Our very clever, very clothed Never Cook Naked columnists, Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein, are at your disposal, able to troubleshoot everything from questionable table etiquette to tricky cooking techniques (and, natch, proper cooking attire). For those of you curious to read more culinary conundrums explained, perhaps you’d care to peruse previously asked questions, starting with last column’s answers regarding “blonde” coffee, old eggs, and diplomatically declining undesired foods. Still not seeing what you’re seeking? Ask anything (well, anything pertaining to food or drink) @ NeverCookNaked@leitesculinaria.com.

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Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: Is there a way to save leftover chicken salad, coleslaw, or other mayonnaise-based salads? Won’t adding cream or something like that keep the mayonnaise from separating? –Dairy-Deprived

Dear Deprived: For this one time only, in the entire history of the universe, cream is not the answer.

Your mayo-drenched salad may weep, but you needn’t. By and large, the problem’s not the mayo. It’s everything else. The salt and other random acts of sodium in the salad pull moisture from the cabbage, carrots, celery, cukes, onions—even from the chicken and mayo, although that doesn’t account for much compared to the vegetable swamp.

That said, there’s an easy solution for coleslaw, albeit one that relies on preventative measures and not after-the-fact heroics. Before you make your slaw, just toss the shredded cabbage with 1 to 2 tablespoons salt and let it rest in a colander placed in the sink. Within minutes, you’ll see the cabbage start to exude moisture. After an hour, rinse the cabbage to get rid of the salt and squeeze it dry in handfuls before adding it to the dressing and other fixings.

But would that life was as easy as slaw! Other salads come more quickly to the crying game. If you anticipate having leftovers of a creamy, er, mayo-y salad, skip the water-sapping salt and let everyone sprinkle it on their individual portions. And bear in mind that low-fat or fat-free mayonnaise is made with far more water than the high-octane stuff. Use full-fat mayo for less soggy salads. Or make your own mayonnaise—which won’t have any water in the mix.

Still, you’re fighting a losing battle. So eat those creamy, full-fat leftovers sooner rather than later. You can save your weeping for later, when you step on the bathroom scale.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: How do you get fluted pie crusts and tarts to maintain their pert shape and not shrink during baking? –Shrinking Violet

Dear Shrinking Violet: We hear your pain. We, too, have witnessed shrinkage shrivel the best of intentions. A dip in the pool after dinner and the night’s ruined. Once we were at this jazzy little hotel when. . . .

Oh, wait, we’re talking about pie crusts. Well, same thing. The problem is still water. Too much makes things shrink. Here’s how to fix it:

Add as little water to the dough as possible. Most pie crust recipes involve a rather inexact measurement of liquid–for example, between 3 and 5 tablespoons cold water. Start with the minimum of 3. Not even 3 1/2. See if the dough will cohere. If not, add more water in teaspoon increments until your dough holds together. Despite the fat and the water, good crusts are all about wheat gluten and its ability to build structure. But you don’t want glue. You want just enough moisture to loosen the gluten a bit so those proteins can line up properly for a good crust.

Remember that using butter in a pie crust is, essentially, also adding water to a pie crust. Butter is about 20 percent water, whereas vegetable shortening and–dare we say it?–lard contain no additional water. So be even more judicious when adding the water to all-butter crusts since there’s already hidden moisture in the mix. Or use a combo of butter and lard (or shortening) to help keep shrinkage to a minimum.

Use cold water when making a crust. While we’re talking about fat, you also need to try to do everything you can to slow down the melting of the fat as you work the pie crust so the fat can do its flaky-layer-making thing as the crust sets in the oven.

As to that other problem with water, just book a room in a hotel without a pool. And don’t eat too much pie. That can kill the mood, too.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: My husband and I love a proper rib eye. He does the cooking; I do the plating. I tend to carve for myself the tender, pot-roast-y, ridiculously fatty fat fat outer portion, leaving him everything else. Is this behavior okay? He’s not a picky eater, whereas–let’s be honest–I am. –Ms. Jack Spratt

Dear Ms. Spratt: Is it okay?

Is it okay to offer the tender, succulent round eye of steak to your husband?

Is it okay to sit there and watch him slice his perfectly cooked, relatively lean, medium-rare steak while you eat the charred crust, the fat sticky and glistening on your lips?

But there’s a bigger, far more important question here: who gets to gnaw away in bliss on the juicy bone? That will tell just how okay the situation is—and how viable your relationship. Whatever the answer, we don’t think it’s going to pose a problem. We have a similar arrangement in our house—he who gets the fat also gets the bone—and we’ve lasted for 15 years of rib eyes.

Got more questions? Good. We do, too. That is, more questions AND answers. Take a peek at previous columns from our Never Cook Naked guys for more cooking etiquette and enigmas explained. Still not finding the answers to your every culinary conundrum? Ask the guys what’s on your mind by emailing NeverCookNaked@leitesculinaria.com. Anything pertaining to food or drink goes. Well, anything within reason. But first, those previously tended questions we promised…

“Blonde” Coffee, Old Eggs, Diplomatic Diners, Flat Cookies

“Standing on the stage delivering the graduation speech at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris is not the optimal time for an existential crisis.”

Listen to the podcast

So begins The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, a sequel, of sorts, to The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry from award-winning writer Kathleen Flinn. Whereas Flinn’s first book tells her tale of earning a diploma from the world’s most famous cooking school, her second commences two years after she’s left the hallowed halls–and kitchens–of Paris for home in Seattle. But here she’s back, standing in an opulent ballroom just off the Champs-Elysées, rows of graduates before her, a line of chefs in tall toques behind her. Everyone is waiting to hear what she has to say–including her, as she finds herself wondering what wisdom she can possibly impart to to others when she still hasn’t decided what to do with her degree. It wasn’t until after returning to everyday life in Seattle that the classically trained chef with a penchant for helping others found her way…or rather, that it found her.—Editors of Leite’s Culinaria

***

Normally, I do not stalk people in grocery stores.

