After years of struggling to perfectly poach an egg, I discovered I could get much of what I liked about them from soft-boiled eggs, with a zero percent failure rate to boot. My technique is just like that of my hard-boiled eggs, except I drop the boiling time down to 6 minutes. This assures a solid white and soft yolk, and the pinnacle of deliciousness spread over buttered toast and topped with a pinch of salt.

[Updated] There are about as many techniques for hard-boiling eggs as there are eggs out there, but until 2017, I used the method my mother taught me because it never fails: Submerge a large egg in enough cold water to cover it and bring the water to a boil over medium-high heat. Once it begins to boil, set a timer for 10 minutes. Plunge the egg into cold water to get it to stop cooking. Plus, cold eggs are much easier to peel.

However, the trickiest part was always knowing when the water starts to boil. How would you if you weren’t standing over watching it, and we all know how that goes. In 2017, I realized that I could gently lower an egg into already boiling water and do almost exactly what’s written above — cook it for 10 minutes then plunge it into cold water, except now I use ice water and let it rest in there until it’s completely cold through, about 15 minutes — and it not only perfectly boils and egg, no pot-watching required, but it seemed to peel even more easily. I wondered if there was any science to it and whoa, there is.

Both my mom’s method and this new one work splendidly, and I promise will work for you, but I’m now fully converted to the newer method, because it’s easier and easier to peel.

As someone who manages to drop an average of one to two egg shell pieces in each baked good batter, I’ve discovered a trick: The easiest way to fish them out is not with a cooking utensil or, heaven forbid, your finger but with another egg shell. I don’t know how or why it works better, so I just chalk it up to magic.

I try to include weights for ingredients for almost every recipe on Smitten Kitchen, and I can’t recommend using them enough. [Btw, if you see one that’s missing weights, give me a shout and I’ll add them.] I’m a big fan of weighing ingredients for two reasons:

Accuracy: Do you realize that, depending on how you measure a cup of flour, it can weigh anything from 120 to 190 grams? The difference between the outcomes these amounts of flour will impart in a cake, cookie, or bread dough is staggering. Weights will never do this to you. But beyond accuracy, there are ingredients that actually hurt my brain to measure in cups because you will never get the same weight twice. At the top of this list is almond flour (which you can press and pack to almost double the volume in a cup), followed by flaked coconut, oats, nuts, and [actually cringing while writing this] chunks of fruits or vegetables.

Ease: An inexpensive scale will last you years and years and — this is key! — give you far fewer dishes to do. You simply add the first ingredient to your bowl until you hit the weight you’re looking for, tare it out (i.e. zero the scale), then the second, then the third. And you will never again have to do something I find maddening — measuring things like mayonnaise, peanut butter, or honey in measuring cups (all of that shoving ingredients into a small space just to scrape them out again). Weigh your peanut butter and you’ll never look back, promise.

Shoutout to measuring spoons, however, for very tiny amounts: Do I have a gram scale, i.e. a scale that’s highly accurate in small amounts and often is made by brands like “G Dealer” suggesting that maybe it’s not marketed for cream of tartar precision? Yes, I do, but I’m a pedant and a person who develops recipes for a living, so it makes sense for me. But for a half-teaspoon of cinnamon? A quarter-teaspoon of baking soda? It’s going to be fussier to try to get a read on a 10-pound scale than it is to just scoop and level it. [I love these measuring spoons, btw, as they fit in small spaces. Mine are in perfect condition after nearly a decade of use.]

May I implore you, nay, beg you to forgo store-bought breadcrumbs and make your own? It is too simple not to. Take any bread at all — I mean your favorite kind, rolls the pizza place sent you with your salad, the crusts off your kid’s sandwich — leave it out overnight and pulse it in the food processor the next morning: instant breadcrumbs that will put that sawdust in a can to shame! In a rush? Fresh bread grinds up well, too, whether or not you toast it first. Planning ahead? Make a lot and keep it in the freezer. Breadcrumbs, at the ready!