David A. Goldfarb

That's exactly what you should have. The more gelatinous the better!

For removing the skin I usually use a Henckels Four-Star 7-inch flexible boning knife that I originally purchased for removing the breast from a roast turkey before carving.

I use a few different knives for filleting fish--French and German style chef's knives and a flexible and a stiff boning knife. The main thing is that it needs to be really sharp to do a clean job. Lately I seem to be doing a lot with my 4-star "Elephant" Sabatier carbon-steel chef's knife. It's thinner and lighter than a German style chef's knife and holds a terrifically sharp edge. The ones you see the guys in the fish markets using usually have a very thin blade that's angled back like the Wusthof on this page (scroll down to "W4622WS")-- http://www.knifemerchant.com/products.asp?manufacturerID=19&mtype=18 I'd like to get a deba at some point, but it seems that the main attraction of a deba is that it serves two functions--it can be sharp enough to make a clean fillet and heavy enough to cut off the head--and in the meanwhile, I have other knives that perform those functions perfectly well. If you've never handled a deba before, I do recommend picking one up in your hands before ordering one. They're surprisingly heavy. Here's a demo showing one way to fillet with a chef's knife-- http://www.chow.com/videos#!/show/all/11243/how-to-fillet-red-snapper Check out "itasan18" on YouTube for many excellent videos demonstrating Japanese fish preparation techniques.

The French butter that I like that is easily obtained in New York (Fairway, Zabar's, occasionally Murray's, and elsewhere) is Celles sur Belle, but I don't know how widely it is distributed in other parts of the U.S.

I have a large flat board (25" square) without rubber feet, too big to wash in the sink, and our old counters aren't level, so my solution to both the problem of having a level cutting surface and keeping water from collecting under the board is to use a slice of cork from a wine or Belgian-style beer bottle under the board in one corner.

My current version of garlic bread uses garlic confit made with a couple of heads of garlic, separated but not peeled, salt, pepper, and thyme, tossed with olive oil, then baked at 350F in a small covered gratin dish for about a half hour. Cool, pop the garlic cloves out of the peels, and store in a container in the refrigerator. Then for garlic bread, I just spread that on bread, maybe grate some parmesan or suchlike on top, and toast.

I definitely do that too. Whole pork shoulder dropped to 99-cents a pound at my usual supermarket-kind-of-market last week, so I took the biggest one in the bin and cut up the whole thing for sausages--about 3 pounds fresh and 7 pounds for <i>saucisson sec</i>, and then cursed when I saw pork shoulder at another market a few days later for 69-cents a pound.

I pretty much always cook around what looks good in the market. Once in a while I want to try some particular recipe or dish or concept, but with the prior assumption that I can get the ingredients needed in season, which isn't to say I won't go out of my way to hunt down unusual ingredients when seasonality isn't an issue, as for a spice that is normally dried or for a fermented sauce.

As another reference point for cost, I think I paid about $55 new for my 40 quart Korean 4mm-aluminum stock pot from a restaurant supply in the Bowery. I bought it more for things like lobster than stock. Unless I was planning to load up my freezer with glace de viande, I don't think I have anywhere to put 40 quarts of stock.

Just for the record, I have two Mauviel tin-lined hammered copper stock pots, and as heavy copper goes they don't come that thick, so even Mauviel doesn't seem to think that a heavy straight gauge stockpot is a necessity. The 9.5" is 2mm thick (that's the one in my avatar), and the 11" is 3mm, so my sense is that they make them thick enough to support their structure, but not as heavy as, say, a saute pan or a rondeau in the same line. They do maintain a nice steady low simmer without need for much attention, and I think they heat up and cool down relatively quickly, but above a certain size, the volume of the liquid is a more important determinant of a stockpot's cooking qualities than the material the pot is made out of. Of course a heavy bottom is desirable if you want to be able to brown things in the bottom of the pot.

