Everyday cooking means taking lots of shortcuts. For the most flavor with the shortest amount of time in the kitchen, especially when you've splurged or gone out of your way to buy good ingredients, it's a delicate balance between paying attention to the details and just trying to get dinner on the table.

We've all done it -- cooked tomatoes with their peels and seeds, served pureed soup unstrained, fried the potatoes just once, not twice. It's healthier, right?

As a cook, I embrace shortcuts. But as a cooking teacher, I always try to explain to my classes why, over the centuries and millennia, certain techniques have developed. Sometimes it's cultural. Usually, though, there's a very real change in texture or flavor, nutrition or shelf-life.

Two simple techniques increasingly omitted from recipes now are salting eggplant and browning butter. Neither are absolutely necessary. Both, however, are worth doing every once in a while to remind yourself just what amazing flavors you can create in the kitchen.

BROWNED BUTTER

Simmering whole butter until all its water bubbles off and its protein solids separate accomplishes several key improvements. It allows the butter to sit at (tropical) room temperature much longer without turning rancid. It significantly increases the butter's smoke point to allow high-heat cooking. And it transforms the milks sweet flavor, adding deep, nutty, caramel tones. Indians call it ghee, while the French call it beurre noisette, or hazelnut butter for its rich color and flavor.

You need just five or ten minutes to make browned butter. Melt good-quality, unsalted butter in a small, heavy pan over medium heat. (A lighter colored pan will allow you to judge more easily the color of the butter as it cooks.) Continue cooking it through the foamy bubbling stage, while all the water evaporates off. Reduce the heat if you want to give yourself some extra buffer time, especially if this is your first time browning butter. As the bubbles subside, swirl the pan occasionally and keep an extra close eye on the butter. The protein solids will sink to the bottom. When they turn light brown, transfer the hot butter immediately to a heat-proof bowl. Be sure not to scorch the butter, as blackened protein will taste sharply acrid, not pleasantly nutty. It will darken a little more as it cools.

For frying or long storage, be sure to separate the milk solids: skim off any remaining foam and spoon or pour off the oil while still liquid, leaving behind the darkened protein at the bottom of the bowl.

Browned butter can be used while still melted to saute or to garnish. It's excellent for vegetables like asparagus, broccoli, and green beans. If you're trying to use less butter, deepening its flavor will accentuate the effect from smaller amounts. For a super simple yet elegant entree, sear chicken breast, pork chops, or fish fillets in browned butter and then serve with fresh lemon wedges.

Let browned butter solidify and substitute it in baked recipes for extra delicate cookies and cakes. (Remember that less water means less gluten development in flour, so be sure to allow for some trial and error as you figure out the fulcrum point between flavor and structure.) Use it in rice pilaf to serve with full-flavored stews and roasts. Or simply offer it at the table in your regular butter dish and spread it on crusty bread or flaky biscuits for a flavor epiphany.

SALTING EGGPLANT

With ever smaller, younger and fresher vegetables making their way to our markets in the past decades, old rules have lost much of their imperative. Peeling, trimming, salting -- these were techniques required when vegetables were allowed to mature completely on the plant, transported long distances without the benefit of refrigeration, and served within days not weeks of harvest. Tender carrots no longer require peeling. Young celery stalks can be cooked with leaves. And most eggplants now, especially the narrow Asian varieties, are fine going straight from the cutting board the pan.

Occasionally, though, salting eggplant is critical and will remind you just why this vegetable has been embraced in classic dishes around the world. It's a hassle, but the extra step draws out bitter juices in older vegetables, whether those missed in the back corner of your garden or forgotten in the bottom of your refrigerator. More importantly, salting alters the cell structure of the vegetable's flesh, creating that famous silken texture while preventing excess absorption of oil.

To salt eggplant, halve, dice or slice it as needed. Sprinkle generous with kosher salt and set aside in a bowl or colander. To encourage the purging of juices, weight the eggplant. (The most effective way is to fill a zip bag with water and plop it on top of the pieces. The age-old method is a flat plate topped with a rock.) Leave the eggplant for 30 to 60 minutes. When you return and peek into the bowl, you'll see a surprising amount of dark brown liquid at the bottom. Rinse the eggplant quickly in cool water, drain well and then dry it by wringing in a clean cloth or patting with paper towels.

Salting eggplant will noticeably improve recipes that call for stuffing eggplant halves or rolling thin slices around a filling. It's also a good technique for dishes where keeping its shape is important, such as stews, curries, ratatouille, or parmigiana. If you're deep-frying eggplant, salting is essential for preventing greasiness.

And what if you're making baba ganoush or using tiny, little adolescent eggplants? Nope, no one will care or notice if you skip the salting.

Cooking is an investment of time and money, energy and love. Like all decisions, judging the costs requires knowing the benefits. And then choosing wisely.

There was a time, before Pyrex and Oxo, calculators and even cookbooks, when rules of thumb ruled the kitchen. My mother taught me my first one when I was six and still standing on a barstool to reach the kitchen faucet, the infamous and eerily accurate "one-knuckle" rule for cooking rice. Like all good R.O.T., the measures were flexible. It didn't matter how much rice or what size pot or what kind of stove. It worked.

