The Ink-Pot and the Palette

It's a marvelous book, and I fully intended to thank you for the recommendation. It was in my amazon.com shopping cart for ages before I was finally able to buy it. It's already proved its worth just in the vast improvement in my chicken stock.

Ruhlman recommends the McGee book too, so now I'm saving up for that one.

Good food is absolutely not hard to accomplish, and I learned to cook early enough in life that it was before everything went artificial in the late 1970s. I know plenty of people who don't have a clue what the kitchen is for, and it's a personal crusade of mine to make sure that the young people in my life know how to cook a few basics.

There's a scene in "Big Night"--perhaps one of my favorite scenes in any movie--where, after the Big Night, the chef wakes up in his kitchen, puts a pan on the stove, scrambles a couple of eggs with some olive oil, and eats them along with a piece of bread. That is the essence of good, simple food, and if people could just start there, the world of cooking would soon open up to them.