Yesterday I cooked a big meal for the in-laws. Started with a baby spinach and arugala salad sporting a dash of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, sprinkled with toasted walnuts and blue cheese chunks. The wine was a 1997 Puy-Blanquet St Emilion Grand Cru Bordeaux. The menu included homegrown garlic mashed potatoes with a duck gravy that couldn't be beat. I've been reading What Einstein told his Cook: Kitchen Science Explained (thanks, sis!) and had found the section on gravy the night before. Aha! Pair that with a heaping platter of ratatouille and a main course of Duck a l'Orange. Of course we followed up with a dessert of Creme Brulée and a side of fresh blackberries. After which we rolled into the living room and watched Monsters, Inc.

I've been meaning to mention the Kitchen Science book since my sister gave it to me. The author is a chemist who cooks, turned cook, or something along those lines. Nonetheless he does a great job discussing cooking and, most importantly, WHY you do things a certain way or use certain ingredient combos. It's one thing to read a recipe for gravy that says do this, with these ingredients, no questions asked and another to know what is happening and why. Unlike other kitchen science books this mixes a little humor and some recipes along the way. Recommended.

The duck was on the slight side, a four and a half pound weakling who couldn't flap his way out of a wet paper bag. Usually we get a hefty local duck from the co-op but they've been scarce lately. This one came from the ice fuzzed depths of the grocery store's frozen bird section. Poor duck, probably spent it's life jammed inside a long, low slung building along the interstate in Minnesota. It's no wonder the breast meat was a dimunitive afterthought, with wings that never felt the invisible lift of air or the mad flap of final approach onto a lake. In France you see ducks in most bodies of water. I have this fantastical illusion that French restaurants hire snorklers to harvest ducks from below. Perhaps someone will create a free-ranging duck farm and use retired NASA wind tunnels for daily exercise?

Cooking is quite a bit like programming. You can totally wing it or follow reference manuals. The more you cook/program the more tricks you have up your sleeve. Then again, maybe cooking is more like writing utilities than full blown apps? When I'm digging through the french cook book looking for a technique with eggplant it's not that much different than digging through an O'Reilly book looking for an example of the Perl map function. Is it?

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