space-time coordinates (for lack of a better term). The jobs thus get done in series, rather than in parallel.

Remember the example I gave in the previous article, where one person does some of the preliminary work, another person does the rest of work, and then the king breezes in like a TV chef and finishes off the meal? That’s a perfect example of using temporal space. Each person effectively has his own workspace by working in series in the same physical space.

Result? Dinner might take a bit longer to make, but it will be ready with zero crowding and zero friction.

Stay tuned for the fourth and final installment of the "How to Team Up in the Kitchen" series: Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies.

How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors

This is Part 2 of a four-part series on How to Team Up in the Kitchen. If you haven't already, please take a look at Part 1.
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Part 2: How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors

As you'll recall from Part 1, being King isn’t always fun and games and ordering people around. There is a weight of responsibility too, as the king’s duty, in addition to choosing the meal and getting it on the table, is figuring out an effective way to divide up the work. What is the best way to designate the responsibility of meal preparation so that everything is done well, the serfs don't revolt from overwork, and the meal is ready on time?

Ah, the crown can weigh heavily on the brow of the king. But don't get discouraged. There are lots of ways to divide up the workflow of a meal in an effective way. Here are a few highly typical examples that we've used in our kitchen:

1) One person creates the grocery list and goes to the store, another person plans the menu and makes the meal.

2) One person cooks everything, another does clean-up duty (sometimes the idea of cooking AND cleaning up afterward is just too much to bear).

3) One person washes/pre-preps the vegetables and sets everything out on a cutting board ready to go, another person blasts through all the actual chopping. Then, the King breezes in like a TV chef and makes the meal with the bulk of the manual labor already done.

These are admittedly generic suggestions. Since much of the division of labor depends on the nature of the recipe you're making, a highly specific list of labor division ideas would probably be infinitely long. Also, you can use combinations and permutations of these ideas, depending on whether you have one spouse-serf or a team of children-serfs at your disposal.

But don't worry so much about specific details just yet; my goal is to get you thinking about general and logical ways to break down dinner into something managable. With practice, you'll come up with the best solutions for dividing up workflow as you develop a feel for the core skills and task preferences of your serfs. We'll go deeper into how to optimize everyone's core skills in Strategy #4.

Let's face it; cooking isn't always a blast, especially when you have a family to feed every damn night. Sure, there are plenty of cooking shows, cookbooks (and even blogs like this one) that try to make cooking seem like some kind of consistently glorious act of personal expression. The real truth is that sometimes cooking is an obligatory, and occasionally a truly depressing, job.

But remember, you are king! If you use the suggestions above as a framework to think about logical ways to break down dinner preparation, you’ll be surprised how quickly everybody completes their tasks, and how even highly complicated meals get whipped up in no time by a well-oiled family team.

For additional thoughts on issues surrounding doing prep work, outsourcing, and teaming up to do kitchen tasks in parallel, see my Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking essay.

We'll be back shortly with Part 3: Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen.

How to Team Up in the Kitchen

The purpose of this four-part series of posts is to help you collaborate in the kitchen with your significant other (or even your entire family) with a bare minimum of friction.

Let me start by stating my personal qualifications on this matter. Like most married couples, Laura and I have had our fair share of turf battles. And in years past, our kitchen was a truly unique theater of war on which we've had some of our greatest fights. I'd tell you some war stories, but in the interests of time let me summarize by saying they mostly had to do with me being a micromanager and Laura chasing me out of the kitchen with various sharp objects.

Fortunately, we emerged from this dark era of conflict with a healthy awareness of how to team up in the kitchen. We learned to decide who's in charge, how to share work and divide up the workplace in a sensible way, and how to take advantage of each of our individual cooking skills and interests. Cooking suddently started to require a lot less effort, and it wasn't long before it grew into something we actually do for fun.

Cooking is one of those activities that the whole family can get involved in, and there is no pleasure greater than spending quality time with your family creating and enjoying great food.

Over the next two weeks, I'll share the four key strategies that have helped us team up in the kitchen.

Part 1: Choose Your King
Part 2: How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors
Part 3: Three Strategies to Create Personal Space in Your Kitchen
Part 4: Capitalize on Your Cooking Core Competencies

I hope this series of posts will encourage you and your family to team up in your kitchen too. We'll start today with Part 1.

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Part 1: Choose Your King

The fundamental problem most kitchen collaborations suffer from, and the fundamental problem Laura and I always had in our early days, was a battle for control. Maybe we'd successfully agree on what to cook, but once we actually began cooking we'd both attack the recipe full-force, giving out instructions and orders to each other. It was chaos. Two kitchen Napoleons simply cannot coexist in the same kitchen at the same time.

Eventually, one of us would win out and start controlling the direction of things. And of course the other person would usually be annoyed and feel like a second class citizen. Nobody was in charge, there was no succession plan, and we wasted a lot of energy fighting out a battle for control before we ever got down to cooking.

Finally, after staring one too many times at the business end of a paring knife, I came up with the "King" idea. "Hey," I said, "let's decide ahead of time who's the boss here. And don't worry, I'll just be King for a day. We'll take turns and you can be king the next time we cook."

What exactly does it mean to be "King" then? Think of the king as a kind of all-powerful general contractor for dinner. The king decides what to cook, and how it's going to be cooked. The king is responsible for completing the dish satisfactorily at a time agreed upon in advance with his or her subjects. The king also gets to delegate some of the work involved (but only some, as we'll see below), and figures out who should do what task and when.

We’ve found that allocating nearly complete powers to the King works well for us, but of course you can delineate the powers of your version of the king in a way that works best for you. The key point is that you should always choose your king together before starting up a recipe. You'll be stunned at how much smoother things go once that decision is out of the way.

And certainly it goes without saying that you need to take turns being king. We've settled into roughly a 60/40 split favoring me with kingly powers, but that’s only because I tend to do more of the cooking in our home.

Another king-related rule we have is this: if you come up with the meal idea, YOU get to be king. This makes being king a reward for dinner idea generation, as well as a reward for initiative. Of course, the king still typically ends up doing much of the work too, and that's deliberate: you want the pleasures of royalty to only slightly outweigh the burdens of command. You don't want the king to live off the backs of the serfs in some kind of kitchen feudalism. Thus, being king is a good thing, but not so good that you won't share the title next time around.

Another compelling idea would be to let your kids be king once in a while (after they’ve developed the basic skills of cooking of course). Imagine being a teenager and getting to order your parents to do prep work! Who knows, not only will this give your kids an extra opportunity to appreciate cooking, it could help them develop skills in management and leadership.

I'll be back in a couple of days with Part 2: How to Divide and Conquer Your Cooking Labors. Stay tuned!