Chef Scott Spencer, owner of Spencer's Pantry. Photo by Jenny Oh.

If you know any cyclists, chances are they're "food-passionate" (This sounds less pejorative than food-obsessed.) They range from serious athletes who religiously count calories and eat specific nutrients to stay fit for races, or those like me: folks who pedal hundreds of miles so we can eat delicious meals guilt-free.

Chef Scott Spencer is a fellow cycling-food enthusiast who I met through the Bay Area cycling community. To borrow some racing classification terms from the world of cycling, Scott is a cooking "Pro," whereas I'm merely a mid-range "Category 3." As the owner of Oakland-based Spencer's Pantry, he'll prepare an exquisite 6-course meal for you and your guests using fresh, local seasonal ingredients -- often from his garden.

48-hour short rib, 12-hour pork belly, brown butter potatoes, baby carrots, onions and beurre rouge. Photo by Scott Spencer.

Preserved Meyer lemon ricotta-stuffed squash blossom, rock shrimp, basil and fresh pea puree. Photo by Scott Spencer.

Diver scallop, caviar lentils, farro, uni cream and tarragon. Photo by Scott Spencer.

His culinary interests began over ten years ago while cooking on a casual basis for friends. Scott's hobby soon evolved into the pursuit of a professional culinary career, and he attended the California Culinary Academy in 2002. Upon graduating, Scott held diverse group of jobs: he learned about desserts at Scharffen Berger, worked the wood oven at B Restaurant and oversaw the raw bar at the now-defunct Pearl Oyster Bar & Restaurant in Oakland.

Then he landed at Boulevard in San Francisco, "a restaurant that I had really dreamed about working in since I started cooking. But I was still on the line, busting my butt every night and I hit a spot in my life that made me question where I was going to be when I was 30."

"My friend was working for Thrillist.com and approached me about an article. He knew I did some catering on the side to supplement my cook's income. I just said, 'Write that I will come over and cook a meal like I do for my friends and family. Very intimate, more along the lines of having a dinner party with a friend who is a chef.' I got 63 emails that morning, left Boulevard and was off to the races. It's been nothing but great for the last 2 years."

Scott says there are many benefits to owning his own business. "I can close up shop and travel when I would like. I make a lot more money than I ever have. I don't have any employees, so I have total quality control. I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my cooking. The only con has been the time involved doing it all myself. I ride my bicycle around the Bay Area to gather ingredients, so the prep time turns into a 14-18 hour workday before a dinner."

If you'd like to have Scott pedal over and cook for you in your home, visit his blog and website to learn more about Spencer's Pantry. You can also check out his reviews on Yelp and find him on Facebook and Flickr.

Heirloom tomato gazpacho. Photo by Scott Spencer.

As it's prime tomato season, here's one of Scott's stellar recipes for a vegan Heirloom Tomato Gazpacho. It's also gluten-free as it eschews the usual addition of bread.

Heirloom Tomato Gazpacho
Makes 6 Cups

1 ½ lbs. very ripe heirloom tomatoes cored and roughly chopped
1 large yellow onion thinly sliced
1 English cucumber peeled and roughly chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 tablespoon cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

Add olive oil, onion and cayenne to a large pot, stir and set to low heat. Cook until soft and translucent, about 15 minutes. Take the pot off the heat and add the rest of the ingredients. Stir and add in small batches to a blender. Blend on high until smooth and run through a fine mesh strainer (optional).

If needed, season with salt, cayenne and rice vinegar. You are looking for the warmth of the cayenne, the flavor of tomato and the zing of a little vinegar. The soup should be chilled and served cold.

So it's time to make a meal, and you're bored with making the same old dishes. It's time to recharge your repertoire.

Back in the day before the dawn of the online era, you'd just snag a new family recipe from a relative with some culinary chops, or tune into the wisdom of Julia Child. But the mega-popularity of The Food Network has since ignited an unrelenting avalanche of food-related media, and now you can find endless numbers of resources on television, newspapers, cookbooks, blogs, discussion forums, and even smart phone apps.

So where to go in the midst of this media overload? There are some excellent new sites that offer a curated collection of recipes that will help you sift through the onslaught of available resources.

If you're a fan of food porn, the following two sites will catch your fancy. Punchfork aggregates recipes from a number of popular food websites that rank highly in the social media sphere. According to their website, "Punchfork uses real-time data like tweets and Facebook shares to measure which recipes are grabbing the attention of users. We uncover the latent sentiment in sharing patterns on social networks." You can see which recipes have top-ratings with the foodie crowd, what's new, and of course, what's trending. Each recipe is easily sharable with folks on your own social networks, too. Learn more about this innovative new site in this interview with Punchfork's founder, Jeff Miller.