I confess to the occasional practice of supermarket voyeurism. Who doesn’t sometimes notice the curious collections of fellow shoppers, then contemplate what this may reveal? What goes on in the home of a hunched, graying woman with 19 cans of cat food, iceberg lettuce, a family pack of steaks, and a copy of In Style magazine? Or an elegant man with a perfect manicure who lingers over the imported cheese counter, his cart filled with organic greens, expensive olives, and four bottles of champagne? Every grocery cart tells a story.

Late on an otherwise average Tuesday afternoon, a sight near the canned tuna stopped me dead in my tracks. The cart sat as if abandoned in the middle of the aisle. It contained two dozen haphazardly piled boxes of dehydrated mixes for pasta, casseroles, rice, and stuffing and dubious jars of gravy. Despite being half full, the cart contained no real food. As I stood contemplating its contents, a heavyset woman in her late thirties claimed the cart. Her preteen daughter twirled impatiently around her, quietly singing a Lady Gaga song under her breath.

Would it be wrong if I followed her to find out what else she might buy?

Small basket in hand, I trailed behind her to stealthily observe. I feigned interest in various items along the aisles as she stocked up on packaged waffles and pizza pretzel bites, a collection of frozen dinners, chicken potpies, and a family-size package of pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy.

By the time we hit the meat department, I suspected she was onto me. “Can you believe how expensive chicken breasts are these days? Crazy,” she said out loud, to no one in particular.

I seized the opportunity to say something. “Whole chickens are on sale,” I said. “Ninety-nine cents a pound, I think.”

She chuckled. “Thanks, but I would have no idea what to do with a whole chicken.”

It hit me. After a year deboning chickens and stuffing meat with other meats at a famous Paris cooking school, I had information this woman needed. For some reason, at that moment, I felt compelled to give it to her. “Come with me. I’ll get someone to show you how to cut up a chicken.”

“Ah, no, thanks,” she said. A reasonable response given that I was a complete stranger who had followed her or 20 minutes through the maze of grocery store aisles. Somehow I assured her that I was not trying to sell a time-share in front of the turkey kielbasa. We headed over to the butcher.  He stopped to show her how each cut was done. As he finished, he crackled fresh butcher paper around the pieces. He winked and passed her the freshly wrapped chicken. It landed heavy in her hand. She looked thoughtful. “What is it?” I asked.

Want it? Click it.

She looked around, leaned forward, and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “I don’t know what to do with the other parts of the chicken. I only know how to cook the breasts.” She shrugged, embarrassed. “But thanks for your help.”

As she pushed her cart away, her daughter in tow, I stopped her. I could not let this woman go without knowing what to do with the rest of her chicken.

For the next hour, I led her around the store, making notes in the margins and writing new recipes in the notepad that I always carry in my purse. We discussed why she bought so many boxes and cans. “When I make stuff from a box, it always turns out right,” she explained. She picked up one box of pasta, the kind that makes a side dish in a few minutes. I know that Alfredo sauce is made with cream, but I would have no idea how to make it.”

I spent a year in culinary school learning endless variations on cream sauce. I explained a simple technique—boil cream until it reduces and then extend it with a bit of the cloudy water left over from cooking pasta. “That’s it? Oh, wow, I thought it was a lot more complicated.” She agreed that if I wrote down the recipe, she’d give it a try. Out went the nine boxes, and in went two packages of pasta, a quart of cream, and a small wedge of Parmesan cheese—for roughly the same amount of money yet enough to make twice as many servings.

This result made her curious about what else we could replace from her cart. Real potatoes picked out by her daughter (along with a pink peeler) replaced the dehydrated variety. “I don’t mind boxed mashed potatoes” was not the sort of comment that crept into my usual conversations.  What intrigued me was that the woman I met felt that she was cooking. To her, opening a box and doing something with it was creating a meal. I disagree. Yet neither of us is right or wrong.

“You know, I can’t thank you enough for all this,” she said earnestly as we made our way to the checkout. “At first, I thought you were some crazy person. But this feels like Wonder Woman stopping to help fix a flat tire.” She and her daughter waved an enthusiastic good-bye.

That afternoon stayed with me. It awakened a curiosity that I hadn’t realized I had. Somehow, I knew this chance encounter was going to change my life.

My grandma isn’t your typical floral housecoat-wearing, quilt-sewing, rolling-pin waving sort of grandma. When she’s not driving herself to Monday morning Tai Chi class, she’s lunching with friends while wearing hip-hugging jeans most likely purchased at Target and, if she’s feeling really spry, red cowboy boots. Even after 89 years, my grandma has style–especially when it comes to shoes. It’s a fetish she and I share, even if she prefers these days to scuttle around in sensible sneakers, seeing as her balance isn’t what it once was. Not that this keeps her from going shopping for outlandish heels–and then returning them a few days later. She can’t actually wear them. She just likes to think she can.

The other passion we share, something she has yet to lose and I have yet to master, is her knack for baking chocolate chip cookies. I recall her avocado-green stand mixer resting on her kitchen counter. I would watch, mesmerized, as the enchanted bowl seemingly turned on its own while the beater twirled like a dervish inside. At the time, I thought my grandma to be magic incarnate, that she’d cast some sort of kitchen spell. Occasionally she’d jab her wand—okay, spatula–into the bowl, scraping the cookie dough from the sides and pushing it into the dancer’s path.

