-_Empress_-

Get to know the key elements of food: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; acid, which balances flavor; heat & time, which ultimately determines the texture of food.

Undersalting is the most common kitchen offense. When you do salt, give it a few minutes to absorb before adding more, or you may over salt it. It takes a few for salt to absorb before you can taste and identify if it needs more. Salt brings out the flavours in everything else. Fat is a critical element that adds depth of flavour to any dish and is key in binding. A lean patty needs fat or it will fall apart. Bacon fat is always a fantastic one because of its flavour profile. Heat and time determine how moist something will me. High heat doesn't make cooking faster, it changes the entire chemistry, so know your heat and time. Don't go for fast cook time or quality will suffer. Acid is arguably the most important and most often neglected side of a dish. Acid can really give it that final note that ties and entire dish together. A squeeze of lemon juice is some witchcraft.

When you understand how these ingredients play into a dish and how the heat and time all come together to form the right result, you can work with any food.

My biggest recommendation is to play around with different cultures and cuisine. Authentic food. Look for recipes online (YouTube is great) from people who live in that region and learn to cook authentic dishes. This will expand your understanding of the ways those food "elements" can be used in a much larger scope and you will learn how to work with a ton of new ingredients. Doing so enables you to make incredible use of the natural flavour profile of basic ingredients like meats and veggies and when you play around with these, your cooking really hits the next level. I find a lot of authentic foreign cuisine has excellent insight into how and why certain processes work the way they do and often times they will give great explanations about it---the stuff most chefs would only learn working in the kitchen with the head chef.

Acid check and salt are my two biggest ones. They're the most common misses for developing cooks. Give salt time to absorb, factor in ingredients that may have their own salt content, and don't forget to use acid. Lemons are the greatest gift to humanity.

As someone who had exclusively attorneys for clients, I support this notion. 90%+ are fucking morons of a special calibur. The minority group can be pretty fuckin cool though. Just gotta wade through incomprehensible levels of idiocy to find them, lmao.

Hahaha I like that. Although I think some of them missed the memo because they run solo practices (very, very, very poorly) and will have a meltdown over the slightest inconvenience. Turns out running your business with such tight overhead that a minor obstacle brings the whole thing crashing down is a bad idea. Who would have thought!

One of my clients put it well, though: everyone in law school was the smartest kid in their hometown class (or above average), but all of those people go to law school and find out they're subpar in comparison to the competition. So, you wind up seeing a lot of dumb, fragile ego'd people who lack the business practicality and common sense for running a practice, let alone being a good attorney, but they're all egotistical to some degree and many have control issues.

That being said, business sense isn't everyone's forte and I have great clients who recognize they're better attorneys than businessmen, but they're capable of letting people who are more specialized in the business side of things actually run that part of the machine as a team, and thus, they have very successful firms. Hoenstly I think some business education needs to be a requirement for law school. It's insane how many people are drowning in horribly managed overhead.

Whats really fascinating to me is how wildly different this tends to be with each state, though. Every state tends to have a certain kind of attorney personality as it's most prevalent sort of character, and some states are fantastic, while others I won't even touch with a 100 mile pole. The absolute worst state by FAR is Texas. You couldn't pay me a million dollars an hour to touch Texas again. People are unbelievable, easily the most entitled, egotistical, idiotic bunch of lawyers in the country. It's like half of them are licking lead paint and huffing paint thinner.Granted that's not to say there aren't gems. Some of my favourite clients of all time are out of Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. Just have to wade through a bog of absolute insanity to find them. 🙄

Honestly idk how tf you guys can stand being attorneys. I've had a couple clients tell me I should have been one and I just laughed and was like nah, then I'd have to deal with these assholes even more, in person at that. He laughed and said that was a good point.

It's been an interesting experience to say the least. I've learned a lot, had some crazy cool clients, and heard some craaaaazy stories.

Hahahaha it wouldn't be the first time I've done that! Had a few clients I love shooting the shit with and one I'll make any excuse to do a layover in Dallas to catch up with, lol. The fun ones are a BLAST. Feel free to DM!