Its been a busy few weeks for shewearsboots. Among the myriad of January adventures (6 shows in 4 days with
the Don't Tell Darlings,
June Apple Kitchen debut impending, selling more produce for
Horse & Buggy, oh, and
Western wear shopping adventures), I've been reading
Mark Ruhlman's Twenty. The "cook manifesto" genre appeals to my little home-cooking soul. This isn't really a book of recipes to follow, but a series of techniques/concepts that Fancy Pants (that's Ruhlman) decided were the 20 most important things a cook could know and understand. Seriously people: this is my kind of book. There's an entire chapter on things like "Onion" and "Butter" and "Poaching" and "Water". Ruhlman works his way through the building blocks of how we create, build, and manipulate flavor, instead of just giving a set of instructions. You know the old adage: give a woman a fish, and she'll eat for a day, but teach a woman to cook, and she'll make that truffle-duck-aspic-flambe she saw last week on the Food Network. (Not true. There was no duck-aspic-flambe. Actually, there might have been, I don't know. Who's got cable?!)
