Criticism of a dish is not a criticism of the cook.

Don't get attached to any one idea. Nothing is too precious.

I ate cottage cheese all the time growing up, but it wasn't until I was in college that I became aware of the stigma surrounding it.

When I was a kid, my idea of heaven on a hot summer day was fresh cut-up watermelon, Breakstone's cottage cheese, and a sprinkle of salt.

As an adult, I use whole-milk cottage cheese anywhere you might use plain Greek yogurt or ricotta cheese.

The mild creaminess of cottage cheese makes it a perfect blank canvas for almost any flavor combination, savory or sweet. Since it's so soft, I usually try to give it some textural contrast in the form of something crunchy. Brightening it up with acid is also a must.

In the height of summer, a ripe cantaloupe is one of the most intoxicating pieces of produce under the sun.

Every year since culinary school I have made a Buche de Noel, or Yule Log.

I made my first Yule Log as a culinary student in Paris, complete with the traditional chestnut filling, silky chocolate buttercream, and almost-too-adorable mushrooms. Since then, I've tweaked and updated both the recipe and the process - and I've definitely learned tips and tricks to make it easier.

For reasons that aren't quite clear I derive a weird and almost inappropriate pleasure from making a cake that looks like a decomposing log. Essentially, that's what a Buche de Noel is supposed to look like, complete with meringue 'mushrooms' poking out of the chocolate buttercream 'bark.'

Lemon curd is one of the first things I remember cooking when I was old enough to use the stove without supervision. I looked up a recipe in my one of my mom's Martha Stewart cookbooks and went to work, stirring anxiously and monitoring closely for signs that the mixture was thickening so as not to curdle the eggs.

Lemon curd is a basic custard, meaning it's thickened by eggs. Although many curd recipes call for just yolks, I prefer to use a combination of whole eggs and yolks to add a bit of lightness.

True marshmallow - and I'm not talking about those ones from a bag - is nothing more than an Italian meringue set with gelatin.

For rave-worthy soups, skip the store-bought stock. You can extract a cleaner, stronger broth from a combination of water and several pantry ingredients. It's all about layering powerful flavor-enhancers that you probably already have on hand - bacon, tomato paste, herbs, peppercorns, a Parm rind, and, of course, kosher salt.

Simmering vegetables in a covered pot over low heat so that they steam in their own liquid - a French technique called a l'etouffee - is the ticket to achieving a soup with pronounced depth.

When making any pureed soup, don't blend all the liquids and solids together at once. Hold back some liquid at first and use it to thin the soup as needed. You can always add more liquid, but there's not much you can do to fix a too-thin soup.

My maternal grandmother, a.k.a. Nanny, wasn't much of a cook. As a kid I remember her making only a handful of things, mostly dishes with Ashkenazi Jewish origins like kasha and bowties (which, for the record, only my dad liked).

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.

Serve as a sweet brunch treat or with tea in the afternoon. No one would turn it down as dessert after a big holiday meal, either. You'll find there's no bad time for babkallah.

Can you braid three strands? Then you can make babkallah. The very idea of babkallah came about because the recipe avoids the complicating twisting technique that gives babka its signature swirl.

It's the ingredients you choose (Chorizo? Sure! Rye bread? Why not?) that will make your stuffing stand out.

When making tartare, keep everything chilled as you go, including the mixing bowl and plates. Presentation matters, too: The meat should be fridge-cold when served and cut as precisely and neatly as possible.

Turmeric or cinnamon? Nuts or raisins? The players may change, but the fundamentals of fluffy, fragrant pilaf are always the same.

Ever crack an egg into simmering water only to watch the white spread out and form wispy tentacles? It happened to me until I came across this game-changing fix: Break the egg into a sieve set over a bowl. The watery outer edge of the white will drain through, leaving the thicker white and yolk intact.

You don't need a specialty lame (French for 'blade') to make professional-level bread at home, but it certainly helps in creating those telltale slash marks. You need a truly razor-sharp edge to make a clean cut; even a sharp paring knife will drag as it moves through the wet dough.