50p for a Thermomix probably beats my best deals, which include-- Two Mauviel 9.5" 2.5mm copper, stainless-lined Windsor pans (evasée) in the clearance section of Bed, Bath and Beyond for $19.98 each. I was walking by the clearance section, about 8 or 9 years ago, just as the clerk was putting these out. They had a couple of scratches on the bottoms, as if they'd been used once in a demo or maybe had been returned, so I asked if that was really the price, and he said yes, so I took one for myself and one for my father. A block of six Sabatier **** Elephant carbon steel knives plus the block and a steel at a stoop sale in Brooklyn (the Brooklyn equivalent of a garage sale) for $40. They were coated in vegetable oil, which I stripped off. After using the 10" chef's knife for a few years, I decided it never felt right to me, so I sold it for $80 on eBay. Still using the others after about 10 years or so, and they seem to get better and better. Around the same time as I got the Sabatier knives, the landlord was renovating an apartment upstairs from us in our brownstone, and the contractors threw out a 25x25x1.5" side grain maple butcher block, which I reclaimed and am still using.

Nicely illustrated demo! Congratulations. I particularly liked the deveining photos, which are useful. The pink salt, containing ordinary salt and sodium nitrite, would have an effect on the texture and color and also prevents botulism. The pink color is an artificial color used to prevent its being confused with ordinary salt in the kitchen, so Himalayan pink salt isn't a substitute. Since I assume you are keeping the pate under duck fat in the refrigerator (as opposed to room temperature), it's probably okay, but I wouldn't keep it around for months as suggested for pate prepared with pink salt.

I haven't, but that sounds like a great idea. I'm sure one could do better than the stuff in the jar. I just looked at a jar of B&G cocktail onions in the fridge, and they seem to be simply pearl onions pickled with salt and vinegar, and no sugar or spices to speak of. Next time I go to the farmer's market I'll be on the lookout for maybe some local red pearl onions. I think they'd make a good cocktail onion. I don't know how much people think about pairing cocktails with food, but I like a Gibson with a steak.

If one were to use a mallet on the spine of a vegetable cleaver to hack through bones (which would be perfectly acceptable technique with a meat cleaver), that could crack the spine.

Fats, braising liquids, sauces that freeze well, rice. I've also got bags in the freezer for various bones, trimmings, and desirable vegetable peelings and scraps for stock. One of the nicer uses of leftovers recently was a salad I made with leftover black rice, surplus cooked white beans from a cassoulet, lots of chopped flat parsley, olive oil, and seedless mandarin slices.

My French carbon steel knives generally discolor onions and avocados, but not always, and I haven't figured out under what conditions it's more likely to be a problem. I'm not sure that patina helps. I polished a few blades recently with white rouge and red rouge, and my first impression is that the polished knives are less likely to discolor vegetables that are prone to discoloration than knives with a heavy patina. The knives being sharp and working fast helps, and if I notice a problem, I just switch to a stainless knife. What did they do about this before stainless knives?

Wanted to try it tonight, and normally we would have put up with the 15 minute wait to get in, but we were trying to make a movie, so it will have to wait for another opportunity. Looked like a happening place.

I've used both of those methods--oven cleaner and prolonged heat, and they both work quite well, and I also discovered the heat method accidentally by making the mistake of answering the phone while my Lodge grill pan was on a medium flame. Years of accumulated gunk was all turned to cinder.

The only reason to own books, in my opinion, rather than borrowing them from the library is to write in them, so I usually have notes in my cookbooks, and I don't worry too much about the occasional splash. I try to avoid getting them dirty of course, but I'm not wrapping them in plastic or anything like that.

I stack leftover pieces of bread that I think would be suitable for breadcrumbs off to one side of the breadbox to dry, and when I need them or they are taking up too much space, I grind them in the blender and put them in a ziploc bag in the cupboard until I need them. If I want more coarse breadcrumbs, I put them in a bag and hammer them with a rubber mallet.

Made a cassoulet this week, preparing a day in advance and reheating on the second day before serving it, and it was good on the second day and again on the third day, but it was really good for lunch on the fourth day after being cooked once and reheated three times, cooling overnight in between each reheating.

I just think it takes time for everything to get absorbed and infused into everything else, flavors marrying and such. Occasionally I've tried cooling more rapidly and then reheating something like pulled pork or cassoulet, and it didn't seem as good or worth the effort. Better just to plan ahead and let time do its work.

That's exactly how it should be! Heat it up, and it will be a liquid again, and when it cools, it will return to its gelatinous state.

Look in the frozen section of any ordinary not-too-upscale supermarket in Manhattan. Your best chance of finding tropical ingredients is in predominantly Latino neighborhoods like Washington Heights or further uptown on the Upper East Side toward East Harlem, but I've seen these products in other neighborhoods as well.

Looks like a nutcracker, unless I've grossly misread the size from the photo.