For the longest time, I thought I didn't like green beans. I mean, clearly I didn't like green beans - I wasn't under some freakish delusion. They were nasty. Mushy, vegetal, bitter, and all-arouind unpleasant.

Dinner salads are tricky. You're basically juggling three slightly contradictory concepts. You want the lightness and freshness of a salad. You want to be full and satisfied after dinner. And you don't in any way, shape. or form want to create some kind of horrible Applebee's salad monstrosity full of iceberg lettuce and deep-fried things. But I have a few things I like to do with a dinner salad that I think makes for some good eating. And to illustrate them, Tuesday night's dinner salad:

One of the things I now do on a regular basis, usually once every month or two, is buy an entire boneless leg of lamb from Costco. I prep it during a weekend afternoon into cutlets, chunks, and/or ground lamb, all of which I find very useful in the kitchen, none of which are readily available in supermarkets, at least for a reasonable price and quality. Since I was planning on breaking down one such leg today, I thought I'd break in the new BastardCam (cheapo digital camera for kitchen use) and document the process.

I don't like ham. Mostly. I don't like canned ham, I don't like deli ham, I don't like honey baked ham. However, when we started buying whole pigs, I started having to deal with ham. Cured, smoked, bone-in cooked hams. Two of them per half-pig. Huge ones.

So basically, I reprocess them into usable pork. So all I do is take a knife and cut shallowly through the skin in the traditional ham diamond pattern. Toss it into a roasting pan, cover it with foil, set the oven to 250, and let it go for at least five hours.

So what do you do when, say, you'd just bought a six-pack of red bell peppers from Costco, and your CSA, in its infinite wisdom, decides to bestow upon you a bounty of... red bell peppers? So that you have so many goddamned red bell peppers that even you, lover of red bell peppers that you are, could not possibly eat them all before they went bad?

Try roasting them.

I don't buy a lot of salad dressing. Not because I'm not lazy - I am very lazy in many ways - but because the odds of me wanting either one flavor of dressing until the bottle runs out, or a half-dozen bottles of dressing in an already full-to-bursting fridge door, are pretty slim. So I make a lot of viniagrettes. But making a proper viniagrette, with the bowl and the whisking and all, can actually be more work than I'm willing to go through for a quick salad.

Enter the Squeezebottle Viniagrette.

The wet masala method is an easy way of making quick, very flavorful curries at home. It basically involves using a food processor to make a quick vegetable marinade that then becomes the sauce.

One of the biggest mistakes people make with tofu is to open the package, drain it, and use it. One of the bazillions of things I learned from watching Alton Brown is that you will like your tofu more if you press it first.

To press tofu, you'll need a pound block of firm or extra firm tofu, at least four paper towels, two plates, a couple of heavy cans, and about 20-30 minutes at a minimum.

STEP ONE: CUT

Halve the tofu lengthwise. Just bisect it through the short parts of the rectangle, taking care to cut evenly.

NOTE: This technique uses an oven. All ovens are different, but some ovens, like my ovens, are more different than others. If you do this, keep an eye on both time and temperature.

Why roast potatoes? Because they're a quick flavorful side dish, and because they're especially handy to have around if, say, you have a batch of garlic aioli you want to use before it goes bad.

STEP ONE: Buy Potatoes

Many people overlook this step, and end up very hungry as a result. I like Yukon Golds or fingerlings for roasting.

This is a pretty common thing. I have no particular insight into it, but I'll mention it anyway in case people don't know.

When you buy a bunch of asparagus, about 2/3 of it is usable. About 1/3 of it is thick and woody and not nearly as good. You could guess, but why guess when you can know?