About

Welcome to the table.  My name is David Ellis, and I live in Washington, DC.  Throughout my life there has been one true constant: food.  I love eating it, and I love preparing it.  A few years back, I decided to try to master home cooking with the same fervor and commitment as a professional chef.  I began stockpiling cookbooks, experimenting with recipes, taking cooking classes, watching cooking shows and researching everything from spatulas to spices.

Along the way, I started to realize something interesting.  All good cooking comes down to just three things: ingredients, tools and techniques. It was really that simple.  If you have the best possible ingredients, use the right tools for the job, and practice the proper techniques, you can cook at home like a professional chef night after night.

Recently, I decided to kick things up a notch and began the culinary techniques 101 program at L’Academie de Cuisine, which will be followed by pastry techniques program in 2012. It has been a truly rewarding experience, and I have gained a degree of knowledge I could not have achieved on my own. But my lessons at the school have only strengthened my conviction that ingredients, tools and techniques really are the keys to good cooking.

I created this site to act as a knowledge-base for all that I’ve learned about cooking. After all, what better way to master something, than to write about it? I know there are a lot of people blogging about food these days, but I hope to be more than a big appetite with an Internet connection. So instead of just posting recipe after recipe here, I have tried, and will continue to try, to gather and present content that focuses on ingredients, tools and techniques, because once you understand what you are cooking and how to cook it, you really don’t need that many recipes.

I hope you will find something here of interest, and if you have anything to share, please don’t be shy. One of the great advantages of this medium is that we can interact. Sharing our thoughts, opinions and lessons about cooking will only make us all better cooks. Feel free to comment on any of my posts at any time, or you can email me at mail[at]davidstable[dot]com.

Now let’s get cooking… so that we can eat.