It’s French for “everything in its place,” and it’s how cooks are trained from the outset to prepare recipes.

It simply means that before starting to cook or bake, everything needed to prepare the recipe is gathered, pre-prepped (chopping onions or measuring flour, for example) and set on the counter in easy reach. Only then is a cook ready to begin.

It’s surprising how many home cooks don’t follow this simple system. If you’ve found yourself looking for the lemon to zest, stopping to hunt for a kitchen tool or realizing that you don’t have enough butter, you’ll find that cooking is more efficient and unharried when you put mis en place in place.

Thanks to Chef Louis Eguaras, author of 101 Things I Learned In Culinary School, for this tip.

All in place and ready to cook. Photo courtesy RestaurantWindow.com.

Although National Mushroom Month draws to a close today, these tasty, low-calorie fungi should be enjoyed all year round.

Learn from The French Culinary Institute’s Marc Bauer how to slice mushrooms evenly and with little waste.

Substituting part or all of the meat in your recipe with mushrooms can help stretch your food budget.

For more how-tos, visit our Food Videos Section.

This 10-cup manual drip Melitta Coffeemaker set is just $12.95 at Amazon.com.

Before 1908, coffee was a gritty affair. The percolators of the time tended to over-brew the coffee, making it too bitter. Espresso machines left grounds in the cup. Reusable linen bag filters were an option, but who wanted to empty and clean them?

Housewife Melitta Bentz (1873-1950) of Dresden, Germany sought a solution.

In 1908, Mrs. Bentz tested different ways to create a permeable barrier between the grounds and the brewed coffee. She hit pay dirt when testing blotting paper from the notebook of her older son (in those pre-ball point, pre-felt tip days, people wrote with pen and ink, and used the paper to blot up the ink spills).

Mrs. Bentz tweaked the product and received a patent in 1912 for “a coffee filter with a curved and indented bottom and with slanting extraction holes,” to be used in combination with “filtration paper.” It was a hit. Today the company, run by Melitta’s grandchildren, has a workforce of some 3,800 people in 50 countries. In the U.S. alone, it sold $100 million worth of filters in 2009.

You can see the original device here. It doesn’t look like today’s sleek plastic cone and cone-shaped filter, (shown in the photo), but it did the trick.