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How I Learned to Cook

I grew up in a house where dinner was cooked far more often than it was ordered.

The food wasn’t fancy. There were casseroles bubbling in the oven, big pots of soup on cold evenings, Sunday roasts, pasta assembled from whatever happened to be in the refrigerator, and cakes that never looked quite as perfect as the picture in the cookbook.

But food mattered.

The kitchen was where everyone eventually ended up.

My mother taught me the basics, although I’m not sure either of us realized she was teaching me at the time. I learned by standing nearby, asking questions and gradually being trusted with increasingly important jobs – from washing vegetables to making an entire dinner without supervision.

Years later, after moving away from home, cooking became something else.

It became how I made unfamiliar places feel familiar.

Everywhere I went, I found myself paying attention to what people ate when nobody was trying to impress anyone. The bowl of pasta someone made on a Tuesday night. The soup a friend’s mother insisted I try. The dish everyone at a neighborhood restaurant seemed to order without looking at the menu.

Those were usually the meals I remembered.

I started writing recipes down.

First in notebooks. Then in an increasingly chaotic collection of documents, photographs and emails to myself.

Eventually, that collection became the beginning of The Local Cook.

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Why “The Local Cook”?

I’ve always believed that some of the best food in the world isn’t found in famous restaurants.

It’s found in home kitchens.

It’s the food people know by heart. The recipe a family has made fifty times. The dish associated with a particular town, season or Sunday afternoon.

And while I love learning where food comes from, I also believe recipes have always traveled.

We borrow them. Adapt them. Substitute ingredients. Make them easier. Make them spicier. Make them our own.

That’s what The Local Cook is about.

This is a place to discover recipes with a sense of place and personality – and then make them work in your kitchen, wherever that happens to be.

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My Approach to Cooking

I am not interested in making home cooking more complicated than it needs to be.

A good recipe should tell you what matters.

It should explain what the onions should actually look like when they’re ready, not just tell you to cook them for an arbitrary number of minutes.

It should warn you when something is likely to go wrong.

It should tell you which ingredient is essential and which one you can substitute without ruining dinner.

And most importantly, it should work.

The recipes I share on The Local Cook are developed for ordinary home kitchens using ingredients that real people can reasonably find.

Some are quick.

Some take an afternoon.

I don’t believe everything needs to be a 20-minute meal. I do believe that if I’m asking you to spend two hours making something, the result should be worth those two hours.

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How I Develop Recipes

Before a recipe appears on The Local Cook, I cook it from beginning to end and look at it from the perspective of someone making it for the first time.

I pay particular attention to:

• whether the ingredient quantities make sense;
• whether the cooking times are realistic;
• the visual and sensory cues that tell you when something is ready;
• which steps genuinely matter;
• where substitutions are possible;
• and which questions I would have if I had never made the dish before.

Recipes may be updated over time when additional testing or feedback from readers reveals a better technique, clearer instruction or useful variation.

Cooking is always a learning process, and I don’t believe a published recipe needs to be frozen in time forever.

It should become more useful.

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What You’ll Find on The Local Cook

There isn’t one single type of food that I cook.

You’ll find the kind of recipes that make up real life.

What connects them is that every recipe should give you a good reason to make it.

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A Few Things About Me

• I will almost always choose a small neighborhood restaurant over a fashionable one.
• I think mushrooms make nearly everything better.
• I own far too many wooden spoons and somehow still use the same two.
• I read restaurant menus for fun.
• My favorite way to discover a new place is through its markets and grocery stores.
• And despite spending an unreasonable amount of my life thinking about food, some of my favorite dinners are still the simplest ones: good bread, something salty, something fresh and a table full of people who aren’t in a hurry to leave.

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