Generally, if two ingredients sound like they're going to taste bad together, they're probably going to taste bad together.

Kids want to know things - it's just a matter of keeping them engaged with cooking in a way that provides these learning points, while also giving them some degree of control over the finished product.

If you want your kids to have fun learning about food, you need to let them explore it in their own way. Let them figure out for themselves what textures and flavors go well together. Who knows, maybe they'll invent the next French-fry-dipped-in-a-Frosty trend.

Kids do gross things. For several months, mine would combine everything on her plate into a single bowl, pour her drink on top of it, then mash it up and eat it with her hands. It didn't matter what it was.

Here's what I think, though this theory is hardly unique to me: Kids aren't picky because they really care about particular foods; they're picky because it offers one of the few opportunities in their heavily guided and chaperoned lives to express opinions and exercise control.

I found, when I was working in restaurants, that I did have this sort of natural curiosity about why things work.

Well, my mom is Japanese. She moved to the U.S. when she was a teenager. And so, her food is - she did all of the cooking at home for the most part.

I mean, my family liked eating, but I was one of those kids who, you know, I hated fish until I was probably in my early 20s. When I went to college, I had no idea how to cook.

I was very involved in back of the house, and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So, when you're living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people.

I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I'm pretty methodical, so I had a recipe booklet written out, everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate.

So, the first step to opening a restaurant is, don't. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. I mean, even once you're open, it's still a series of putting out fires. Step one: don't.

I started freelancing for Serious Eats while I was still living in Boston. I was born there, grew up in New York City, but went back to Boston for school, and then I lived in Boston for about ten years.

But if you're from New York and you grew up here, you have it built into you - what a slice of pizza is supposed to be - in a way that people from outside of New York don't.

I have very strong opinions about bagels.

People should eat what they like, even if it's some jalapeno and cheese-covered monstrosity with blueberry cream cheese.

Book proposals are written like business plans. You need to identify your market, see what the competition is in the space, calculate how many books you think you can sell, work on building a platform to sell them and promote them.

A zipper-lock bag will work for basic, short-term sous vide cooking projects, but for extended cooking and storage, you'll want to pair your sous vide circulator with a vacuum sealer.

When I had a side-by-side-style freezer, I kept everything - soup, ground meat, steaks, cooked rice - frozen in flat packs that I filed away vertically like vinyl records.

Steel is dense, which means that, for a given volume, it can hang on to more thermal energy than aluminum can. On the other hand, aluminum is highly conductive, which means that it can transfer heat from one place to another very rapidly.

Many call for cooking pasta directly in milk, a technique that works okay, but it can lead to scorching if you're not super careful with stirring. I prefer the evaporated-milk route because it ensures a clean pan with no burnt bits on the bottom.

Fattier, expensive cuts like prime rib or New York strip are celebratory centerpieces that do best when simply roasted with salt and pepper and served straight away.

If you want to get really crazy, Brussels sprouts love cured pork. Crisp up some bacon, pancetta, or chorizo in a skillet; save the crisp bits; use the fat to roast the sprouts; then toss them together with the meat when they come out of the oven.

So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room, where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything, because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you're forming it, it doesn't bind properly, and your sausages end up crumbly and dry.

Batters are made by combining some sort of flour - usually wheat flour, though cornstarch and rice flour are not uncommon - with a liquid and optional leavening or binding ingredients, like eggs and baking powder.