While I’ve long loved to cook – having, for example, requested a hand-cranked pasta press for my fifteenth birthday – I’ve also never been a big fan of cookbooks. Most, it seems to me, are focused solely on specifics – one recipe at a time. A bit like collections of individual mathematical equations without any discussion of the underlying theories.

Still, for some time, I’ve been on the lookout for culinary education that transcends the what’s and when’s, reaching through to the how’s and why’s. A few years back, for example, I was lucky enough to discover a ‘knife skills’ class at the Institute for Culinary Education. Though just hours long, it permanently changed the way I wield a kitchen blade. And, as nearly all cooking involves some cutting, that one class has therefore affected nearly all of my kitchen adventures since.

Last week, I discovered two cooking books with similarly broad-reaching potential: Wayne Gisslen’s Professional Cooking, and Linda Carucci’s Cooking School Secrets for Real World Cooks. While the first is a wheelbarrow-worthy textbook and the second just a significantly oversized trade paperback, both are packed through with detail and insight across an astounding array of cooking topics:

From the importance of mise en place or the technique for perfect dicing, through the chemistry of caramelization and how that drives the choice of any of the twelve primary wet or dry cooking methods, to odds and ends like why you should dab off marinades but never directly rinse scallops or mushrooms. And, of course, recipes. Lots and lots and lots of exceedingly intriguing recipes, the first of which seem to be field-testing well in my Manhattan apartment kitchen.

Whether you can’t tell the difference between a saucepan and a Dutch oven, or whether they know you by first name at your local Sur La Table, your cooking is bound to improve with either or both of these books. Pick up copies today, and, once you’ve read your way through, invite me over for a home-cooked dinner by way of thanks.

While I’ve long intended to eat more salmon, I never managed to work the pink filets into my regular rotation. Too protracted in baking, too prone to disintegration on the trusty Foreman, and stinking up my small apartment with a pungent fishy smell either way, salmon simply seemed too effortful to push me past my inherent laziness in pursuit of Omega 3 -laden benefits.

A week or so back, however, Abigail came over and cooked up a great Japanese-style salmon – in the microwave. Apparently, place a salmon steak in a glass dish, toss in some marinade, nuke it on high for four or five minutes, and the fish comes out baked to flaky perfection, with nearly zero prep, baking time or cleanup.

Always quick to steal good ideas from people smarter than I, in the past week I’ve replicated her high-speed technique, cooking up two separate nuclear-powered batches. Give it a try yourself.

Or, even better, find a hot blonde to come over and cook it for you. I can’t recommend that second option highly enough.

There are a number of basic guy skills – driving stick, holding liquor, hailing cabs, etc. – that any competent male need develop at some point in his life. Granted, some of those skills tend to atrophy a bit over years of disuse (as the clutch of my brother’s car attests after each of my visits). But, like electro-shock therapy, all fall more or less into the ‘get it once, get it for life’ category.

Each, I would contend, is crucial. Which is why, at Thanksgivings past, I’ve always been painfully aware of one such talent I never had the chance to develop: carving a turkey.

In large part, the lack is due to celebrating Thanksgiving, year in and year out, at my parents home in California. There, my father, turkey-carver extraordinare, takes great joy holding the bird-slicing helm. And, to be fair, it’s a well deserved post, a place where years of practice come together with his surgical profession and an outsized collection of carving accouterment: from carving knives and forks of all makes and sizes, to a professional chef’s jacket donned solely for the occasion. Certainly, watching him work has given me a vague sense of the movements required to beautifully de-bone, but, as in so much of life, I’d long suspected that watching and doing were worlds apart.

Over the years, as the number of turkey-day attendees grew steadily, my parents would cook up successively larger and larger birds. This year, however, the combination of an all-time eater high, and the Jewish cultural ‘let’s cook at least three or four times as much as we could possibly eat’ tradition, forced them to divide and conquer. This year, we roasted twin turkeys.

My father, recognizing the double-birding as a chance to pass along Newman carving finesse as the start of a grand culinary tradition, had me carve the second. In a play-by-play master class, he stood across the kitchen counter, directing me from drumstick de-jointing and dark meat chunking through breast slicing and wishbone removal. And, while I wouldn’t claim to be ready for cooking channel prime time, years of observing and his live instruction allowed me to make fairly fine work of our de-feathered friend.

Now, placed bird-side, Wusthof in hand, I’m sure I could carve a turkey – at least as well as I could change a car tire or avoid asking for directions when lost on a long road trip. Another guy competency conquered with sense of manhood unscathed. Someone get me a beer.

