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began at five, the room seemed simply to fill up with more friends. I’d sometimes be surprised to find Chatty Matty, Matt Harlan—now chef de cuisine of Lolita—putting up the first courses, only to look around and realize that the people at the tables were customers and not just friends coming to hang out. I think that’s another reason for Symon’s success. He, and critically his wife, Liz, create places that are fun to be in. You’re always glad to be there. It’s like a family. I loved reporting from both restaurants because they were a pleasure just to be a part of the family for a while. The places were filled with smiles—and they had the same effect on the rest of Cleveland as they had on me. People felt like they were part of the family.

All of which is why I’m so excited about this book. I knew Michael would create an uncompromising chef’s book that speaks directly to home cooks without talking down to chefs or simplifying any of the food. This is not four-star cooking at home, at home with the four-star chef. His food is simple and ingenious. It has an excitement generated from thoughtful flavor pairings, an integrity based on Michael’s Mediterranean–Eastern European heritage and his twenty-plus-year commitment to food and cooking and the restaurant business. Michael is true to who he is and where he comes from—from Cleveland, a city defined by simplicity, ethnic diversity, economical thrift, hearty fare, and a distaste for pretension.

But most of all, he makes the food fun. It’s the kind of food that, when you see him cooking it, or even listen to him talking about it, makes you want to go home and do it yourself. He makes cooking fun.

I think all chefs, at least on some level, want their own cookbook, a record of their work, not for posterity but rather, on some level, for permanence, because what we do nightly disappears faster than it takes to create it. Our work, if it’s any good, vanishes and the better it is, the faster it goes away! On the other hand, I have never wanted simply a collection of recipes. Recipes are important but only to a point. What’s more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that. My favorite cookbooks are those that have changed the way I think about food and cooking. My goal in Live to Cook is to make great food more approachable for home cooks and to do so without dumbing down or simplifying the food or the cooking.

My cooking and this book are above all about approachable food, food that isn’t heavily fussed over; food that is what it is and tastes delicious. It’s how my food has always been at my restaurants, how my food is at home. And I think approachability is what chefs need to keep in mind when they share their food with the home cook. The food I’ve been doing my whole career is straightforward: there’s no masking of flavors, and the dishes are economical and efficient, with minimal embellishments, but with big, big flavors and soulful satisfactions.

In the end, great food is nothing more than this: great ingredients, sound technique. That’s all there is to it. To become a better cook, always be thinking about those two things, always be asking yourself, are my ingredients excellent and am I applying good techniques to what I have?

Do you want to know how to improve your cooking? The first thing you can do, and you can start doing this immediately, is start shopping better. That is the number-one way to become a better cook: buy better ingredients. For produce, buy with the seasons—that is, buy what grows naturally in that season. Don’t try to buy a decent tomato in January; buy them in the summer. Peas and asparagus in the spring. Citrus fruits in the late winter. Buy fresh oils, good vinegars. You get what you pay for here: the range of quality is broad in oils and vinegars and other condiments. Pay for them and use them well. The excellent-quality ingredients are not that much more expensive than the cheap stuff, and odds are, if you pay a little more money for a good balsamic or a good