Quotes from Claire Saffitz

When I'm desperate for spring produce but nothing has hit the farmstand yet, frozen green peas are a godsend.

I have makeup that I can do in 15 minutes, 10 minutes, or five minutes, depending on what I'm doing that day. On a day when I'm shooting, it's 15 minutes. Five minutes is when I'm running around that day, and it's no big deal.

True marshmallow - and I'm not talking about those ones from a bag - is nothing more than an Italian meringue set with gelatin.

Turmeric or cinnamon? Nuts or raisins? The players may change, but the fundamentals of fluffy, fragrant pilaf are always the same.

Quince may resemble pears and apples, but unlike their fruit brethren, raw quince are inedibly tannic and sour. This means you do have to cook them, but the transformation is dramatic, and well worth your efforts.

Pate a choux is a mixture of simple ingredients - flour, water, milk, eggs - but the proper technique is essential. Unlike other doughs, the pastry is pre-cooked on the stovetop before being enriched with eggs, piped, and baked.

I made my first Yule Log as a culinary student in Paris, complete with the traditional chestnut filling, silky chocolate buttercream, and almost-too-adorable mushrooms. Since then, I've tweaked and updated both the recipe and the process - and I've definitely learned tips and tricks to make it easier.

If you are the kind of person who makes homemade chicken stock on the regular and keeps it frozen in various sized containers for all your cooking needs, I truly commend you. Quality homemade stock will invariably add great depth of flavor and body to a recipe. But it's a luxury, not a necessity - it gilds the lily, as they say.

Heaven is a bowl of creamed herring and onions. Ditto whitefish salad. But the real object of my desire for all things gilled is gefilte fish.

When the urge to bake strikes, it strikes hard and fast. You want to get in the kitchen and start breaking eggs right away, so it can be real buzzkill to find out that the recipe you're using calls for room-temperature butter.

Lemon curd is one of the first things I remember cooking when I was old enough to use the stove without supervision. I looked up a recipe in my one of my mom's Martha Stewart cookbooks and went to work, stirring anxiously and monitoring closely for signs that the mixture was thickening so as not to curdle the eggs.

Plating your salad with groupings of ingredients may seem fussy but in fact it's the opposite. All the prepped ingredients go directly onto the platter, so no need to dirty a separate mixing bowl for tossing. Another reason we like this plating strategy? It allows the picky eaters out there to choose only the parts they like best.

One thing I hear a lot is that people feel less stressed out after they watch 'Gourmet Makes.' There's a transference of their stress onto me.

My maternal grandmother, a.k.a. Nanny, wasn't much of a cook. As a kid I remember her making only a handful of things, mostly dishes with Ashkenazi Jewish origins like kasha and bowties (which, for the record, only my dad liked).

If soggy, baked choux can be re-crisped in a hot oven for several minutes.

I always keep some variety of dumpling in my freezer for convenience, but frozen homemade pierogi are a special treat.

Only advanced bakers should endeavor to adapt non-vegan recipes to be vegan, or gluten-full recipes to be gluten-free. There are all sorts of tips and tricks when it comes to subbing vegan ingredients for eggs and dairy, but it's tricky to say the least.

Simmering vegetables in a covered pot over low heat so that they steam in their own liquid - a French technique called a l'etouffee - is the ticket to achieving a soup with pronounced depth.

Depending on when vegetables are picked, they might take different lengths of time to cook.

As a kid, I was overly studious, overly serious, very academically driven. It was important to me on a cellular level to do well. And then I went to college at Harvard, and I relaxed a little bit.

No stuffing is complete without chopped onion and celery - they're the building blocks. If you want to deepen the flavor, consider adding leeks, sage, and/or hardy greens.