Each time I’d visit, which was often, there would be cookies. I’d sit at her kitchen table, a plate of them before me, while she watched her afternoon “stories” on TV. And each Christmas Eve before bed, the kids would scrawl notes to Santa and leave them by our grandparents’ shimmery-tinsel-covered tree alongside a heaping stack of her cookies. (I’ll never forget the year I woke up Christmas morning to find a Barbie Dream House waiting for me. Throughout the rest of my believing years, I was convinced that this present was a message from Santa, his way of saying, “Those cookies rock!”)

When I think of my grandma, I always picture her making those cookies. They, and she, are as much a part of my childhood memories as my Raggedy Ann doll and roller skates. Not to have them would be like erasing the chalk hopscotch squares I etched on my driveway as a kid.

I never outgrew her cookies, just as my grandma never outgrew making them for me. Her cookies have always been there for me when I needed them most, like when I’d graduated from college and moved across the country. They just appeared my doorstep one day in a brown paper grocery bag wrapped around a Sears sweater box and shackled in miles of transparent adhesive tape. I had to literally hack through the layers with a knife, but eventually I unearthed a heaping mound of cookies protected by plastic wrap and foil. Taped to the top was a handwritten card that read, “If you want us to come get you with a U-haul, we will. Love, Gramma.”

My Grandma’s cookies still come out of the oven exactly the same as they did when I was a kid–crunchy at the edges, chewy in the center, with hills of milk chocolate chips and golden doughy valleys coursing through them. As the only granddaughter, I’ve always felt compelled to figure out her secret, which is actually no secret at all. It’s not as if the recipe has been handed down from relatives who arrived on the Mayflower. Nor does it call for a rare ingredient harvested from the fields of Shangri-La or plucked from an exotic tree in a country whose name I cannot pronounce. It’s printed in mass quantities on the back of the Nestle Toll House bag. Though born from a simple and ubiquitous recipe, her cookies are somehow special and, like her, have a flair all her own. Sort of like those red cowboy boots.

I first asked my grandma “How do you get them so perfect each time?”as a teenager, my mouth crammed full of chocolate-chip cookie number three while I battled with my brother and cousin for the last one on the plate. She laughed her familiar toothy, three-part laugh, the same laugh I’ve heard my entire life. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said proudly, shrugging her shoulders. “I just do.”

I’m still asking her that question. To date, I’ve baked thousands and thousands of cookies–or so it feels–yet not one has rivaled hers. So, like a radio show listener, I call in for advice after each botched batch. Our conversations tend to go something like this.

“What about the butter?” I ask her. “Do you think I’m softening it too much?

“Did you use butter or butter-flavored shortening?” she asks.

“Uh…the recipe calls for real butter, Grandma,” I respond, hoping the what-the-hell face I’m making out of confusion–and, who are we kidding, mild frustration–can’t be detected over the phone.

“Ah ha! Well, that’s it then,” she says in a tone that makes me think she really wants to say “Of course you use Crisco, dummy!” even though she’d never, ever call me that. “I always use butter-flavored Crisco,” she adds.

Though frustrated by the omission of this important substitution, I refrain from pointing out that she once told me she follows the steps of the original Toll House recipe  “exactly.” And this is not exactly.

“Ok,” I say. “I’ll try the Crisco.”

“Butter-flavored Crisco,” she insists.

I cringe. Then I try it. Actually, the Crisco cookies look more like hers. Taste more like hers, too. But they still aren’t hers.

“Did you put the flour in a little bit at a time after you creamed the butter and sugar?” my grandma asks during our next call.

“Yes, I did that.”

“Well, maybe it’s your mixer,” she says.

I remind her that I’d purchased a mixer, one just like hers, years earlier when I first embarked on my cookie quest. It has the same removable beaters that I like to lick clean, just as I did when I was a little girl in her kitchen.

A few weeks later I inquire about her cookie sheet.

“Oh, I’ve had my cookie sheet for 20 years. That’s not the issue,” she says.  “But how many cookies do you put on it at a time?”

“Twelve,” I respond.

“You should only put on nine, ” she said, relinquishing yet another never-before-heard spoonful of wisdom. “Don’t crowd the cookies.” Pause. “Unless you’re in a hurry.”

Sigh.

My aunt Jan has been on a similar quest to recreate these cookies. A doting daughter, she’s lived most of her life within a few miles of my grandmother. I, on the other hand, have been separated from my grandma’s kitchen by states or continents since I was 25, thus left to do my own cookie detective work. I suspect Jan’s benefitted from a little extra cookie coaching over the years. Betty Crocker versus Nancy Drew.

“Honestly, I don’t care who masters the recipe,” I told my aunt a while ago, sitting in her kitchen and watching her fold chocolate chips into her cookie dough. “We just need to make sure someone does.” She nodded in agreement, handing me the spoon to lick. Neither of us said what we were actually thinking–that this really isn’t about the cookies. What we’ve really been seeking by measuring and stirring all these years is some way to lessen the inescapable grief that will suffocate us when my grandmother is no longer with us.

I’m banking on the notion that when she’s gone, these cookies–her cookies–will lead me to memories of her. Memories of the two of us squeezed together in the EZ chair having warm cookies and milk while reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas. Memories of the soft touch of her hands in my hair as she formed the double braids I was so fond of as a child. Without an exact replica of these cookies, something I can cling to when she’s gone, I’m afraid my memories will be forgotten. That I’ll one day forget her.

