Today on Deep Sea Cooking with Dave Cousteau...

My good friend Dave gave me a jingle last night as expected. In his quest to not randomly fall over of a massive MI, a ‘sprucing’ up of his diet has begun. And although he can factor PI, yank square roots out of thin air and figure out how many religions there would theoretically be in the Milky Way...well, this ‘cooking’ thing is boldly going where he has not ventured often before.

Apparently I’ve accrued quite a culinary database over the years and while I am not at Julia Child level, I can certainly braise, clarify and deglaze my way around most recipes. Armed with this knowledge, I assisted in deciphering:

1. The difference between a Dutch Oven and a Stock Pot
2. The difference between a Colander and a Strainer
3. Why you should always wash rice
4. How to improvise a double boiler to steam veggies

(It probably also helped that in the DBC (Days before Cable), I had a habit of napping on Sunday afternoons with the PBS cooking lineup turned on.)

Interesting tidbit, and perhaps solution to all this was found when scrolling for a good online glossary to send him: Carrier, the native language of a large part of the central interior of British Columbia, has only two cooking terms:

Onliz: to cook by immersion in hot liquid or steam. (blanch, boil, steam)
Otes: to cook dry, without liquid. (fry, bake, roast)

As this plays nice along with his urging to move to Canada, may I present this as an alternative to learning random French culinary phrases and loading up on weird utensils and cupboard clogging cookware?