My Food Shopping "Philosophy"

The food media—magazines, blogs, websites, television, and cookbooks—can be both inspiring and intimidating. You might think that having the best, priciest, hardest- to-track-down ingredients is the key to cooking.

My approach is simpler than that: You buy the best ingredients available and combine them in ways that make sense on any given day. An omelet made with farm-fresh eggs, a locally raised chicken roasted with fragrant olive oil, sliced tomatoes straight from the garden—these experiences cannot be duplicated with supermarket ingredients. But those ingredients are precious and rare and therefore unrealistic for most people to eat every day.