My family gathered at my aunt’s house this past Thanksgiving, a rare reunion given that we’re all spread thin across time zones and responsibilities. After dinner, my aunt nonchalantly placed a platter of perfectly lumpy cookies, gooey with melted chocolate chips, in the center of the table. If I hadn’t known where they came from, I would’ve guessed they were my grandma’s.

Greedy hands emptied the plate in record time. My eyes locked with those of my aunt, who I could tell was silently asking what I thought. I bit into a cookie. It tasted exactly like my grandma’s.

My grandma tried one, too. Then she patted my aunt’s arm. “Well, I guess you don’t need me anymore,” she said quietly, looking down at her lap.

I went to where my grandma was seated and kneeled in front of her. She placed her hands on my cheeks and smiled down at me, her hands smelling of Lubriderm lotion–a scent that, like baking cookies, reminds me only of her. In that moment, I understood that these cookies weren’t just important ingredients in my memory. They also mark decades of birthdays and housewarmings, graduations and holidays, for her as well. “I need you, grandma.”

Practice has brought me closer to perfecting her recipe, though I still feign helpless granddaughter from time to time, calling to ask her exactly how she does it. This, even though I’m of an age where I’m beginning to understand the lure of sensible shoes.

“Do you use pure vanilla extract or vanilla flavoring?” I ask.

She knows I already know the answer. But she explains patiently anyway.

“Oh, only real, pure extract,” she says. “It costs a little more, but it’s worth it.”

It seems neither of us is ready to let go just yet.

Babies’ hair smells keenly of humanity. It makes people groan, small but deep–a kind of creaking in their gut as they inhale and say, “Hmmm.”

Babies smell of rusks, even if they don’t eat them. Tiny babies smell like kissing someone in a field; also of milk, and asparagus, and–it’s up to you really–pancakes cooked in the Frytex of your youth; baby lotion, even if they are wearing none; sunshine, even in the middle of winter; and so on. They smell of all lost things, now regained.

Want it? Click it.

Babies’ feet smell, bizarrely, of feet. It starts early.

Babies’ shit smells a little like ham going off. Also biscuits. Sometimes, if their tummy is upset, there is a whiff of fried egg. One day, much later, you turn from the nappy table and say, “Christ, that actually smells like shit.”

Babies finally smell like you and they smell like your partner. This is as it should be. This was the way they are made. But I wonder if they don’t just take our imprint on to their skin, which is to say, the imprint of the last person to hold them–the mother’s the father’s, the baby minder’s, the woman in the doctor’s waiting room who asks can she “have a go.” Some parents can smell a stranger off their baby as soon as they pick them up–I am speaking of quite normal parents here–they can smell musty old talc, and women who wear Obsession, and the baby minder’s car with its little bottle of aromatherapy oil, plugged into the place where the cigarette lighter used to go.

Perhaps babies are just olfactory blotting paper. They smell of the person who last minded them. They smell of You.

What do we do with babies? We inhale them, our face hovers over them, we hold them and keep a tiny, delicious distance between their skin and our own. We kiss them thoughtfully on the head, and we kiss them playfully in the fat, soft cusion under the chin. All day, we sniff them up and down. We do not lick them.

I really don’t like candid photos. Whenever people want to take a picture of me, I a.) make them sign a contract that gives me full PhotoShop approval–in perpetuity–over any image of me they publish, and b.) insist on spending an inordinate time on my hair and teeth. Once contractual obligations as well as buffing and fussing are out of the way, I give the go ahead to take that sparklingly spontaneous shot.

But when I saw this little moment of supper loveliness tonight, I grabbed my iPhone and just snapped. I didn’t even have enough sense to remove the Costco salt grinder or fluff the spaghetti. This was our supper table, unstyled. But to me, it sums up everything about outdoor dining: casual, simple, unpretentious, and, yes, bounteous. (It’s The One and me we’re talking about here. That man can polish off three-quarters of a pound of pasta in a single sitting.)

Dinner took as long to put together as it took the spaghetti rigati to cook. What–15 minutes, maybe? Meanwhile I sautéed tiger shrimp in a lake of brown butter and a bit of oil, then tossed in a big-ass handful of chopped garlic. I had about 1 1/2 cups of leftover homemade tomato sauce and spooned that in, too, for good measure. I dumped the drained spaghetti into the skillet and the sautéed it all together for another two to three minutes.

As I began plating, our frequent dinner companions, whom we haven’t seen since last October, dropped by for a visit. I mean, of course, the backyard bats and mosquitos. To prevent The One, a long-suffering chiroptophobe, from letting loose with his 12-year-old-girl shrieks that blow like a train whistle, I demanded he don a baseball cap and keep his eyes on his plate. Me, I’m just a great big flashing neon sign that sputters on and off “All You Can Eat Buffet!” We haven’t yet bought bug spray this season, so I wore thick wool socks with my pant legs tucked in and a dirty dish towel over my head. Lucky for us, the paparazzi didn’t know we were in town. Do you know how hard it is get them to agree to that PhotoShop contract?

E, my husband, likes to give big gifts. Extravagant gifts. Thoughtful gifts. Like a patootie-kicking mountain bike. A week in Paris. A Macbook Air laptop and vintage leather messenger bag so I, his writer wife, could call the city–and its endless park benches and sunny stoops–my office.

I veer toward less pricey gifts. Practical gifts. Gifts inspired by a farmer’s daughter’s frugality. Like a virtual surprise birthday party with friends scattered across several continents. A private bourbon tasting of rare bottlings for him and a buddy so he knows exactly which brands are worth the splurge. And, this past Christmas, utensils.

