I’m not a chef. Well, not as defined by the dictionary, which says a chef is a person who is formally trained and running a restaurant kitchen. I’ve only taken a few cooking classes here and there, and I don’t run a professional kitchen, so I am a cook. But when I really started getting serious about cooking, I realized that I was going to have to learn much more than just how to follow a recipe.

In the course of reading recipes, I began to pay more attention to words like “chop.” What does that mean? How does that compare to “mince” or “dice?” How does it affect the finished food? Turns out, it can affect the food a great deal. Ever chomped down on a big piece of raw onion in some tuna salad? Ick. Ever had a stew where most of it is cooked to mush, but the potatoes were raw? Bleh. The size, shape and uniformity of your chopped up food has a huge impact on the finished product.