Sara Jenkins of Porchetta Restaurant wrote a great, heartfelt article for The Atlantic extolling the virtues of home cooking. I love her point of view. My first culinary instructors were my mother and my great-aunts, and I’m grateful for having been brought up in a no-shortcuts cooking household. Although the spirit of the article can be summed up in these few sentences, I suggest you read the whole piece:

If you really want to put great food on the table day in and day out, restaurants are not really what you want to emulate. What you need is a few techniques and a few standards and eventually you will have the ability to improvise and adapt. Learn a couple of recipes well and then build on them.