Who says biology isn’t handy? Keep this in mind the next time you’re slicing or dicing an onion:

Onions contain sulfur, which turns into sulfuric acid when it hits the water in your eyes. Obviously, getting acid in your eyes burns like hell. (Side note: subsequently rubbing your eyes with your hands simply gets the sulfur from your hands into your eyes as well, and makes things worse. If you need to rub, use the inside of your elbow.)

But science doesn’t just provide explanations, it provides solutions:

First, pop the onion in your freezer for a few minutes before cutting, as the cold decreases the speed of the chemical reactions.

Second, as the vast majority of the sulfur is in the root of the onion (the weird hairy bottom part, for those not agriculturally inclined), don’t cut that part. The area near the root is also the least sweet, juicy section, so you’re both saving your eyes and pleasing your palate by simply not using the bottom 10% of the onion.

And, honestly, not bawling like an idiot is well worth the five minutes of freezer time and the five cents of tossed onion bottom.

While I really enjoy cooking, I must admit I rarely get around to it. When business meals don’t have me dining out, I’m likely to piece together haphazard dinners consumed while standing – a handful of deli turkey; a tomato eaten whole, like an apple; a chunk of cheese; perhaps some mushrooms and zucchini grilled up on the Foreman.

Every so often, however, I manage to block out time and really cook. Odd as it may sound, I love it for the same reason I start companies or make photographs: creating something from nothing, even on a dinner-plate scale, makes me profoundly happy and wildly excited.

In particular, I’ve fallen in love with making pasta from scratch. I don’t completely recall what drove me to it the first time, but I remember the details of the attempt: fifteen years old, passing the rolling pin again and again over the round lump of dough, slowly flattening it into a sheet thin enough to slice, line by line, into broad, uneven fettuccine.

After the arm-exhausting rolling effort of doing it once or twice more, I requested a hand-cranked pasta press as a birthday present. Admittedly, an odd gift choice for a teenage guy, and one that got me no end of ribbing from my younger brother. But after my first cranked batch, I was even further hooked. The joy of making something from nothing, compounded by my inner child’s love of the Playdough press: the sheet of dough magically thinning and lengthening with each successive pass, then cranked through the slicing wheel, the broad sheet emerging as perfect narrow strips.

Late last week, I realized it had been nearly six months since I’d whipped out the press. So I blocked in some time yesterday evening, invited a friend, and linguined away. Feeling adventurous, I decided to try making pesto sauce, which in fact turns out be remarkably simple: 2 large bunches of basil, 6 cloves of garlic, 2 ounces of pine nuts, a cup of grated Parmesan and 3/4 a cup of olive oil. Tossed in a food processor for a couple of spins, those five basic ingredients emerge emulsified and emerald green, a perfect pesto.

As an antipasto, I had bought tomatoes and mozzarella, which I sliced and topped with a bit of leftover basil and olive oil – a classic caprese salad. Paired with a bottle of wine and capped with a few store-bought cupcakes for dessert, the perfect evening.

Another long-form article, this one added to the ‘food’ section of the ‘plus‘ page, about knives for cooking – which ones your need, how to care for them, and how to use them. Since, odds are, you’ll end up cutting something at some point during the rest of your life, take five minutes to read this through, and change the way you wield a blade forever.

This past weekend, stopping in at Rite Aid to pick up shaving cream and shampoo, I noticed a small table of kitchen appliances on clearance sale, among which sat a $12 crock pot. Having recently read that perhaps slow cooking was healthier cooking, and with a $20 bill burning a hole in my pocket, I decided to go for the impulse buy.

Several days later, I can definitively say it was the right choice. I’ve churned out a couple of excellent slow-cooked meals that were tasty, healthful, easy to prepare, and conducive to leftovers (key for someone who eats as frequently as I do). Despite skimming the booklet supplied with the crock, I in the end jettisoned prescribed recipes in favor of a fast-and-loose instinctive cooking approach. The two resultant winners:

Ridiculously Easy Pot Roast

6 medium potatoes
1 large onion
10 carrots
3lb lean beef bottom round
1/2 cup water
salt, pepper

Slice the onion, peel the carrots, and toss everything in the crock pot on low heat for 10 hours. Voila.

Even Easier Chicken Casserole

3 large chicken breasts
Bear Creek Chicken Noodle Soup Mix (or similar)
3 cups water

Toss everything in the crock pot (nota bene: remove soup mix from package first) on low heat for five hours. Voila again.

Honestly, I think I just might be the next Fannie Farmer.