Then there's Gojee. Be sure to click on this site after you've had a snack, because the glossy photography will make your stomach instantly growl with hunger. You have to register to view the recipes, and then you're greeted with a stunning portrait of a dish that you'll want to make right away -- like Penne with Corn & Brown Butter.

The user interface is quite personable, allowing users to search by ingredient for what you "crave," what you "have" in your pantry, and what you "dislike." And when you type in search terms, witty messages such as "Almond joying myself, are you?" pop up as you wait for the recipe to pop up. And they bring careful attention to their curatorial process, as mentioned in this Forbes.com article: "You could call us a high quality, hand curated, easy to use Google for food blogger recipes. Every recipe on our site is manually chosen by our team," says founder Mike Lavalle.

Then there's Foodpress, which has a roster of featured food bloggers that contribute recipes. You can click on popular keywords that are listed in a handy sidebar, or check out sections such as, "Today's Specials" and "Featured Posts."

But if you'd like to dive into the online juggernaut, there are comprehensive sites such as Yummly, Google Recipe View (and if you're using their new Google+ social network, their "Sparks" feature includes recipes. However, you'll see it filters through articles as well as plain recipes when you scroll through.)

And of course, don't forget to check our Bay Area Bites's extensive archive of great recipes.

Unless you've been hiding out from the internet the past two months, you've undoubtedly heard about Google+, Google's new project that "aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in real life," according to their site. It's being touted as a real competitor to Facebook and Twitter, the current social media titans.

There are some significant differences between Google+ and its cronies, however, such as "Circles," "Huddle," and the innovative "Hangouts" feature. When you start a hangout, up to 10 users can video chat together all at once. The main screen will focus on whomever is predominantly speaking. Users can even watch a YouTube video together. The tech blog Mashable recently published an article about creative ways folks are utilizing Hangouts, and the "Google+ Cooking School" caught my eye.

The founder of this cool new school, Lee Allison, took time out from teaching to answer some questions about his project via email.

Where do you live?

As of last winter, my lady and I live in Queens, NYC. We love it here. There is so much great amazing food that it’s not even funny.

Do you have a professional culinary background?

No, I am entirely self-taught and have been interested in things in the kitchen since I was in high school. In fact, I knew I was hooked when in my junior year I turned out a perfect angel food cake from scratch. I was completely enthralled that I could do that! Then about five or six years ago, I decided to teach myself how to bake an amazing loaf of bread. That process, the investigation into what to do and what not to do really kicked off my food-junkie habit.

What inspired you to start Google+ Cooking School?

When I saw how easy it was to setup the video session with other people, I immediately knew what I had to do. It’s obvious that people would rather be led through a cooking session than simply read a food blog or watch a dry video on some website. This is all about the socialization of cooking and I love that aspect of it.

Tell me about your first cooking class. How many folks participated, and how many cooked right along with you?

My first class had three cooking along, which is pretty normal. That session was full with ten people. It involved teaching people how to make and cook dumplings. Once you know how, they are amazingly easy. But most people can’t get past the initial dread of tackling such a dish. In fact, I had several people mention that if I hadn’t shown them, they never would have attempted such a thing. That completely made my day. It was a full class with people waiting to join in from the wings.

What are the pros and cons of holding a class with G+ hangout?

Pros: Super easy to setup, very inclusive, fun, spontaneous
Cons: No moderation of idiots (none so far, thankfully!), no support if someone has an issue

How can people participate if they’re interested?

Add me on G+ (mention this article) or email me at lee@thesocialskillet.com to learn more.

Classes are in Eastern Standard Time, so make you sure you plan accordingly when signing up for a class. And check out two videos from a previous class that demonstrated how to make margherita pizza and ice cream.

Like many modern friendships that are born in our era of social networking, I first "met" Ezra Caldwell online in 2006. I discovered his Flickr account through mutual contacts and was drawn to his extraordinary images of dancers, his beautiful wife Hillary and photogenic pooch Putney. We also happen share a deep devotion to bicycles and food, and he regularly chronicled his endeavors in frame building and cooking.

Ezra shared his thoughts with me about cooking via email: "I think it's important that people eat at home a certain amount of the time. For us it's pretty much every night. We eat out about once every three weeks. There's something about the time spent in the kitchen in the evening that is a real relaxer for me. A meditation. I often drag out food preparation just because I enjoy that time of day."

