As much as I enjoy making these comfort foods, more often
than not I’m stumped in the kitchen when it comes to taking
everything to the next level—making the pasta from scratch, for
example, or knowing (and understanding) the proper way to truss
a chicken. Luckily for me, over the course of writing my blog, I’ve
had the chance to meet a wide variety of chefs, many of whom are
incredibly generous when it comes to answering my cooking
questions.
Which is how I got the idea for this book.
What if I spent a year of my life traveling the country, cooking
shoulder-to-shoulder with the best chefs and home cooks all over,
gleaning as much knowledge, experience, and inspiration as I could
in the process? Why, such an adventure might be instructive,
edifying, and empowering not only for me, but also for you, the
reader. A project like that could make all of us better cooks.
You are now holding the result: this book. Here in these pages,
I’ve attempted to distill the breathtaking amount of culinary
wisdom that these giants in the kitchen have to share. Once you
start reading these essays and cooking these recipes, you’ll throw
out your old bag of tricks and start thinking about color and
texture, where your ingredients come from, how best to combine
them, and how, once they’re combined, to present everything in
the most beautiful way possible. But we’re getting ahead of
ourselves.
The point is: the child of a noncooking, shoes-in-the-oven
family went on an epic cooking odyssey and now gets to share