Last December, the loss of a loved one left us thinking presents weren’t exactly a priority. Still, I thought coming home to a little something under the tree–left bare in our rush out of town—would create a moment of loveliness, something to help soothe some raw edges. So I did what I—and every rational and rationalizing woman I know–instinctively do when circumstances scream for some measure of happiness. I splurged at Anthropologie.

It was a modest extravagance, as extravagances go. A set of six steak knives. Steak knives that sort of flaunted stately blades of sturdy stainless steel and curvaceous handles fashioned from, of all things, lollipop-colored PVC. It was swoon at first sight.

The knives were crafted by forge de Laguiole, the legendary French house whose artisanal craftsmanship can be traced back two centuries and whose unparalleled elegance I’d coveted the past two decades. Though the company tends toward more masculine designs drawing on wood handles, a nod to their beginnings as makers of pocket-knives for sheepherders, these were unlike any other Laguiole creations I’d seen. Yet I’d recognized that luxurious curve immediately. Utensils, yes. Utilitarian, not so much.

E’s reaction as he unwrapped the box was one of…surprise. Bemused, eyebrow-raising surprise. Holding a slender knife—the magenta one, the one most dear to me–daintily in his rugged hand, his expression said everything. Flimsy. Silly. Girlie. “They’re not terrible,” he finally said halfheartedly.

I kept them anyways. Call it woman’s intuition. I found them to be unabashedly bohemian as well as eminently practical. A single steak—ribeye, grass-fed, washed down with bubbly—was all it took for E to appreciate how Laguiole’s stylish blade slid through the steak as if it were silk. We’ve since come to appreciate that they work just as deftly on takeout chargrilled chicken from across the street. Any excuse to use them. I even let our Lauguioles out on the counter, their psychedelic handles jutting out of an antique canning jar, mostly because I like to watch E as he muses over which color he selects on a given night. Although as befits the thoughtful guy that he is, E always lets me select first. It’s what I consider to be a gift.

Laguiole steak knives are not currently available at Anthropologie, although the set of six knives in psychedelic colors is available elsewhere, including the very reasonably priced Whisk and, not surprisingly, at Amazon, albeit priced at a slightly more indulgent splurge. The knives can also be found in more muted colors at Wine Enthusiast. The full array of Laguiole steak knives, in traditional wood grain or crazy colors, can be found at the source, Laguiole.

If you’re wondering, “Why such an unusual name for a cooking advice column?” look no further. Actually, look away. For a very brief moment in time, I did cook naked. To whit, I have a terrible habit of getting about as much food on me as I do in the skillet when I’m in the kitchen. But I’d long ago sworn off aprons because they tug too much on the back of my neck, making me look more Quasimodo and less Rico Suave. So one night before guests arrived, I had an idea: I’d strip down, do the last-minute searing, sautéing, and such, and then pop into the bedroom to get gussied up. The result, I thought, would be impeccably grease-free threads. No one would be the wiser.

Lesson one: Oil burns when it splatters. A lot. Especially on tender, counter-high nether regions.

Lesson two: Food left on the stovetop burns when you ignore it as you run cursing around the kitchen rubbing ice cubes all over your, well, never mind.

Lesson three: Lesson learned.

The lessons don’t end there. We’ve more kitchen wit and wisdom to impart, believe it or not, and here to do it are our Never Cook Naked guys, Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein. Ask them anything. Anything at all, whether matters of ingredients, technique, or etiquette. (And we do mean anything, given that we hear they, too, have had their share of boxer-clad culinary mishaps.)—David Leite

—–

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: I thought my love of strong black coffee made me something of an elite coffee drinker. But now that some coffee shops are professing the purity of lighter, or “blonde,” roasts, I’m starting to question everything. Was my sense of coffee superiority an illusion? Are my consumption habits about to become passé?—Nervous (But Not From the Caffeine)

Dear Nervous: Allow us a few guesses. You’re over 30. That tattoo you got in college is starting to fade. You find yourself buying sensible shoes. You’re afraid you’re no longer relevant.

Take heart: You’re not. Welcome to Adultlandia. Your resident visa will be ready in a few weeks.

In the meantime, sit back and sip your strong black coffee. Don’t be swayed by the marketing. All that advertising blather about ultra-light roasts was designed for the hipsters filling the ranks you’ve left behind. (We’ve seen what passes for coffee in some of those shops that tout their light roasts. A pumpkin mocha macchiatto with extra whip is not coffee. It’s Dairy Queen for the newly tattooed.)

Just relax. You’ve entered the blissful years of enjoyment without ego transactions. You’ll be nice and rested when you revisit this whole problem in your early 60s with the purchase of your first Corvette.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: In my experience, in order to make perfect hard-boiled eggs, the eggs need to be at least a week old. I’m not sure why, but they always come out perfectly. What gives?—Nothing’s Rotten in Denmark

Dear Rotten: We live in the country. We buy eggs from a woman down the road from us. Yet we still don’t know exactly how old those eggs are. So unless you’re raising your own hens and are present for the blessed event, chances are you don’t know exactly how old your eggs are, either. Neither do we.

We do know this: brand-new eggs out of the henhouse become hard-boiled eggs that are, as you said, more difficult to peel. The membrane that holds the whites to the shell in these eggs is more tenacious, mostly because the egg itself is more acidic when fresh. Over the course of a few days or weeks, as the pH of the egg rises, the membrane becomes less adhesive. Voilà. More easy-to-peel hard-boiled eggs.

There’s a trade-off. Once the membrane begins to lose its adhesive properties, the yolks move around more freely in the white and thus are often not perfectly centered in hard-boiled eggs. It’s not a big deal, but you were making claims for perfection, so we felt the need to point that out.

