Cooking For Engineers®

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

Twelve years ago, I wrote an article comparing plastic and wood cutting boards which may be why one of the most frequent questions that I get is what cutting board do I use in my personal life. For the last six years, I have been using cutting boards made by Epicurean Cutting Surfaces and my wooden cutting boards haven't come out of storage for years. Here's why I like the Epicurean boards.

One question that I keep getting asked (and that I keep asking myself when standing in the produce section of the market) is whether or not a particular type of fruit will ripen at home. It turns out there are only a handful of fruits which get sweeter after being picked: apples, bananas, kiwifruit, mangoes, and pears. There are a dozen additional fruits that continue to ripen (through aroma or textural changes) and all the rest do not. I put together the following chart listing the fruits which do ripen after being picked as well as those which do not from a variety of sources including but not limited to On Food and Cooking, Cookwise, Modernist Cuisine, and The Science of Good Food.

I find that whenever you're discussing a topic with or trying to explain something to others, it's best to have a common vocabulary. This is true in the kitchen as much as it is in the professional world. Here is my kitchen dictionary, compiled from the top of my head, the internet, and various cookbooks.