Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I learned this amazing hack from IdeasInFood.com & Studiokitchen.com (Alex & Aki and Sholo Olunloyo, respectively)

Soak dried pasta in sealed plastic bags of water (or stock, if you want to add a flavor) overnight.

Then just finish cooking the pasta for a minute or two right in the sauce!

Sooo many implications for cooking pasta on the line -- it's so much faster and you don't have to keep water boiling. The texture does not suffer.

I always cook my short ribs ahead of time for dinner parties... usually the day before, and stick the whole covered pot in the fridge.

You do have to scoop off the solidified fat before warming the ribs up... you can heat them slowly in their pot over low heat, or put big scoops in a hot cast iron to give the edges a crackly crisp.

Now I want short ribs! I need a summer kitchen.

How has no one said the burger at Noble American Cookery yet?

Grass-fed, topped with a big slice of beet, sauce gribiche, some lovely cheese and for one single dollar extra, a twice-fried, chopped BACON WAFER.

The beet ketchup that comes with the fries is also worth the visit. Truly magical.

Milk is every mammal's first food, but the only mammal that drinks it past their youthful state is humans.

I love cheese, heart yogurt and never want to live without cream puffs, but drink a glass of milk? Yuck.

Ikea makes really cute kid's aprons that are ridiculously cheap and look sassy over your throwback dinner-party-hostess outfits. For actual cooking where you get dirty, the standard white restaurant apron with a towel tucked into the strings is invaluable.

Hosting sucks, that's why restaurateurs are always hiring new ones. Don't submit! Wait tables or tend bar... running a place sucks almost as much as smiling and minding the door.

This is the first place I ate in Roma when I arrived for study abroad... our teachers took us on a walking tour and instructed us to go in and "point at what we wanted" if we couldn't say it. Thus began my love affair with pizza bianco, which has outlasted four boyfriends and three cars.

Whoa, total lies and shenanigans. Wait till Mario see this blog post.

Cows are ruminants, that is, they are supposed to eat GRASS. Feeding animals corn, bone meal and the ground-up scraps (including brain and spinal cords) of other ruminants requires massive amounts of antibiotics and is the direct cause of bovine spongiform encephilitis (mad cow disease) infecting humans.

Taste aside, these creatures were not meant to eat anything but grass and forage. As a meat eater, I find it nonsensical that Josh Ozersky would damn grass-fed meat based on its lack of "marbling".

Don't do it. Just serve cocktails to everyone while you hover over the pot and stir. Re-heated risotto is a gloppy mess. And as a server, I can say the good restaurants make it to order.