I cooked a nice meal for Faith's birthday the other day. The menu on the right is what I put together for her dinner.

Last year my sis gave me Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook. It's quite the tome, beautifully put together and full of fantastic recipes, thoughts on cooking, and imagery.

It's also a little intimidating.

Reading the cookbook everything makes perfect sense. You might even say to yourself, "ah, that IS the way to cook a pea." In practice it was more involved than it seemed. A single ingredient in a recipe turns into a whole separate recipe elsewhere in the book, hopefully one without a similar hierarchical lineage.

The top photo is of fresh English peas chilled in an ice bath before cooking. For all of the recipe's simplicity it took a lot of effort and time, yet the final product was the brightest, greenest pea soup you have EVER seen. Not the army green of most pea soups, but a livid, fluorescent bright green. And yummy!