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seyo---I use a well-worn small corning ware casserole/saucepan & fill with an inch & half water & cover to start to boil. Fill one old coffee cup with water & microware until water boils, leave in micoware for now. Crack one Eggland's Best egg in another old coffee cup & set aside. When saucepan water barely begins to boil, take off electric heat, uncover & gently add egg to water, cover & keep off heat. Hang-out for a couple of minutes. Uncover pan to check on appearence of almost set egg white. Depending on how it looks, either keep uncovered or cover & place on original heated element to bring to perfectly soft runny yolk looking state. Take cup with microwaved water out, dump water, lift egg out of saucepan with slotted spatula to drain & place in hot old coffee cup. Poached egg for one can then be eaten with a long handled spoon, gently poking at the oozing yolk--yum!

Thanks JEP, I'll try it!

I have gotten pretty good at fresh pasta. It is very helpful to have a machine to roll out the dough, but it's not vital. Patience and some elbow grease are a viable alternative. I make egg pasta, I havent tried making the semolina and water only kind yet. The recipe for the dough is as follows:

Combine is a large mixing bowl:

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup semolina flour
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
a few good grinds of black pepper
2 tsp turmeric
large pinch of saffron
approx 2 tbps olive oil and 2tbsp water, more as needed

knead it all together to form a consistent dough. You want a moist springy ball of dough that is neither goopy and sticky nor crumbly and dry. You'll want to knead it for a good 8 - 10 minutes to get it nice and springy. Keep adding flour in small dustings to the bowl to prevent the dough from sticking, you want to work it to get a nice playdoh consistency.

let it rest for about 15 minutes. cut it into eighths. If you have a pasta machine, roll it out into sheets, getting progressively thinner. Dont be too aggressive with it or it will break. Get it down to about 1mm in thickness, or the before-before-last setting.

Lay the sheets down on a floured surface like a cookie sheet or a cutting board. dust flour between sheets so they dont stick together. when your sheets are all rolled out, cut them in half. Then feed them through the cutting tool and as they come out, hang them on a dowel. I use a wooden coat hanger that I hang from a peg.

You can dry them out entirely if you arent going to eat them right away, or, once theyre all cut, throw them in some rapidly boiling salted water. They will cook very fast, about 3 minutes. Even more crucial than with dry pasta, DONT OVERCOOK!!!

If you dont have a pasta machine, roll your sheets out with a rolling pin, then using a straight edge (i use the cardboard sheets that come in my folded laundered dress shirts), cut your pasta with a sharp knife.

Since they cook so fast, you can spend some time making a pan sauce while the water boils. Olive oil and butter with garlic and shallots and fresh herbs, with some wilted greens makes a yummy dressing. Olive oil, garlic, tomato concentrate and anchovy fillets are awesome. Just butter and cheese is really good, and so is pesto.

When the pasta is ready to come out, gently strain them, or scoop them out with one of those strainers with a handle on it, but dont shake off too much of the cooking water, its better if theyre still wet. Throw them in your sauce pan and coat them with your sauce. Serve immediately.

The key is in gauging the moisture of the dough. When you get good at this, then you can make flavored dough like spinach pasta. Get a standard bag of baby spinach. Chop it up with some fresh basil or marjoram, and throw it in a pan over medium low heat with a little oil and salt and cover. Let them wilt. Once wilted, uncover and let the moisture cook off, without letting them burn, so stir them and turn them over. You want to cook out as much water as you can without burning them, so turning down the heat, putting some music on and cracking a beverage helps. It should take about 20 mins.

Your bag of spinach should be reduced in volume to about a cup. Chop this up very finely or pulse in the processor, then add this to the dry ingredients mix and then proceed as above. Fresh home made spinach pasta will knock your socks off. I havent tried it yet, but you can make pastas with all sorts of veggies in the dough, like beets, tomato, whatever you want really, as long as you get that water out.

If you dont use all the dough, roll up whatever is left into a ball, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate. It will keep in the fridge for quite some time. The turmeric is an antioxidant and will help preserve it.

I'm embarassed to admit that I've forgotten a ball of dough in the fridge for over a month, and ate it anyway. It tasted fine, but needed a little oil and water to resuscitate it. Making ravioli is also a lot of fun...

i hope you try it and let us know how it works out for you.

Grilling is something I've gotten right only in the past year, as I finally have a decent grill to experiment with. (My wife likes to say, "Your grill's bigger than Bobby Flay's ...") I've always been an accomplished breakfast cook, and only last week finally mastered frying chicken on the stove after decades of trying. My deep-frying skills have always been good, but that particular dish just kicked my behind.

I need to learn how to bake, from scratch, along with the confidence to be able to experiment in that area.

making a roux. dangerous and tasty, and thus exciting.

Things I have mastered:
thickening with roux (its not SOO hard!)
butchering a chicken
making thai green curry (paste and coconut cream must be friend together until you sneeze, THEN add coconut milk, meat and veggies)
poaching eggs
making omelettes

Things I fail at:
pastry
most authentic indian food.

I recently got a good grasp on pie and tart crusts, as well as experimenting with my broiler...Mmm.

Not a technique, but I'm getting pretty good at putting together a Middle Eastern meal: babaghanouj (with roasted eggplant), Israeli salad, falafel, pita bread (fresh or toasted with za'atar), mujadarra.

I just wish I could get more excited about hummus. It would make my life much simpler :-( .

I've basically mastered most non-yeast baking (although I have yet to reproduce at home the puff pastry that I made in a class last year), roasting and grilling vegetables, and omelettes (I made them once a week for a year when my mom was training for the Marine Corp Marathon and ran 20-35 miles/week)
I would LOVE to master yeast breads (I've been working on it this summer), gnocchi (the one thing I've totally failed at, and am too scared to try again, despite several years of further cooking experience), yogurt making, and ice cream making (mine always seem fine, then turn rock hard and icy in the freezer)

I would like to say baking, but thats probably a lie. I honestly don't think I have mastered anything, I get cooking ADD and try different things all the time so I don't think I have had the time to master any one thing. If I had to pick somethings though it would probably be some soups and pastry cream. Although not together.

I would like to master a lot of different Asian foods, roast a turkey or chicken (basically any large piece of meat), omlettes... o I don't know. How bout everything?

Stew. I make kick-butt stew. I have two secrets. One is that I ALWAYS use meat on the bone. The natural bony goodness immeasurably improves the texture of the finished product (I take the meat off the bone before chilling -- to allow for fat-skimming -- and reheating and serving). The other is that -- particularly with lamb or chicken or anything that involves lentils/beans/pulses -- I almost always throw in a homemade preserved lemon. It both brightens the flavor and, somehow, deepens it.

Most recently, I've mastered the scrambled egg. I know, it sounds dull, but the trick I learned recently is this ... instead of adding cream before you cook the eggs, you add the cream right at the end, which stops the cooking process and keeps the eggs from turning rubbery. Even better is a dollop or two of sour cream, mixed right at the end. Also, turn the heat off sooner than you think you need to. The pan is plenty hot enough to finish cooking the eggs, and keeping it on the heat too long will result, again, in rubbery eggs.

I see 2 new techniques I'd like to try---laura dot's milk bread with the poppy seed addition & DaveFaris' scrambled egg--thanks for sharing your expertise!

One cookie I can never get right is the old-fashioned cut-out sugar cookie that you roll out---mine always sticks on the counter or the shapes get weird when I cut them---suggesstions?