So yes, it’s true, perfectly fresh eggs don’t make the best hard-boiled eggs. But they do make the best scrambled eggs. And fried eggs.  And poached eggs. And puddings. And soufflés.  And meringues.  We could go on, but those eggs are starting to get old.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: I’ve got a question about how to diplomatically decline foods you can’t stomach. The top of my ick list is dill. It ruins everything for me. So what do I do if I’m at a dinner party and am served an offending dish?—Dillphobic

Dear Dillphobic: First, you’ve got to decide how important the dinner is. If you’re being offered the position of executive producer on a Hollywood movie and you’re invited to seal the deal at George Clooney’s dill farm, smile and swallow. If you’re out to dinner with your future in-laws and they’re wondering if you’ll be a good guardian of Junior’s trust funds, smile and swallow. If you’re over for dinner at a friend’s house and the salmon comes with a dill sauce, you’re within the range of acceptable manners to ask that the sauce be left on the side.

Just be sure to ask, not screech. It’s the outrage, the horror, the eye-rolling, the if-I-eat-that-I’ll-convulse attitude that tends to set off hosts–especially hosts who’ve invested quite a lot of time, money, and love in that meal, and then graciously invited you to partake of it. So be decorous. Explain your dilemma. Tactfully. Better yet, explain your dilemma when you accept the invitation so your host has plenty of time to plan.

Bear in mind, there’s a hierarchy of intolerances at the table. We’ve been talking about preferences, not actual physical intolerances or allergies. You owe your host the respect of telling them about your specific needs. They’d rather know than have you push the plate away. And you need to respect yourself, too. There’s no reason to set yourself up for 24 (or more) hours of gastric distress just to be polite. Although, that, of course, is up to you.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: Why do my chocolate chip cookies always spread too much? I heard somewhere that using more shortening and less butter would fix this problem.—Flattened But Still Baking

Dear Flattened: Blame Laura Petrie. Actually, blame everyone in the ’60s. Back then, home cooks wanted convenience, so they quit lifting their biceps-building stand mixers in and out of the pantry and instead bought nifty little hand mixers they could keep in a drawer. But those puny, weakling gadgets can’t handle butter that’s anything but semi-liquid. Thus, cookie recipes began to be written for “room temperature butter.”

Problem is, room temperature butter can’t trap air. And the entire point of beating butter is to ensure that its fat molecules encapsulate as much air as possible, which lends structure to the dough and in turn makes, arguably, a perfectly shaped cookie. In order to do that, the butter needs to be cool enough to retain its own shape. If the fat gets warm, it loses any semblance of structure and spreads all over the place.

So rather than tampering with the ratio of fats in your recipe, perhaps you simply need to buy a back-breaking stand mixer and see to it that your butter is properly chilled. All that said, there are a few other reasons that cookies sometimes tend to spread:

The baking sheet was still warm from the previous batch. Always cool baking sheets to room temperature before plopping more cookie dough on them.

You used a silicon baking mat. There’s simply no resistance to stop things from going every which way on silicon, just like ice rinks. Try baking a batch of cookies with parchment paper instead.

Your baking sheet is insulated. This diffuses heat and leads to cookies spreading in all directions.

Your oven’s calibration is off. Yes, ovens can go out of whack, just like pianos. Buy an oven thermometer and hang it from an oven rack to make certain your appliance’s reading is more accurate than the thinking was back in the ‘60s.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: What to do with shrimp heads and shells after you’ve extracted every possible morsel of shrimp and drop of juice? Compost them? Put them down the garbage disposal? Use them for stock?—Shell-Shocked

Dear Shell-Shocked: Here’s a rule-of-thumb we use in our house: Once a piece of food has been in someone’s mouth, it’s garbage. Feel free to adopt it in yours.

While we’re at it, here’s our off-the-cuff corollary: You can’t make stock out of table scraps. Those shells have been doused with herbs, spices, oils, sauce, maybe even spittle. Not even Martha can make stock for shrimp and grits out of them.

To answer your question, yes, you can compost shrimp shells. Many home gardeners swear by shellfish compost. (Caveat: Some public piles won’t accept shells owing to a desire for pristine vegan mulch.) Just make sure your personal pile is far from your house, as shrimp shells do indeed put up something of a stench in the hot sun– although that’s actually the least of your worries, because the more tasty things you toss on the pile, the more furry well-wishers you’ll attract. In our neck of the woods, we worry about bears. You may have to contend with raccoons or chipmunks. Consider yourself warned.

As for putting shrimp shells down the drain, they can–and will–clog the garbage disposal. They also make for an odiferous trash can. Our best advice is to stuff the shells in a zip-closed bag, stash them in the freezer, and save them for trash day, when you haul them to the curb—along with any of that stock you’ve made.

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: I’m thinking of making the lemon soufflé  on your site. The recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar, although I can’t remember when I bought the dusty bottle that’s sitting in my spice rack. Can I omit the cream of tartar? Or substitute something else? Or should I just use my ancient powder?—Ye Olde Spice Rack

Dear Ye Olde: Short answer: Maybe, no, and yes. In that order.

Long answer:

Maybe. Whether you omit the ingredients depends on how much you value appearances. Cream of tartar strengthens the structure of whipped egg whites, ensuring they’re able to put under lock and key all the air that furious, high-speed beating imparts. Leave out the cream of tartar and you won’t taste the difference, although you may not have the loftiest soufflé on the block. Such scandalously shoddy attention to aesthetics might miff the foodies around you, but it won’t get you kicked off the PTA (unless you live within spitting distance of The French Laundry or appearance-obsessed L.A.).

