I have noticed a certain elitism creeping into people's notion of what it means to cook well.  These days, when people speak of cooking, terms like locally sourced, organic and artisanal are used.  Expensive knife sets and appliances are considered indispensable and a stint at the C.I.A.'s five day culinary book camp is described as the next step for "serious" cooks.  Make no mistake these are all fine things and well worth the time and money.  But cooking well is not  just a question of skill, equipment or ingredients but one of passion.  I have worked with cooks who in spite of the best ingredients and all the advantages of a professional kitchen, have still succeeded in producing a thoroughly mediocre product.  Cooks for whom the process of cooking is not a joy, but rather an inconvenience - something that stands between them and clocking out at the end of a shift.  Cooks who have no problem saying,"It's good enough."

I have been cooking professionally since 1985. That's 25 years, a freakin' quarter of a century.  I have spent those years  of joy, anger, sadness and absurdity in every sort of establishment imaginable.  From deli to fine dining, I've seen it all.  Well, maybe not all, but a lot, certainly more than most, maybe I should write a book.  But more to the point, those years have instructed me thoroughly on the nature of cooking and cooking well - lessons hard earned and not the kind you'd find in cooking school.

Years ago, I worked with a chef named, Haig Krikorian.  Haig was the first chef I worked for that I really respected.  One busy day on the line, Haig called me out on a plate I had just put up.  I told him, "It's good enough."  And he informed me that in his kitchen, "Good enough isn't."   That pithy little comment has stuck with me, and to this day informs my efforts in any kitchen.

So what is cooking well?  It's a process.  It's a state of mind.  It's an adventure.  It's sweating the small stuff.  It's using what you've got and making it great.  The end result of cooking well can be as simple as a baked potato or as complex as a fine mole.  Fundamentally cooking well boils down to giving a damn - caring enough to make sure all of your ingredients (however humble) are used to their greatest advantage, and never being content to say, "Good enough."