As I mature as a chef, I no longer aim to pack multiple techniques and ingredients into a single dish. Realizing that restraint is more difficult, I find it often renders incredibly beautiful results.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Mastering one recipe is better than mastering too many. Learn something and own it, and you'll feel so much better about it. You'll have more confidence if you've made it five times, and that confidence adds so much fun to cooking.
You don't have to stick with these recipes. They're guides. As I say, they're a way in. Have fun with them. It's an easier way to cook in a busy life, once you get the hang of it.
Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe again and can take off on your own.
Don't put too many chefs to work. Sometimes they get too involved in the ingredients and are of no help.
You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.
I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.
I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.
Even though I'm big on recipes, I love to make up my own dishes and when you take a risk in the kitchen, you learn a lot about food!
The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.
I've always done 20 things at once. It's my way of staying alive, not to keep one dish cooking, but several dishes going. And I'm pretty organized.