Season To Taste - By Staff Member "Silas Merriweather".

Three little words. They sit at the end of nearly every savory recipe. After slicing and dicing and roasting and blanching and braising and basting and sweating and resting, after you've exhibited every ounce of cooking prowess you possess there they sit. Dainty as a demitasse spoon, quiet as a quail egg - season to taste.

Ho Hum, just season it to taste, as if it's been flippantly tossed into the recipe. But beware this task.

Do not trust the seeming ease with which television cooks fling their salt, the two or three power turns with which they crack pepper. Seasoning to taste is an art.

The task is also known as add salt and pepper. But the phrase season to taste gives the cook such grandeur, as though at the end of the process you, the chef, will confer your special magic on the dish. And that is not far off from the truth. Salt and pepper are magic ingredients. Wars have been fought over both. They are nearly universal in cuisine.

The reason is that salt and pepper have a unique ability to highlight the flavors in food. They are like a giant spotlight that make your food shimmer. No matter how carefully you have painted your portrait or sewn your costume it is only when you turn the light on that people can appreciate it. So it goes with salt and pepper.

And so it is very easy to use too much or too little. One of the secrets is to add salt as you go. Just a little bit to each part of the recipe. It will add up so be sparing. But incorporating it into each part of the dish you will begin embodying each of the ingredients as you go. That way, when you reach the end, you need only add a tad of salt and pepper to bring that final light to your dish.

Another secret is to learn the size of your hand. How much salt do you hold in that pinch of your fingers? You will start to learn how your body measures food.

And finally, never, ever, ever, pour salt from the box. One oops and your dish is ruined in a cascade of white.

As for pepper, a little often goes a long way, though you can add more if it has been ground fine.

Julia Child - By Staff Member "Silas Merriweather"

While Julia Child was undoubtedly knowledgeable and quite charming neither of those facts is what endeared her to me. What I found so lovable about that mistress of French cooking was that she screwed up. She didn't try to hide it. She didn't pretend to be perfect like so many of those cooking shows today. Julia accepted failure as a part of life in a kitchen. And she handled it with aplomb.

In one of my favorite moments a wooden spoon escaped from her hand, went skidding across the island and landed with a rattle on the floor. "Well," she said, picking up another wooden spoon, "that's why it's always good to have two."

If you are going to cook well you are going to screw up. Not that any of our mistakes ever make their way to your party. No, our mistakes are what we refer to as staff lunch.

I must confess that I am prone to a certain number of, um, "mistakes." Oh, nothing like the over salted polenta incident of 2006. But I have had my fair share.

The latest involved our caramel pot de cremes. It was the end of the prep day. Tiny caramel pot de cremes was my final task. They take a while to bake so I should have started them earlier. There are times in the kitchen your eye simply skips over a prep task on the list. No one knows why this happens.

Anyway, I made the pot de cremes, helped everyone clean up, and then watched everyone go home as I stayed to wait for the pot de cremes to finish. And I waited, and I waited... and waited. The way to check a pot de creme for doneness is to give the ramekin a little shake. You want the edges solid but for the center to have a slight wiggle, like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Well my pot de cremes were all wiggle, from the center to the edges.

One hour went by, then two hours. It was now ridiculous. My pot de cremes would not set. I called Hugh whose sage advice was, "Maybe you did something wrong." After the third hour I took my wiggly pots out of the oven and went home. A mystery left unsolved.

That is until I awoke at 4 in the morning with the sudden realization - I forgot to put the eggs in.

I convey this story of my humiliation in the spirit of Julia Child. May it bring you solace when you too screw up.

The Potato Gaufrette - By Staff Member "Silas Merriweather"

A potato gaufrette is a wafer thin lattice-work slice of potato. That’s what it says on the Internet. Most of us know them popularly as waffle fries. Continue reading and you will be told they are simple to make. Peel a potato, slice it on a mandolin turning 90 degrees with each slice. Fry in oil.

That’s a bit like describing marriage this way: find someone you like, get a cake, continue to be nice for 20 years. It’s just a little more work than that.

Let’s begin with the mandolin, kitchen tool or ninja weapon?

The mandolin has certainly claimed more finger flesh over the years than many a sword. Then there is the inevitable shifting of the blade. One second you’re cutting perfectly thin slices and the next a potato thick as a side of ham falls out.

Suddenly, slicing potatoes becomes a cat and mouse game with your mandolin, moving the blade up, moving it down, pressing harder on the potato, flicking your wrist at the end of the slice to keep the end from becoming ragged.

As you get down to the end of the potato heed the sage advice our chef David gave me, “Don’t be a hero.” It’s ok to leave the nub of the potato for another use. Better to have all your finger tips.

If you’ve made it this far you now come to the oil. Potato gaufrettes are notorious for browning on one end while remaining soft on the other, or refusing to cook in the center. Just as you must adjust your mandolin a good gaufrette demands constant heat control.

Get you flame up high when the gaufrettes go in. The temperature will plunge. As it comes back up turn your flame down. You’re looking for that sweet spot, that magic place where the potatoes turn brown and crisp before burning.

Get your spider in there. It actually looks more like a web with a long handle. Who knows why they call it a spider? Get it in there none-the-less and move it around. Adjust your heat. I guarantee you that the minute you turn your attention to something else your gaufrettes will turn an invisible corner and be ready.

Now pull, pull, PULL. Get them out of the oil and onto some compostable, recycled, blessed by the earth paper towels. Salt ‘em.

If they didn’t work, throw them out before anyone sees them. But discuss the failure with your spouse. It’s all about communication.