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When I try to remember how I fed myself through four years of college, the best I can come up with is Cinnamon Toast Crunch, cans of chickpeas, and one particular evening when, after coming back from working in India for a summer, I prepared a curry that was so hot all my friends ate it in total silence, sweating. On a day-to-day basis, it was mostly tuna melts and late night pizza slices that sustained me.

Picnic logistics are difficult, as anyone who has trekked out to the park or beach only to discover they forgot to bring forks can tell you. In principle, it's a pretty easy way to eat a meal in the outdoors, but in practice, you can run into all kinds of snags, especially if it's a potluck picnic. All meats and no cheese, or all cheesee and no crackers. It won't ruin your day, probably, but it's still not ideal.

Popcorn, like pasta, is difficult to estimate. The amount of popcorn that you pop on your stovetop, pop in the microwave, or order at the movie theater might seem like a reasonable amount until you're a third of the way through and can't eat another bite. There ends up being a lot of leftover popcorn in the world, no matter how careful you are.

Maybe you only know ricotta as the stuff that you buy in a tub about twice a year when you attempt to make lasagna. Maybe you're only aware of it because it can get gritty and unpleasant when baked, like in lasagna or dessert applications. For years, a friend of mine insisted that she hated ricotta, ranking it as a worse cottage cheese. But that was before, one day, I convinced her to try a dollop of fresh ricotta from the farmers' market, and I watched her face light up.

Getting into baking sourdough lands somewhere between adopting a puppy and deciding to start a garden on the commitment scale. Just ask Noam Grossman of Upside Pizza, who uses a sourdough starter rather than commercial yeast, for all of the pizza dough in the shop. Figuring out how to feed the starter so that it would be at its peak during the hours when they needed in was a process of trial and error, with a lot of focus on the temperature of the water and the temperature of the room that the starter was in.

So you've got a tough piece of meat, or maybe just something that could use a little extra flavor or moisture. You've got options! Part of it is, of course, in how you cook the meat and serve it. Braising is great choice for tougher cuts, for example, and a delicious pan sauce does wonders for something that could otherwise turn out really bland. But one of the tricks to adding flavor is treating the meat before it goes anywhere near a heat source.