While I had lived in Ezra's hometown of New York City for 13 years, it wasn't until I moved all the way across the country to San Francisco that I finally met Ezra in real life. In the spring of 2007, he and another Flickr friend, Yohei Morita, embarked on a trip throughout the U.S. to share bicycle adventures and meet other Flickr comrades. They met me and a mutual Flickr friend, Judah, during their visit to the Bay Area.

And like many modern time-pressed friendships, we stayed in touch in the virtual realm. And so it was through Flickr that I learned in August of 2008, Ezra was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. In true Ezra fashion, who has never shied away from baring it all, he started a blog, "Teaching Cancer to Cry," as a "a way to keep people up-to-date as treatment progresses, and a way for me to look back when all this is over and reminisce."

Six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation treatments began. Ezra wrote about the tough days, yet still managed to make us laugh, too. He even got married along the way.

When he went into remission, he started posting recipes for spinach salad, sudado de pescado, and stewed chicken with olives. His lush images of his elaborate meals mirrored his renewed energy.

Then in September of 2010, the cancer returned. He resumed his documentation of the grim realities of his second round with the disease.

Through all of this, Ezra still found time and the desire to cook.

"Over the last bunch of months, I was really laid low. I was in a lot of pain, a lot of the time. Having to take pain killers. Spending a lot of time in bed. Happily, though, this time around we found an anti-emetic (anti-nausea) drug that worked! So for most of the winter I would just save up my energy during the day to be able to get out of bed and cook some evening. It meant a lot to me to be able to continue to contribute to the household. I've always done nearly all the cooking, and didn't want treatment to interrupt that. Just about everything else went on the back burner."

Cooking also ignited yet another creative project.

"I started making videos, partly because I was getting back into making video and needed a subject, and here was this thing that I was doing every day anyway! I like to encourage people to cook. I think it's a little strange when people don't know how, or believe they can't. Cooking is easy! It's not hard to make yourself really good food.

So I started putting instructions for cooking on the blog, and later the videos with the instructions. I think it's sort of a great way to learn. See something done REALLY fast, and then read some instructions for it. You've still got an image in your head of what it looked like, and the instructions can be pretty bare bones.

I don't like the word "recipe." I feel as though there's an implication with "recipes" that makes people believe that there's a RIGHT way to cook a certain dish. That sort of takes the fun out of it. Instead I try to write instructions for dishes that maybe include some useful technique, like braising, or using an ice bath, that people will be able to include in their arsenal of approaches in the future. I love it when people write to me and say, "I tried that dish, but I changed it in this way and that, and it came out great!" Aha...you've been bitten."

Here's his artful visual rendition of "Braised Lamb Shanks" that will make your mouth water.

Braised Lamb Shanks from Fast Boy.

You can find his complete archive of instructions and food videos on his blog. He's since finished up his latest round of treatment and recently prepared a sumptuous lobster dinner with a friend who's battling breast cancer. May the cooking and celebrations continue for a long, long time.

I remember my first cookbook. It was Thrill of the Grill by Massachusetts-based chef and barbecue enthusiast Chris Schlesinger and former Gourmet editor John Willoughby. I was eleven or so, on the verge of vegetarianism, yet strangely fixated on the primitive allure of pit cookery -- a notable early contradiction in a life that has seen many. Before long, I graduated to a Jenifer Lang-edited edition of Larousse Gastronomique, Prosper Montagne's ancient and massive encyclopedia of (largely French) cooking techniques, traditions, and terms. I was learning French in school at the time, so dips through those thin, colorful, glossy pages dovetailed nicely with my foreign language studies. Other cookbooks followed -- Rick's Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, The Silver Palate Cookbook, and, of course, The Joy of Cooking. When I was moving out -- either bound for school, or for San Francisco, I hinted that I wouldn't mind taking a few with me. The Larousse, my mom informed me, was outside the realm of possibility; the Bayless, on the other hand, was doable.

