Recipes & Tips Blog

I grew up in a food family. Cooking and talking about food was an integral part of every day. Phone conversations with my parents quickly turn to what we have been eating and cooking. The recap of a recent trip they took to Tahoe, for example, was a riveting 15 minute discussion about a leek tart they’d had at a restaurant, oh yes, and the skiing was good.

My kitchen skills are basically self-taught with a few weekend or evening classes thrown in here and there over the years. I’ve always done fairly well following recipes, but have certainly had my share of spectacular disasters, excuse me, “learning experiences.” Though rather competent at producing a dish with the aid of instructions, I was utterly baffled by the knowlege that chefs make up their own recipes. How do they do this? I figured it was their special talent and that’s why they are chefs.

My secret dream has always been to one day have enough spare time and money to go to culinary school for the fun of it. Schools like the Culinary Institute of America do offer week-long boot camps for obsessed hobbyists like me, and I read Martha Rose Shulmans’s  book, Culinary Boot Camp: Five Days of Basic Training at The Culinary Institute of America, with great envy.  That is, until I got to the part about them having to create a meal themselves, inventing the recipes. That struck me as terrifying, would I really be able to do that?

Then I discovered www.Rouxbe.com, an online cooking school with the curriculum of a professional culinary program. It wasn’t long after working through my first few lessons that it started to click; cooking techniques are independent tools applicable to any food, and recipes are just ingredients and flavors layered over these core techniques. Having been an avid cook for 20+ years, I knew ingredients, flavor combinations, and had experience making countless recipes, but for the first time I was seeing cooking approached from a technique perspective rather than a recipe and it was exhilarating. It was as though a secret code had just been unlocked. All of the sudden I understood how it’s possible to just go in the kitchen and cook; to create a fabulous dish without a recipe.

One of the first videos to really change what I was doing in the kitchen was this one on using a chef’s knife. I knew about the tucked finger technique, but I never really mastered it until I watched this.

Once I learned how to properly heat a pan, food didn’t stick. Once I learned how to properly control the heat on my pan, I could actually make a pan sauce because the highly coveted “brown bits” were brown rather than black. Once I learned how to pan sear a piece of meat, I could cook any piece of meat, with any flavors and any additions. Who needs a recipe?

Rouxbe has had a profound impact on my cooking skills and I am ecstatic to be able to share this magnificent resource with you now that we are an official Rouxbe affiliate site. Not only will you see Rouxbe videos tucked into my posts here and there to illustrate this or that, but I get to offer you a free 14-day premium membership! The text versions of their recipes are available for free, but you need a membership to access the video demos and cooking school content, so take advantage of the 14-day free trail to explore all the content on their site. If you get as much out of it as I did, you will be like me and  buy a membership without hesitation.

Click here to get your FREE
14-day membership to Rouxbe!

Rouxbe donates 10% of every premium membership purchased to hunger relief agencies. In that spirit, TableFare will donate 100% of our Rouxbe affiliate commissions to Share Our Strength (Please use any Rouxbe link on our site so we get credit for your purchase). This organization does outstanding work to end child hunger in the US. I am an enthusiastic volunteer in their Operation Frontline program helping to teach six-week cooking and nutrition classes to low income families in Seattle. I hope you love the Rouxbe site and will become a member and help us raise some money for Share Our Strength! Also, I encourage you to volunteer for Operation Frontline in your community.

I’d like to introduce you to one of the founders of Rouxbe and let him tell you about the inspiration behind their unique approach.

Please visit Rouxbe and enjoy your complementary 14 day premium membership! I’d love to hear about what you are learning, so come back and leave a comment once you have a chance to poke around their site.

Visit our Rouxbe affliate page for more information.