You mean, you're not _supposed_ to use the leek greens?!
This is news to me. I've only just started using scallions in my cooking, and I find them to be an almost perfect replacement for green onions; the green parts expecially.

Makes me wonder what else I'm doing "wrong" with my ingrediants that still turns out scrumptious.

This Kaleberg person is a cretin. You make an excellent case with your recounting of offal preparations that he/she has turned this whole thing upside down. It seems to me that it is pretty obvious that there is a spectrum of chunks of flesh that range in ease of preparation to most difficult and that the natural course of things has lead us to prefer the easy and typically shun the difficult. Let's take a cow as an example. You have a chunk like the tenderloin and a chunk like the brisket. Tenderloin you could do just about anything to. Shit, you could chop it up and eat it raw. Let's see you apply the panoply of cooking methods to a brisket. Unless you use basically one method, a low and slow cooking method, you are eating a piece of leather. The situation certainly becomes more interesting when you bring in the complications of a kidney, etc. This isn't coincidence either. Often what we are dealing with in offal is a different type of tissue than the standard muscle we are eating. It is bound to respond differently to heat, contain certain elements that muscle doesn't, etc. To claim that a kidney preparation is the same as a chop but that it is just unfamiliar is retarded. It is unfamiliar because it is more difficult.

I think "cretin" is a bit of an exageration. Having gone over my comments, the original posting and the responses, I think "lucky fool, possibly to the point of arrogance" might be a better description.

Indeed, I have heard all sorts of stories about urine ridden kidneys, exploding sausages, and runaway lobsters. My kitchen failures tend to revolve around inattention, with Caltiki the immortal brie en croute and the Ruins of Guernica paella being memorable episodes.

So, why am I so frequently surprised that a "hard to cook" ingredient is surprisingly easy to work with and often delicious on the first try? The Copernican Principle states that there should be no special observers, so what is happening here?

1) I do my homework. I have lots of cookbooks and a Larousse Gastronomique, so I can see what other people have done with the ingredient. The French and Chinese have already figured out how to cook almost anything. When we find life on Mars, they'll be ready with the recipes.

2) I have often tasted the ingredient in a restaurant, so I know what it is supposed to taste and look like. Many of my friends like to reverse engineer dishes and figure out how to make them. At our dumpling festival back in the 80s, they even figured out how to make Burmese sar moo sar by smuggling an order out of the restaurant.

3) I have a scientific background, so I can make back of the envelope estimates on cooking times and methods. I often have to rig up alternative cooking schemes and figure out ways of doing non-destructive testing. Ah, for a home infrared tomographic oven.

Basically, I'm a food nerd. (It should come as no surprise that I use an Apple computer with their slogan Eat Differnt). Rereading my comments, parts of my original post resemble those one finds on SlashDot and other forums in which a serious hacker thinks he is impressing a bunch of newbies. This attitude is not unique to computers, you get this with anything technical: knitting, home repair, makeup work, photography and the like.

Martha Stewart based much of her appeal on this attitude. Something might seem hard to you, but it is really quite easy.

So:

I'll apologize for my tone in my note. I wasn't trying to be offensive, even if I did manage to do so.

I won't apologize for my good luck with first time cooking experiences involving unconventional ingredients. Luck favors the prepared kitchen.

I'll also let stand my comments on high end cuisine as a test bed for introducing ingredients and cooking techniques which are then be moved down market. Fuel injected cars were a luxury item 50 years ago. Who mass produces automotive engines with carburetors anymore?

I don't condone ad hominem attacks, and I would never call any of my readers a cretin, but I do think Kahlberg has proven pstein's point. If a cut of meat requires extensive homework, reverse engineering, and/or a scientific background to prepare, it really isn't all that easy to work with, is it?

I try to do my homework too. I try unfamiliar things in restaurants. And I still make mistakes. I still have trouble with unfamiliar ingredients. And I think it's not just because they're unfamiliar (although I think that's part of it); I think they are genuinely difficult.

Finally, I don't think anybody needs to apologize here, for tone or anything else. The anonymity of the Internet should be enough to thicken our skins.

Actually, I had heard all the kidney stories, so I was quite nervous cooking my first lamb kidneys. I just rubbed them with a little salt, pepper and rosemary and grilled them on a hot fire. That's it. They were wonderful.

I think luck has something to do with this too.

I agree. We don't need to apologize like we are on a playground or something. This of course does not relieve Kaleberg of his/her cretinism.

I think the host is correct. Making the statement he/she made wasn't really arrogrant or offensive, just obviously wrong.

I guess I am obviously wrong. I'll even admit it, but I will offer a story in defense of my blindness, or cretinism, or what have you. I was reminded of it when I was helping my niece fix her computer. Her printer wasn't working, so I suggested that she reboot it. She protested that she had just tried rebooting. At my insistence, she rebooted and the computer worked. Of course, I know more about computers than she does.

You've probably heard the old the story about Tom Knight at MIT, who was a noted computer designer. He encountered a novice trying to fix one of his machines by turning the power on and off and rebooting it. He said, "You can't fix a computer by power cycling it without knowing what you are doing." Then, he turned the power off and back on again and the machine worked.

I suppose I've been cooking too long and doing too much reading to realize what most people face when they encounter a leek or a kidney for the first time. If this be cretinism, make the most of it.

Still, I like to that think luck has much to do with it as with experience and research.

When was the last time I cooked a parsnip? About two weeks ago. I never ate them before this spring. But now that I have, I wonder why I never did before.

Here's what I did: I took a wonderful, organic, spring parsnip (it had wintered and gotten nice and tender), and cut it into bite size pieces. Then I cut up some carrot and potato. I tossed them with olive oil and herbs (I chose Herbes de Provence) and cooked at 450 (400?) for about 45 minutes, until they were browned and fork tender.

My wife was nervous about parsnips, but she raved over this dish, and was sad that I didn't buy enough parsnips to make it again the next night.

About a week after that, we cooked up some stinging nettles. Ah, the joys of trying new ingredients...