A well-crafted cocktail isn't complete without the right garnish. This final flourish - often citrus or fresh herbs - enhances the drink's taste, smell, and look.

If anything betrays my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage - besides the Casper-the-friendly-ghost-like skin tone - it's my love of fishy fish.

Cooking is not effortless. To get a recipe that feels effortless is really hard.

Plating your salad with groupings of ingredients may seem fussy but in fact it's the opposite. All the prepped ingredients go directly onto the platter, so no need to dirty a separate mixing bowl for tossing. Another reason we like this plating strategy? It allows the picky eaters out there to choose only the parts they like best.

Canned chickpeas are my tried-and-true pantry fallback for those days where I get home late with no game plan and no energy to cook. More than just about any other canned bean, they retain their shape and texture really well.

My beauty routine has changed a lot since I turned 30. But also, being on camera more has made me dial in on my skincare and makeup routine. I have acne-prone skin, and washing my face with cleanser in the morning, using witch hazel to tone, and washing twice at night to take off all of my makeup has really made a difference.

The holy grail of recipe developing is the recipe that turns out so much more impressive than you would expect from the effort it took to produce.

Never met an egg I didn't like.

All cold brew coffee is more or less made the same way - by long-steeping coarse coffee grounds in unheated water - but it's not all created equal.

I don't like a too-perfect cake. You want people to know it came from your kitchen and not the cake case in the bakery aisle.

Even as a little kid I knew that spinning a dreidel on the floor for literal pennies was a sad consolation for the joys of trimming a Christmas tree.

Home cooks are finding inspiration in the past, digging up centuries-old recipes more familiar to the likes of Thomas Jefferson than Thomas Keller.

Generally, if you're a baker who's still learning the ropes, substitutions can be risky. It's always best to make a recipe the first time as written, and only after that initial success should you make substitutions.

If you think about it, composed salads are like nachos (I'll explain). When you're eating a plate of nachos, it's always a bummer when you get to those naked, topping-less chips on the bottom of the pile. It's the same with salads. No one wants to find a naked leaf on the end of their fork.

The first time I ever deep-fried something, I was terrified. I was making yeasted jelly donuts, and I was so nervous that I fried them, unblinking, with a pounding heart and sweaty palms.

Running - it keeps me balanced, energetic, and primed for pasta intake.

No stuffing is complete without chopped onion and celery - they're the building blocks. If you want to deepen the flavor, consider adding leeks, sage, and/or hardy greens.

You must pre-bake the bottom crust of a custard pie, but this is a tricky step in the pie-making process. Without the presence of filling the crust can slump down into the plate as it bakes, necessitating pie weights to help keep its shape. Then, once you remove the weights to blind bake the crust, the bottom puffs.

Always bake in the center of the oven. A pan placed too close to the bottom of the oven will receive more heat radiating from the oven floor, baking it faster from the bottom. The reverse is true of something baked on the top rack. Always bake in the center for the most even baking and browning all around.

I always keep some variety of dumpling in my freezer for convenience, but frozen homemade pierogi are a special treat.

Sometimes there is dogma in baking and sometimes there is not - you just have to know when to break the rules and when to follow them.

For baked goods where lightness is a prized attribute - almost all cakes, some cookies - it's important to start with room-temperature butter.

I brought babkallah to a party and people freaked. They hovered over like it was a newborn baby, oo-ing and ah-ing. Its beauty didn't prevent them, however, from devouring the entire thing within minutes. It makes a lovely hostess gift, as it's both novel and delicious.

The last time I ordered soup in a restaurant was - well, let me see - possibly never. That's because in my mind, soup is something to be made and eaten at home, ideally with a cuddly animal at your feet in front of a blazing fireplace while the wind whips outside.

Lame blades can dull relatively quickly, so after slashing several loaves the blade won't slice through the dough with tremendous ease. (When this happens, don't throw it away - it's still sharp enough to score duck or pork skin, or shave paper-thin slices of garlic and chives, like a hot knife through butter).

Generally I don't find that basting does a lot of anything! I think what makes the most difference is treating the turkey ahead of time with a dry brine. It really does provide a very moist result.

One thing I hear a lot is that people feel less stressed out after they watch 'Gourmet Makes.' There's a transference of their stress onto me.

I love the Grub Street Diet. I am particularly fascinated by what people eat; I think it says a lot about people.

As a kid, I was overly studious, overly serious, very academically driven. It was important to me on a cellular level to do well. And then I went to college at Harvard, and I relaxed a little bit.

For a while I thought I would work in museums, so my first job after college was an internship at the 9/11 Museum. I quickly found out that I did not want to do that. So I signed up for culinary school, and directly following culinary school, I went to graduate school at McGill.

I have makeup that I can do in 15 minutes, 10 minutes, or five minutes, depending on what I'm doing that day. On a day when I'm shooting, it's 15 minutes. Five minutes is when I'm running around that day, and it's no big deal.

I've always just operated with the attitude that if I work just as hard as I can, everything will be fine.

I'm so bad at self-care.

Cooking has always been work.

There's a lot you can learn about something by taking it apart.

Having those people that you trust implicitly is so important.

Criticism of a dish is not a criticism of the cook.

Don't get attached to any one idea. Nothing is too precious.

I ate cottage cheese all the time growing up, but it wasn't until I was in college that I became aware of the stigma surrounding it.

When I was a kid, my idea of heaven on a hot summer day was fresh cut-up watermelon, Breakstone's cottage cheese, and a sprinkle of salt.

As an adult, I use whole-milk cottage cheese anywhere you might use plain Greek yogurt or ricotta cheese.

The mild creaminess of cottage cheese makes it a perfect blank canvas for almost any flavor combination, savory or sweet. Since it's so soft, I usually try to give it some textural contrast in the form of something crunchy. Brightening it up with acid is also a must.

In the height of summer, a ripe cantaloupe is one of the most intoxicating pieces of produce under the sun.

Every year since culinary school I have made a Buche de Noel, or Yule Log.

I made my first Yule Log as a culinary student in Paris, complete with the traditional chestnut filling, silky chocolate buttercream, and almost-too-adorable mushrooms. Since then, I've tweaked and updated both the recipe and the process - and I've definitely learned tips and tricks to make it easier.

For reasons that aren't quite clear I derive a weird and almost inappropriate pleasure from making a cake that looks like a decomposing log. Essentially, that's what a Buche de Noel is supposed to look like, complete with meringue 'mushrooms' poking out of the chocolate buttercream 'bark.'

Lemon curd is one of the first things I remember cooking when I was old enough to use the stove without supervision. I looked up a recipe in my one of my mom's Martha Stewart cookbooks and went to work, stirring anxiously and monitoring closely for signs that the mixture was thickening so as not to curdle the eggs.

Lemon curd is a basic custard, meaning it's thickened by eggs. Although many curd recipes call for just yolks, I prefer to use a combination of whole eggs and yolks to add a bit of lightness.

True marshmallow - and I'm not talking about those ones from a bag - is nothing more than an Italian meringue set with gelatin.

For rave-worthy soups, skip the store-bought stock. You can extract a cleaner, stronger broth from a combination of water and several pantry ingredients. It's all about layering powerful flavor-enhancers that you probably already have on hand - bacon, tomato paste, herbs, peppercorns, a Parm rind, and, of course, kosher salt.