[mastersniper]

I have some basic kitchen and cooking skills developed over the past 20 odd years cooking for my family and friends. But I am looking for some help developing various aspects to my repertoire. I am okay, albeit a bit slow with basic knife techniques, can utilize most basic kitchen tools, blenders, graters, mandolin etc correctly and appropriately when needed for various preparations. I have the basics of general cooking styles pan fry, deep fry, roast, sauté, braise, grill etc. and usually can pare the ingredient prep and cooking technique to the dish I think up appropriately, for example if I have a tough hunk of shoulder I first think braise as apposed to roast or grill.

I am sure I have some bad techniques mixed with correct ones. I am self taught from the school of hard knocks. I am looking for some DvD series for various cooking/knife techniques. I was thinking of taking one or several of the 2-5 day sessions offered at some local culinary institutes, it is nice being in the SF bay area we have many local schools. But I think that I would get more from a DvD that I can watch over and over pause while trying the techniques in the kitchen. Than from a day here and there preparing items and getting a few minutes at most of assistance in person on particular techniques. I have searched around Amazon etc and found several DvDs on knife skills but not on other general skills like trussing a bird or roast etc which I can get done but it’s definitely not as pretty as I would like.

I am also looking for a general reference book describing various lesser known ingredients and techniques that are useful for them, for example hearts of palm or lemon grass which are common in some regions but not generally used in others. I had some asian ingredients left over and did a 40 clove chicken with lemon grass, hoisin, and mirin that turned out very good. I am always looking for new/different ingredients to try and having some resource of interesting ingredients sounds appealing.

This got longer than I intended so I will cut if off there. If anyone has any recommendations I would appreciate them.