Of all the quirky, inexplicable, reindeer-embellished holiday traditions out there, making your own Yule log might take the cake.

Cooking for a crowd during the holidays takes a lot of time and effort, so we understand the desire to outsource as much of the work as possible.

Why crown your own rack of pork when a butcher could do it for you? To start, it's way easier to brine two individual racks than a giant round crown (and yes, you definitely want to brine the meat).

Like turning potatoes or making a bearnaise sauce by hand, forming a cornet - essentially a DIY pastry bag - from parchment paper feels like one of those things culinary students do once or twice and then never again.

Holiday eating is a study in paradox. You're surrounded by food, but you're so busy shopping and cooking that you don't have time to eat. Then, when your blood sugar dips to the point of derangement, you make a desperate lunge for the closest foodstuff - and the next thing you know, you've eaten an entire box of regifted peppermint bark.

Caramelized white chocolate is a mind-blowingly simple and delicious technique that will silence all the alleged white-chocolate haters out there.

Press-in crusts are a supposedly easy alternative to the rolled kind, but achieving an even, compacted layer all over isn't a no-brainer.

Quince may resemble pears and apples, but unlike their fruit brethren, raw quince are inedibly tannic and sour. This means you do have to cook them, but the transformation is dramatic, and well worth your efforts.

Poached quince are so tender, aromatic, and rosy that you'd hardly believe the raw fruit is white, fibrous, and hard as a rock.

Whipped ganache is a great gateway icing if you're working your way slowly into the vast world of egg-based buttercreams. It's just a few ingredients and far superior in flavor to the basic butter/sugar/milk frosting.

The problem with traditional pie weights is you never have enough and they're expensive. Common substitutes like dried beans just aren't heavy enough to do the job. Our genius solution? Small steel balls that fit inside ball bearings and that can be purchased at any hardware store.

If soggy, baked choux can be re-crisped in a hot oven for several minutes.

Pate a choux is a mixture of simple ingredients - flour, water, milk, eggs - but the proper technique is essential. Unlike other doughs, the pastry is pre-cooked on the stovetop before being enriched with eggs, piped, and baked.

When I'm desperate for spring produce but nothing has hit the farmstand yet, frozen green peas are a godsend.

Depending on when vegetables are picked, they might take different lengths of time to cook.

I have made cassoulet more times than is advisable - first in culinary school, once with a friend for a dinner party, and at least half a dozen times in the BA Test Kitchen.

Cassoulet requires a few ingredients you won't find in the typical supermarket.

Turkey burgers receive a fair amount of disparagement, and it's not unfounded.

Usually, turkey burger recipes result in something so lifeless and tasteless that drowning one in ketchup (that most perfect and delicious of condiments) doesn't help much. Part of the problem is calling this food a 'burger' at all, because it's never going to satisfy the way juicy, salty, medium-rare beef will.

The main problems with cooked ground turkey are, one, it doesn't taste like much, and, two, it's dry.

Canned chickpeas have terrific range, which is why I make sure I always have at least a can or two lying around at home. They puree easily into a smooth and creamy hummus or crisp into crunchy little nuggets as a component of a sheet tray dinner.

If you are the kind of person who makes homemade chicken stock on the regular and keeps it frozen in various sized containers for all your cooking needs, I truly commend you. Quality homemade stock will invariably add great depth of flavor and body to a recipe. But it's a luxury, not a necessity - it gilds the lily, as they say.

Hearty soups with relatively long cook times like minestrone, for example, are chock-full of aromatics and flavor-lending ingredients like bacon, onions, and garlic. These infuse the water with their flavor and produce a clean-tasting broth all on their own.

Gluten - the elastic strands that give bread its chewy texture - forms when certain proteins in flour interact with water, which is desirable in bread, but not tender cake.

When the urge to bake strikes, it strikes hard and fast. You want to get in the kitchen and start breaking eggs right away, so it can be real buzzkill to find out that the recipe you're using calls for room-temperature butter.