During my years of writing about food, cooking and wine, I’ve taken a hard look at some rules and myths such as “Always presoak dried beans” or “Only flip a grilled steak once.”

One neat thing to do with an everyday, basic, all-time-favorite recipe is to put spins on it, adding to or tinkering with it so it’s not only different, it’s exciting again.

You can make dinner from what’s on hand, as meager as that may be. Above all, reframe what a “meal” means.

When you are your best company, dinner needn’t be “dinner.”

One of the earlier and more primitive transformations of foods is fermentation, the conversion by yeast, bacteria, or microbe, often in their wild state, of one form of food into another, thus lengthening its useful life. Photo from ELEVATE on pexels.com

Which cut of beef is best served by cooking by either dry or wet heat?

The old marketing slogan still holds: the egg is incredible. Photo from Polina Tankilevitch on pexels.com

I was a chicken when it came to fish. Then I learned the great lesson of cooking fish.

What’s here are kitchen or culinary basics—skills, techniques, trucs—foundations for good cooking, all and each.

And yogurt, don’t get me rhapsodic about Instant Pot yogurt. I’ll cry. I adore yogurt and eat at least half a quart a day. The Instant Pot lets me batch up a gallon at a time.

When prepping vegetables for Thanksgiving Day dinner, keep back scraps and peelings—even onion skins—for the deep flavors that they can add to stocks or roasts.

Butternut squash soup finished “in the Spanish way”

If you’re going to get into a pickle in the kitchen, you’d best go all the way.

The “marriage” of prosciutto and melon is a classic, not because of the delicious flavors necessarily, but more because of how sweet “gets along with” salt.

Don’t just toss a bunch of chopped fruit together, then add sugar, without reading this first.

What worlds of flavor and titillation fresh chile peppers can bring us!

“Finding flavors” and save them, not always for times ahead, but also as you are cooking, for many “right nows.”

Fresh sausages—as distinct from pre-cooked or pre-smoked sausages—must be cooked through and thoroughly.

May look like it, but this is not “food waste.”

Two recipes here, one for borscht; the other, for success.