We form relationships with cookbooks, even magazines. We read them for enrichment and entertainment, and we also use them for a purpose -- to prepare specific dishes we're compelled to try cooking. When we learn how to cook something, the dish becomes part of our lives, and we carry the memory of making it along with the memory of enjoying it. I associate particular volumes in my collection with distinct periods of my life. When I was fifteen or so, an old, half-shredded copy of Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook intrigued me with vivid descriptions of unfamiliar cuisines and ingredients. Simultaneously, it vaguely repulsed me with its weirdly unappetizing photographs. A year ago, I constantly flipped through Chez Panisse Vegetables; three years earlier, I pored over the gorgeous Silver Spoon, for the past 50 years, Italy's best-selling cookbook. My cookbooks -- some of them once my mom's, and a few of those perhaps her mother's as well -- are literally marked with the meals they enabled. Splashes of red and brown fleck a Marcella Hazan recipe for tomato sauce with mushrooms. The entire taco section of Mexican Kitchen looks like a grisly watercolor. They have been touched by hands and worn. Corners have been folded over; pen scribbles show that proportions have, for better or for worse, been adjusted. Someone I know writes the date next to a recipe when she's cooking from it, so she can look back at the book years later and see when she's cooked what. I usually try to sort that out by just dating the smudges. It's a field begging for an expert.

Current wisdom, however, holds that cookbooks are becoming obsolete. While food blogs and recipe-rich websites like Epicurious have been around, relatively speaking, for ages, most web-savvy cooks -- skittish about the potential havoc erupting pots and mishandled cutlery are capable of causing -- balk at positioning their precious laptops too close to a rowdy kitchen fray. Enter the iPad. I should say from the outset that I will never get one. They look ridiculous, too large and unwieldy to be truly convenient, and too small for comfortable typing. I am biased against it, but I cannot help but believe a significant portion of my skepticism concerning the iPad stems from having absorbed and rejected most vehemently widespread allegations that it's destined to revolutionize the universe of cookbooks.

Articles and blog posts salivating over the possibilities the iPad poses are hard to miss. Summarizing more than a few of those I've read would take a while. In late April, Gizmodo editor Wilson Rothman ably broke down the app onslaught in a New York Times Diner's Journal column, highlighting the best of what newly-minted iPad owners can expect from the warm plastic tablets: apps like Epicurious and BigOven brimming with grocery list-making functions and interactive aids paving the way for digital app-ified versions of seminal cookbooks.

While at least one person has proven enthusiastic enough to install an iPad in his kitchen cabinet, app-mania drives me a little nuts -- and not just because I can't afford to spend half a grand on a gadget. I can't deny that it must be nice to cook with such a wealth of information at one's greasy fingertips, but there's something so temporary and soul-less about technology's ability to put reams of information into a very small space. I can draw an obvious parallel to collecting vinyl. I own an iPod shuffle I bought for $50 three years ago, but I still purchase vinyl records, and won't stop -- even though digital music is, at this point, practically free. As a matter of fact, I don't feel like I actually own an album unless I have it on vinyl. It's not simply a proprietary longing; without the actual record, music feels ephemeral to me, as if it might suddenly blow away. The comparison doesn't entirely hold up though: Vinyl records actually sound better than mp3s of the same songs, whereas a recipe's usefulness doesn't depend on its packaging, particularly when an iPad can call up ingredient profiles, recipes, and instructional videos with a few brisk clicks. The truth is usefulness doesn't really encompass the point of a cookbook. Like album art, a cookbook can be stylish, beautiful, and evocative -- something people want to display, cherish and share. Any publishers of cookbooks banking on digital downloads down the road shouldn't forget this.

If their cookbook lending library is any indication, the owners of the newish Local Mission Eatery, on 24th St. near Folsom, probably feel the same way. For an annual fee of $35, members can borrow a book a week, providing they follow a highly generous set of rules. With titles like Ferran Adria's A Day at El Bulli, Grant Achatz's Alinea, and a multitude of Craig Claiborne volumes, possibilities run the gamut from fanciful and fantastic to immensely practical. Importantly though, the library applies a dose of community consciousness to the cookbook form, emphasizing that the sharing of a valued text among members of a community makes for shared experiences too. It localizes and articulates a larger phenomenon. When you borrow a cookbook and cook a recipe, you're immediately tied to everyone else who cooks that recipe. Yes, there are apps for that too -- features that illuminate what people in close geographic proximity are cooking -- but those are poor substitutes for dripping sauce on the same page.

Two years ago, my girlfriend and I combined our cookbook collections and stacks of food magazines along with our books and records. Since leaving home, I've bought cookbooks of my own to supplement those pinched from the old homestead. Lately, I've bought some with my girlfriend too. In time, the collection will swell further, and the rows of books will require more shelves. Big, heavy cookbooks take up a lot of space. They don't blink, come to life, or talk to you. They're just cardboard and paper -- fusions of inanimate ingredients that readily fall apart and rot. Still, I imagine they'll still last longer than an iPad's hard-drive -- in every sense.

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