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What we made of that casserole recipe is a dish we’d like to think has a claim to originality: odds are you haven’t cooked one of these before! It’s also a lighter dish that takes about a third as long to cook as the original, using half as many ingredients. And yet ours is a recipe with more flavor—not only brighter flavors, but layers of flavor. We think it’s “restaurant-quality,” but we’re just home cooks. We’ve never worked in a restaurant kitchen; we make few assumptions about tools and equipment, or things like “knife skills,” so our recipes are easy for every home cook. We’re living proof that if you love cooking at home and are open-minded enough (and restless enough!) not to follow recipes to the letter, you can make soul-stirring food today.

Not every recipe in Simple Fresh Southern came from an idea we mined from our cookbook library. Sometimes, as in our Sweet Potato and Okra Fritters with Garlic Buttermilk Dip, they arose from a meditation, over time, on a beautiful southern pairing. Others, like Mint Julep Panna Cotta, hit like a bolt of lightning. But inevitably, each recipe in this book comes from a Simple Fresh Southern perspective, so in welcoming you to our kitchen, we thought we’d show you a little bit more about the three principles that guide the way we cook.

SIMPLE In our last book, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, the shorthand “QKO,” for “Quick Knockout,” signaled a recipe that took no more than 30 minutes to make. We found in the eighteen months that we toured the United States—teaching cooking classes, lecturing, and demonstrating recipes from the book—that the QKOs were the recipes readers made most frequently. It makes sense: as much as we cherish the days we get to take our sweet time in the kitchen, they tend to come along much less frequently than the times we’re really hustling to get things done and served on schedule so that the rest of life can rumble forward.

This book is guided by kitchen simplicity rather than by a strict adherence to preparation times or numbers of ingredients. It would be wonderful if every recipe cooked in the twenty minutes it takes to make our Crispy-Skin Salmon with Buttermilk-Mint Sauce, a perfect after-work entrée that uses only five ingredients (okay, six if you include salt). But we’ve also included recipes that may take a bit longer—a resting period, a cooling-down time, or a marination—yet require very little of the home cook and yield huge rewards with a minimum of kitchen prep and cleanup. For example, our Whole Roasted Chicken, which rests directly on a bed of carrots, onions, and potatoes in a skillet (no roasting rack required!), takes a little more than an hour to cook, but that time is fuss-free. And since you end up with not only a perfectly cooked chicken but also a roasty-warm side dish—all with minimal cleanup—the recipe qualifies in our book as a simple one. We evaluated the simplicity of each recipe based on how easily—from shopping to preparation, cooking to cleanup—it would integrate into the busy lives of home cooks.

FRESH “Fresh” has two senses in our cookbook. In the most literal, it means that we cook with the freshest ingredients we can find in our hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, and that we include shopping notes in our recipes to guide you to locating great ingredients and caring for them. Although you’ll discover that we judiciously use store-bought mayonnaise, canned broth, frozen peas, and Tabasco sauce, we don’t use processed foods such as condensed soups or dressing mixes. Freshness guides the choices and decisions we make about where and when to shop. Whenever possible, we hit the Tuesday farmers market in Mt. Pleasant and the Saturday market downtown on Marion Square. And we’ll go a little bit out of our way, for example, to the Piggly-Wiggly on Meeting Street, which stocks a brand of shucked oysters from Bluffton, South Carolina. True, the Harris-Teeter on East Bay Street is a few blocks closer, but its shucked