I fancy myself a pretty decent cook, overall. The food I make is tasty, and even if not, I know enough about it to sound like a snot, if nothing else. But clearly, one of the things I'm missing is the real, basic grounding a young chef gets at culinary school - the knife skills, the tedious work in perfecting the great mother sauces and doughs. In a lame attempt to fix some of my deficiencies, I bought a copy of Jacques Pepin's La Technique a few weeks ago - a definitive textbook of basic, classical, cooking. My goal is to learn the book to the extent I can - and I'll post my first efforts at any one technique, and hopefully spare everyone the follow-ups.

So, I decided to start this process with pommes cocottes - normal potatoes cut by paring knife into little ovals. The pictures of the raw product - in all their lopsided glory - are here. The potatoes blanched and fried in butter are here. The musings of a spatially challenged clutz trying to carve potatoes into ovals are below the fold.

1. the idea, as Pepin explains it, is to cut a large potato into quarters, and then "turn" them into little ovals. My fundamental take home message from this is that you literally do need to turn them - carving a little bit from each face before rotating the potato ever so slightly counter-clockwise in your palm to repeat. A lot of the bad results you can see in the picture are from efforts where I tried to carve an oval out of the quarter potato - tried to see an oval, to identify the two tips and carve towards them. It doesn't work. Just trust the technique - turning produces ovals. I don't know how.

2. The other thing I'll have to think about as I continue to practice this technique is wastage. I've heard that wasting food, and bits of food, is the bete noire of a restaurant. And yet, the pile of potato scraps my efforts produces was enormous, given that I only cut into two potatoes at my first go. Could any technique endorsed by Pepin possibly waste so much potato? I'm aware that potato scraps are great for vegetable stock, but even so - clearly, as I get better with this, the wastage should decline as well.