Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

We learned this in middle school home ec -- in a pyrex ramekin with a little butter and (quelle horreure) Velveeta -- I did a lot of these after school in the toaster oven as a starving after-school teenager. We also used to get a less-appetizing version at summer camp that we called "hockey pucks" -- not so yum.

I did one last weekend that came out great -- the standard Marcella Hazan Roast-Chicken-with-Lemon-inside (poke holes in lemon with fork, stick in chicken). This time I took a few pieces of preserved Meyer Lemon that I put up a few weeks ago (any Moroccan Preserved Lemon will do), threw them in the mini-chop with a couple cloves of garlic and enough olive oil to make an emulsion. Zip until it makes a nice thick sauce. I painted it on the outside of the chicken and threw it in a 425 oven (breast side down in a hot cast iron pan for 45 minutes, then flip -- I'm at altitude so a chicken takes a little longer than at sea level). It was great -- the combo of lemon and salt and olive oil and garlic made for the kind of crispy skin you just want to pull right off the bird when it's hot, and the juices made a great pan sauce. Yum.

That piece was written by Bonnie Powell of Ethicurean (http://www.ethicurean.com/). If anyone wants more info, she did an interesting post about the math she used to develop the numbers: "Wired’s Infoporn on mapping the price of a calorie" (http://www.ethicurean.com/2007/12/28/infoporn-on-calories/).

Spelling aside -- so did I -- I want both Besh *and* Symon to be Iron Chefs -- they're sort of complementary (and I am weary, weary of Bobby Flay and have always been bewildered by Cat Cora).

My favorite part was always sorting the haul and then hoarding it. I kept mine in an old doll trunk and my brother and I competed every year to see who could make theirs last the longest -- if you got to Christmas with anything other than those horrible Circus Peanuts (really, those people just hate children) then you won. Our mother would also steal the Butterfingers, and one year she had to pull over to the side of the road driving home (we lived on a farm so went to our cousins' house in town to trick or treat) to throw up. An instructive lesson kids, see what happens when you eat too much candy. Because our county is largely rural, and because it's always cold on Halloween, all the kids congregate on a 4 block stretch of Yellowstone Street -- when I was looking at houses my realtor warned me that those houses get 4-5 hundred trick-or-treaters every year -- our local community thrift store donates money to homeowners to buy candy. But it's fun and you get to see all the kids at one time.

But I think if we're trying not to alarm people who find the concept of going organic frightening, then urging them to buy a side of beef (unless they live out here in Montana where that's totally normal and everyone has a freezer) might be aiming a little high. I liked the approach of this article, even if I did quibble with some of the details -- if we can get people to start switching to organic potatoes alone -- the pesticide load not only on the food but on the land is so toxic -- that would be a good start.

What had you been doing wrong before? I'm always as curious about people's cooking disasters as I am about the successes ...

I taught myself to cook in my early twenties from James Beards twinset -- Theory and Practice of Good Cooking and The New James Beard. I was young and broke in NYC and lived about four blocks from the Union Square Greenmarket (and was working as an editorial assistant on The Best of Gourmet and Gourmet's Best Desserts). I was so broke that learning to cook was my main entertainment -- one has to eat, after all. I loved Theory and Practice because it's organized by cooking method -- boiling, roasting, baking etc ...

I do this all the time -- I just salt a chicken when I get home from the store, stick it in the fridge, and then cook it whenever I get around to it. If you think about it as a technique, not a recipe, it's less daunting ...

There's the "Marco Polo" exemption -- spices, coffee, things that historically have been high-value trade-ables are sometimes considered okay. Of course, it's like the different flavors of vegetarianism -- there's always going to be someone who will take purity to outrageous conclusions. I'd condsider olive oil part of the Marco Polo exemption, but then again, I live in Montana, where there are no olive trees --

Beyond picky -- what about the food allergy people -- the celiacs and lactose intolerant etc ... I had one friend who was diagnosed with celiac and became insufferable -- as if gluten was supposed to disappear off the face of the earth because she was allergic to it.
On the other hand, I went to Aqua in San Francisco with a large group a few years ago, and they were great about my brother's shellfish allergy -- they made sure he got something equally yummy for every course and no anaphalaxis!