Why write a cookbook? Because your kitchen misses you.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that next year's perfect tomato starts this year, or something like that. I have to admit that I tend to tune him out sometimes as he waxes philosophical about the majesty of tomatoes, terroir, etc. but I guess every gardener or chef has their "thing".  His point is simply that, as an art form, gardening requires more than thinking about just the approaching season, and how to get a few juicy tomatoes out of the ground this year, but how to get more for years to come.

I remember working in a restaurant in San Francisco and sitting in the corner, always just below a boil, was  a steam jacket kettle (If you don't know already, imagine a 40 gallon crockpot) that was always going, filled with chicken bones, celery ends, onions and carrots.  It would be there in the morning when I would walk in, having lost quite a bit of volume but I was always tempted to just ingest a bowl of the stuff as it was.  We all have our things.

I suppose my point is that cooking and food should take time and maybe some of it should be about the ritual as opposed to the speed of something that comes close. Time is the chefs and the gardener's best friend and worst enemy it seems.  When you are in a kitchen and the tickets are coming in one after another, you learn the value of having been prepared before hand (see mise en place).  Still, there is more to it than that smug satisfaction of being prepared.  There is the calming that went into the construction of the thing.  You know the guest will know that there were hours that went into the preparation of that meal before they even placed the order.

We are writing our own cookbook for 99Knives and it should go without saying that I tend to stop reading when a recipe calls for adding a name brand ketchup as a base or a bouillon cube in lieu of stock.  I am here to make a case for making your own stock and making ketchup from scratch, from tomatoes you grew yourself. This book is meant to be read, to be held, to be marked in and have the pages of favorite recipes dog eared.  Bacon is going to have its own section...that's how serious we are about this.

This book is going to have stories about what it is like to work in a restaurant and what it means to take pride in what you make as a profession, as well as how you can do the same things at home.  We want you to get reacquainted with your kitchen. Take a few hours to smoke some pork, make some stock, or make your own ketchup.  Your kitchen misses you.