Herbs can spice up a salad

Strong opinions and plenty of tips to make your cooking taste better: That’s the specialty of Christopher Kimball, chef and founder of the cooking school and media company Milk Street, named after his Boston address.

His goal is to wean us off classic culinary systems or trying to adapt Italian, Chinese and other cuisines.

Instead, he says we should “rethink what we do at the stove.” That means learning basic techniques that give your food more flavour in less time.

His latest cookbook, Milk Street: The New Rules (Little, Brown/Hachette, $44), begins with four useful pages filled with 75 changes he suggests we make in the way we cook.

For example, start potatoes in the microwave, and after roasting, they will be tender inside, crisp outside.

Sear seafood on only one side, remove the pan from the burner, and let the residual heat finish the cooking. Skip searing meat and get flavour by adding more herbs and spices.

Kimball provides more than 100 recipes and a multitude of adaptations.

He recommends adding some different condiments to your pantry, such as pomegranate molasses for glazing lamb, pork or chicken, and fish sauce for pepping up soups and stirfries.

Make your own spice blends and you can be sure they’re fresh, he writes, offering recipes for blends including five-spice powder and za’atar.

And he suggests livening up root vegetables by grating them, thereby releasing their natural sugars.

The book is beautifully illustrated by Connie Miller.

For Kimball, salads benefit from handfuls of fresh herbs, like today’s recipe in which parsley pairs with baby arugula. Use flat-leaf parsley, which has more flavour than curly.