Through the years, others joined my mental chart of measures. Start frying spring rolls when a dry chopstick, lowered into the oil, sends up a rush of bubbles. Don't eat at a restaurant with the word "authentic" translated into English. A thin girl eats one bowl of rice, a polite girl two bowls. The brownies are ready when only a few crumbs stick to the toothpick.

Cooking school and restaurant work lengthened the list of informal guidelines. Cook a fish ten minutes for every inch of thickness. A properly butchered beef carcass will produce 1/4 steaks, 1/4 ground beef and stew meat, 1/4 roasts, and 1/4 waste. A classic mire poix is 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot, 1 part celery. Roux is equal parts flour and butter by weight. A cake is done when it springs back from a loving tap.

Professional caterers employ some of the most specific calculations for feeding people that are, in their way, merely interconnected rules of thumb. Are the guests standing or sitting? Sipping lemonade or knocking back cocktails? Celebrating a friend's birthday or waiting around to sign big, fat donation checks? Are the plates 5" or 7" wide? Are there mostly women or men? Is it a cold morning or a hot night? Each factor changes what kind and -- more importantly, how much -- food appears on the tables. In the end, it's as much a guesstimate as that thumb in the rice: based on experience, fluid, and as exactly right as it needs to be.

At his ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable website, RulesofThumb.org, Tom Parker has collected thousands of informal guidelines from around the world. The simple rules were originally sent to him on postcards in the 80s, when he started the project, but he's since gathered them onto a site where readers can search by keywords, contribute their own R.O.T., and rate those submitted by others.

Just a few from the Food category:

• One elephant provides the same amount of meat as one hundred antelopes.
• For long trips, plan on at least two pounds of food per person per day.
• The quality of food at a restaurant is inversely proportional to the size of the restaurant's freezer.
• If at their first daily feeding, catfish rapidly swim to the surface, stick their heads out of the water, and gulp for food, everything is O.K. If they are sluggish or don't come to the surface, promptly change the water.
• One pound of clay thrown with reasonable competence on a potter's wheel will make a vessel large enough to hold one average serving of most kinds of food.
• When you order Chinese food, order one entree less than the number of people in the group to avoid unwanted leftovers.
• To dissolve, without cooking, 17 pounds of sugar requires 1 gallon of hot water. This makes two and a quarter gallons of liquid sugar.
• If cows remain lying in a group on a rainy day, then fish will not bite.
• Don't drink water downstream from the herd.
• The hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" sung in a not-too-brisk tempo makes a good egg-timer. If you put the egg into boiling water and sing all five verses, with the chorus, the egg will be just right when you come to Amen.
• If a choking person can verbally request the Heimlich maneuver, he or she doesn't need it.
• You can live three seconds without blood, three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

Each of these reminds me how much more interesting human-based measures can be. Forget the conversion charts and fear-inducing recipes that crackle with numbers. What we need are more colorful stories embedded in plain advice.

What's your favorite rule of thumb in the kitchen? And where did you first learn it?

If you had to choose one book this season and only one book to be your cooking bible, Cooking by James Peterson is an awfully good candidate. Filled with 600 recipes, 1500 photographs it is a "kitchen education". Peterson walks you through all of the French basics and then some.

When you want to return to the classics or just experience them for the first time, Peterson is a tremendously experienced teacher. He learned to cook in France, taking both classes at the Cordon Bleu and working the kitchens of three star Michelin restaurants. He ran his own restaurant in New York and has taught cooking for the last twenty years.

Peterson's writing is detailed, and the photo lessons are a great way to really see techniques up close. The book covers the 10 basic cooking methods, and then just about every category of food including such things as sauces, pastries and custards. Peterson admits to a bias towards French and Mexican cuisine, but there are also Moroccan, Thai, Indian and Italian recipes, to name but a few. They tend to be the more emblematic dishes to be sure.

The only other how-to book with so many photos that I can think of is Jacques Pepin's Technique book. It is for both beginners and advanced cooks and unlike the CIA book The Professional Chef, it geared for home cooks, albeit home cooks who might want to take on making croissants, warm sea urchin mayonnaise, or a foie gras terrine. My only complaint about the book is that some of the non-basic recipes are not very authentic. For example the Moroccan chicken tagine is not cooked in a tagine, but simmered on the stove in a pan, delicious I'm sure, but not really a tagine. Regardless of my quibbles, this book is a treasure trove of great recipes and techniques and tremendous value for the price ($26.40 on Amazon, including free shipping).

Squid Braised in Red Wine
makes 4 main-course servings

3 pounds squid, cleaned, hoods cut into 1/2 inch rings, tentacles left whole
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups full-bodied red wine
Bouquet garni
Salt
Pepper

Ailoi
French Bread

Rinse the squid and let drain in a colander. Gently cook the onion, carrot and garlic in the olive oil in a pot large enough to hold the squid. When the onion turns translucent, after about 10 minutes, add the squid and stir over high heat. Continue stirring until the liquid released by the squid completely evaporates. Add the red wine and the bouquet garni and simmer gently, partially covered, for 45 minutes. Remove the lid and simmer until the sauce cooks down and thickens slightly but still remains soup-like. Season with salt and pepper and serve in heated soup plates. Pass the aioli and bread at the table.

Recipe courtesy of Cooking by James Peterson, Tenspeed Press, 2007