No. Nothing will take the place of it, so don’t even try to substitute anything else for this ingredient. Unlike other items in your spice rack, cream of tartar is pure chemistry. It’s an acid salt known as potassium bitartrate, or, if you were paying attention in high school chemistry, KC₄H₅O₆. Because it’s not thyme or oregano, you can’t swap something else based on perceived similarities or bottle proximity. You wouldn’t substitute Windex for Blue Curaçao, would you? (Well, unless your spouse really annoyed you.)

Yes. Use the old stuff. It has an almost indefinite shelf life provided—pay attention–the bottle has been sealed against moisture, in which case, see “Maybe.”

Dear Never Cook Naked Guys: Every once in a while I read a recipe that calls for a “heaping” cup of this or a “scant” tablespoon of that. What are they talking about?—Ill-Measured

Dear Ill: You’d never read a German or Italian or French recipe that calls for a scant cup of flour. It would ask for 220 grams of flour. Or 230 grams. In other words, it would call for precisely the amount you need. Precisely.

We here in the good, ole U. S. of A. still bake and cook in cups and spoons. (Just be glad we’ve moved away from rods and hogsheads.)  People elsewhere weigh. We dip. That’s what they did when they measured ingredients back in the day of Grandma. And Great Grandma. And Methuselah. And it’s not going to change anytime soon.

Our advice? When you see “heaping” and “scant,” put down the recipe and instead find one that’s more precise. (May we suggest you seek a recipe from our favorite site?) And invest in a kitchen scale. It’s a lot cheaper than immigrating to Europe.

Some foods will improve your meal, your mood, your day, your buttered noodles. Brisket will improve your life.

I didn’t even know what brisket was until I was about 25 years old. My mother never made it. (Can you say, “Vivian, Swedish Lutheran lover of lutefisk?”) But years later, when I put the first piece of voluptuous beef into my mouth, fork-tender, adrift in a rich, sweet onion gravy…well, you had me at brisket. (Full disclosure: My father, Mannie, was Jewish, so clearly I have a strong brisket gene.)

Not long after, when one of my closest friends revealed the secret ingredient in her family’s brisket recipe, I started to cry. That’s the moment I realized I needed to get to the bottom of why so many of us have such a strong emotional attachment to this sort of blah cut of beef. A buttery rich madeleine you could understand. So French, so delicate, so, well, so Proustian. “Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?”

But why does a flaccid, four-pound, gray-brown piece of beef shaped roughly like the state of Tennessee inspire Proustian prose, evoke the deepest pleasure, and create indelible memories?

Is it because it’s so simple and forgiving that even the worst cook can make a good one? A basic brisket requires little more than a few juicy ingredients to keep it from drying out. That and the patience to wait for it to cook s…l…o…w…l…y.

Is there something to the fact that brisket is just so unpretentious? In a world of Rachel Zoe makeovers, brisket is completely comfortable with what it isn’t. Brisket isn’t some snobby dish you can’t pronounce or afford. It’s not posh–rarely has a truffle ever gone into the making of one. Molecular gastronomists haven’t been able to alter brisket’s perfect DNA or turn it into a foam. It has no airs. It’s as content bathed in ketchup as it is nestled in a day-after taco.

Or could it be that for years, brisket was so affordable you could serve your whole family, invite the neighbors, set an extra place for the rabbi and his wife, and still have leftovers for a week?

Want it? Click it.

While all these things are true and contribute to brisket’s lasting resonance, I believe the real reason for its powerful allure is even simpler. Brisket will be what you want it to be. And that, with all due respect, is more than you can honestly say about your teenager, your hair, your Labradoodle, or most members of Congress.

On a cooking level, it’s a perfect culinary blank canvas, adept at adapting to everything you rub on or throw in, from garlic salt to Liquid smoke to miso to gingersnaps to huge gulps of Coca Cola.

On an emotional level, you can celebrate with brisket, mourn with it, diet with it, defrost with it, court with it, make a friend with it. If brisket didn’t have the power to seduce, there wouldn’t be what’s called The Brisket Brigade in certain Jewish circles. (These circles, by the way, don’t even admit there is such a thing.) Here’s how The Brisket Brigade works. When a man is widowed, thoughtful neighbors and friends (read: unmarried women) console and comfort him the best way they know how: by dropping off a pot of still-warm, homemade brisket. With a heady cloud of steam drifting into the air–all deep fragrance and heavenly flavor, well…it’s enough to make a man think how nice it is to have a woman around the house. A loving, caring woman with a fine, deep pot and a brisket recipe.

That’s the beautifully complex nature of this very simple cut. When you get right down to it, brisket has to do with life. Remembering it, sharing it, celebrating it.

Let me just say what you can already feel. I love brisket. I say, a brisket in every pot, in every Crock-Pot, on every Weber, in every barbecue joint, on every Passover platter, in every deli, at every butcher, in every food truck, on every TV food show, food site, food blog. To quote the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Mark Strand, “I raise my fork and I eat it.”

I love Easter. Always have. Although truth be told, I find the holiday to be a bit odd. Or maybe it’s just the related rituals that I consider to be curious.

I was given pink and blue chicks for Easter one year by a good friend of my parents. Never mind pink and blue eggs. They’d actually dyed chicks Pepto-Bismol pink and robin’s-egg blue. My mother, who knew nothing about farming and almost as much about domestic affairs, thought it’d be fun to let the chicks live in our small kitchen. This is the same woman who once stapled my Girl Scout badges to my uniform because she refused to learn how to sew.

