[I] remind everyone not to be too hung up upon the Myth of the Marvelous Ingredient. Sure, the fresher the better, and yes, starting out with marvelous ingredients helps, but...you still have to cook. It´s annoying and patronizing and plain stupid to convince people that unless the produce was harvested within a mile of them by vestal virgins they needen´t even bother to start.

The hardest part of cooking good food (after you've done all you can to buy good ingredients) is … cooking.

And there are two parts to that cooking. There is the "I've got extra time on the weekend, let's make something special cooking", and there is "I need to cook tasty meals every day of the week".

I'm home sick for the second day. I made myself soup yesterday, and it didn't taste very good. A cooking screw up hurts even more when you don't have the energy for a do over.