mise en place. mise en place. mise en place.
It is a French term that just means having everything in place before starting your recipe. Simple concept, and yet I have known a few cooks (and I have in my day also done this) who just don’t get everything ready before they start heating up their oil, or butter, or what have you. If you want to make a recipe, the first thing to do is to read it all the way through and make sure you understand what ingredients and techniques you will be using. It is not fun to get halfway through and realize you won’t have enough butter or that you don’t have one ingredient at all. Also, it’s not fun to start heating some oil in a pan, and then remembering you haven’t cut up your veggies that need to go into this oil like…5 minutes ago. The point is, always make sure you do the prep before you start making any part of the dish, unless that part is specifically set to be a long time before everything else comes together; an example would be preheating an oven, or marinating a piece of meat. Or, making a pie crust and pre-baking it if you need to. Again, I know this is a very simple concept and may especially be insulting to our seasoned chefs who look at the blog..but we did promise kitchen techniques this year, and this is definitely the most important part of starting to cook. A beginner who messes up may have done everything right but with the wrong timing because they did not have ingredients ready…and they may want to give up simply because they did not think about how their time could be better managed in preparing the dish. ANYWAY, that said, Happy Valentine’s Day, and we’ll give you some more recipes this week that we have been very excited to share 
-Ashley