I was certainly game to give it a try. It was the ‘60s and we were living in Maine at the end of a dirt road that overlooked a cove. It was an enchanting place, with ample lady slippers, mussels, and crabs, but it was also a remote place, without any other kids for an only child to befriend. Still, we’d moved there from the city just the year before, so rural living was new and exciting for all of us. Chickens in the kitchen fit right in.

Those chicks were little bundles of fluff, small enough to be cupped in my four-year-old hands, whose cuteness belied their pain-in-the-buttness. My mom and I resurrected a baby gate from the cellar to keep our pets penned inside the kitchen and fashioned a nest from the monogrammed bath towels that my fancy Connecticut grandmother sent us every year at Christmas. During the next few weeks, the chicks hopped around, pooped on the linoleum, squawked in between my legs as I poured Corn Flakes for breakfast, and crowded the fridge’s toasty warm foot pedal that flipped open the freezer door.

That lasted until one day in May, when my mother attempted to make a cake for my fifth birthday. I’d coaxed her into baking it in my new Easy-Bake cake pan, which she’d slid into her grown-up oven for the usual 45 minutes at 350 degrees. The kitchen filled with smoke and the girls fluttered and flew over the baby gate (who knew chickens could fly?) and into the dining room, sending our dog, Jezebel, into a tizzy. An ancient toy Manchester Terrier with bad breath, missing teeth, and a cranky disposition, Jezebel was prone to epileptic seizures. I have very vivid memories of my mother telling hilarious stories at cocktail parties of holding Jezebel down at inopportune moments while the poor thing went off like a firecracker. Roving chickens and an epileptic dog? The chicks had to go.

That Saturday, my father packed my pastel chicks in a box, loaded them in the back of our T-bird convertible, and off we went to a farm in neighboring Falmouth. Driving up the long lane, we watched dozens of dyed birds identical to mine running amok, almost as if they were lifting their pink and blue skirts and making a mad dash for safety. Even to my kindergartener sensibilities this scene seemed ridiculous, which took the sting out of losing my pets. (Although honestly? I really hadn’t been wild about the chick poop all over the place.)

The rest of my childhood Easters were rather boring by comparison, marked only by nondescript colored eggs.

Today I have eight hens, none of them dyed and, thankfully, none of them taking up residence in my kitchen–at least not for more than a month, but that’s another story. While most people nowadays are aghast at the notion of painting chicks, there’s only modest consternation about dyeing eggs. And it’s an issue for some of us only because we wonder whether we ought to eschew all things artificial, including fizzy PAAS tablets. (I sidestep the issue by supplementing naturally dyed eggs with the greenish blue ones laid by my Araucana, a.k.a. the South American Rumpless, an heirloom bird that’s a dead ringer for Carol Channing.

Yet we continue to submerge unhatched chicks in colored water and proceed to hide them where they may never be found, only to foul the air with a noxious odor, one that’s even worse than chicken poop, after several days. Does this strike anyone else as just a little odd?

Apparently not. And so our Easter customs continue, no matter how curious. Those of you who still think dyeing chicks is strange but dyeing eggs isn’t, and there are many of you, perhaps you and I should chat sometime about the notion of a bunny laying eggs.

Up until a couple weeks ago, it’s been a bit chilly this winter, as the locals like to say here in Vermont. This means the temperatures drop into the mid-teens-below-zero at night and rise to a balmy five degrees during the day. Factor in 15- to 20-mile-an-hour winds, and that means it’s cold. Damned cold. Miserably, bone-grindingly, I-hope-the-furnace-doesn’t-crap-out-and-that-the-truck-will-start cold.

None of this would matter much to me if I weren’t a ski instructor. But this curious career choice means I’m outside, day after day, from around 8:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon. Regardless of the weather. “A little nippy,” I’ll mutter to the shivering hulk seated next to me as we ride the chairlift, swaying in the gale and lurching along to the top of the mountain for yet another attempt at this thing called skiing. “Today?” I’ll think to myself. “You have to learn how to ski TODAY?”

I’m generally a pretty reasonable guy. And by and large I like and respect my students. But after a few days of this godawful weather, I tend to get a little nutty.

So at the end of my shift, walking stiff-legged and shivering back to the locker room to change out of my ski boots, all I want in the whole world is some bourbon and a very long, very hot shower. I climb into my truck and make my way home, pulling into the driveway just as the defroster is starting to make a little headway. There I find my devoted golden retriever glaring at me through the plate glass window in the back door. Aw, shit, I mutter out loud. And so I let the dog out. As she noses about, taking her sweet time, I stand there, hands jammed into my pockets, stamping my feet and wondering if she might somehow be in on some conspiracy to keep me out in the cold for as long as inhumanely possible. I also review my plan: 1. Bourbon. 2. Shower.

I’ve long viewed these two activities as largely separate. First I rustle around the kitchen for a teacup, pour my bourbon, and take a sip. Then I leave it on the counter while I took my shower. It simply never occurred to me that you could combine these things. Call it a lack of imagination on my part.

Then the other day, as I was reaching for my teacup from its usual berth on the bottom shelf of the cupboard, I saw it. Sitting on the edge of the upper right shelf, close enough to bite me. It’d been left for me either by the gods, or, more likely, some forgetful house guests from last summer.

Just minutes later, there I was, standing in the shower, steaming hot water cascading over my head and shoulders, holding a sippy cup filled with bourbon. My cup has a little cartoon bear on the side. I’ve been thinking about getting something a bit more Jetson-y. But for now, this will do.

LC Editor Note: We have a sneaking suspicion that you, too, have experienced a sippy-cup moment, concocting something unconventional out of necessity. We want to hear about it. ’Fess up.–LC Editors.