Tag Archives: cooking

My Time Times Ten

Homeschooled children in the kitchen

It’s Friday and I will start with a food thought this week.  I’m a fan of every cooking magazine on the planet, as you should know by now. One of the things many of them have is some sort of time estimate on recipes – this long to prep, this long to cook. Those estimates are usually pretty far off. The reality is that I can do mise en place for almost any recipe faster than most folks in my home and even the slowest of us around my house can do it faster than a real beginner. Our skills make those estimates inappropriate and incorrect.

We also have a cook top that puts out more BTU‘s than does our furnace, so we can cook at restaurant temps (I won’t bore you with the tale of the 6 weeks it took me to relearn how to cook this way after cooking on an electric cooktop for years). This means that often the cooking times are often off as well.  Fascinating stuff, I know, but what does this have to do with you? Continue reading

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Filed under Helpful Hints

The Same But Not

Shellfish paella.

As we head into Labor Day weekend, my thoughts turn to food (OK, so I could make that statement about the 364 other days too – got me…) and since it’s Friday I want to share something that’s rattling around in my head.  I’m not sure if there’s a business thought connected to it or not, but since it’s a day off from work on Monday maybe I can give us all a day off from my wacky business connections.  Or not! Continue reading

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Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Learning Not To Cook

Toque

It’s Friday and the topic, of course, is food-related. I was speaking with a friend of mine the other day and he mentioned that his business used to remind him of a cook and a couple of helpers but now it’s a big kitchen and the cook has become a chef. As we kept talking, it was obvious to me that the guy had NOT become a chef – he was still a cook and that’s the business point I want to make today.

I hear lots of folks complain about chefs (most of them celebrities now) who have six or ten or more restaurants. “How can they run the kitchen from 1,000 miles away?” is the common question. But they can because they’ve learned not to cook and that’s what my friend’s boss needs to understand. Continue reading

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Filed under Consulting, food, Helpful Hints