Cooking well is a pleasure, plain and simple.  It’s a selfish concept; self-indulgence at its finest.   We cook well either to pleasure our own palate, or to stroke our ego by garnering praise by pleasuring others.  But this type of self-gratification won’t make you go blind.

It is meant to be a gastronomic exploration, not some cheap thrill you pick up in the frozen food aisle.  It should be fresh, inventive and varied.  Neither botanical nor carnivorous prejudices have a place in a harmonious kitchen.

It is about working with what is on hand.  Ingredients are merely the notes to a symphony of flavors.  Knowing how to arrange them is the challenge.  Herein lies part of the thrill.  Even the simplest of dishes can provide extreme satisfaction, the complement of a flatiron steak with béarnaise and a bottle of Cabernet with friends, or a baguette, some brie and Chardonnay alone.  Heat and company not always a requirement, contentment the only goal.

It has to do as much with the familiar as the unexplored…the exotic and the commonly abundant.  It is about the enjoyment of preparation and savoring the results.  Cooking well doesn’t have to be complex or expensive and it doesn’t mean cooked until charred like Joan of Arc.  It means to a high standard.   A meal which makes you take a moment and delight.  It could be as simple as a grilled clams and accompanying ice-cold malted beverage.  As sensory as the mouth-watering anticipation of a sizzling steak cooked over an open flame, the way it’s been done for thousands of years, from the time the first human had enough sense to track down some unsuspecting mammal and heat it over a bit of burning brush.

It is a personal journey, a search for culinary enlightenment.  For each it is a distinct experience.  But a quest not meant for all.  Proof of this comes in the popularity of light beer and frozen pizza.

For me, cooking well will always involve some hint of the zoological, whether it be fresh cream for a sauce, or a whole suckling pig.  It’s all about the flesh.  Plants exist only to serve…rosemary, the slave to lamb…peppercorn, servant of the steak.  Mushrooms and onions are mere minions in a cookery dominated by vertebrates.  Besides, a kitchen without animals is a dining room full of vegetarians, and I’m sorry but that’s definitely not someplace I want to visit.