Preface

My mother was lousy at cooking. To her, cooking was more like an exciting experiment. You put some of this and some of that in a pot, and you wait and see what will happen. “No experiments, no experiences.” is what she would say when her experiment did not turn out good, and I heard that a lot.

My father was a good cook, and he loved to cook, too. He often said that he got my mother to marry him with a table of delicious food, not with a beautiful ring. “A family needs only one good cook,” he said.

Now I am a cook myself. And I have my own restaurant. I learned how to cook from my father, of course. From him, I learned the art of cooking. But I did learn one thing from my mother. It’s her famous saying: “No experiments, no experiences.”