>>706,707
Ok I understand the discrepancy now. We have two different concepts of what it means to be "good at cooking." I was basing my interpretation mostly on the idea and quality of outcome while it seems you were leaning a bit more into the mechanics or the "cooking" itself.

Beyond that, geography looks like it's a huge source of disparity that I didn't really think about. I haven't lived anywhere in the past 15 years where shallots or various imported cheeses were a difficult or expensive find. For the last 8 years especially, all the places I've lived were at most within 20 miles of a dedicated cheese shop. And until today I never would have imagined shallots would be out of the ordinary in any part of the country since for as long as I can remember I've been getting them for pretty cheap. Though I don't quite understand your point about the restaurant books. I can't recall any recipes that haven't been adapted for home use. There may be a few sous vide recipes in some of them, or might require something uncommon in most home kitchens like a fine tamis or chinois, but I think that's as far as they go with anything you'd really consider specialized. They've all been very competently adapted in my experience. Or if I'm misinterpreting what you mean and you're saying an adapted for home version wouldn't be an authentic recreation since you're not using the types of equipment they would be using, I'd argue you're making a purer form. Their specialized equipment, e.g. steam jacketed kettle, is a workaround for not being able to do things a la minute like you would be doing at home. Sorry if I was a little vague, but I didn't mean to imply looking at places like El Bulli, Alinea, Fat Duck or other molecular gastronomy/deconstructivist/modernist type restaurants where a lot of the concepts hinge on things produced with very specialized or custom equipment. Though I do really like the Fat Duck Cookbook as a sort of culinary artbook.

Also something I tend to lose sight on is that cooking for me went beyond what an average person would see as a hobby and edging into full blown autism territory. Outside of the height of the summer heat, I usually spend a few hours most days cooking or otherwise engaged in food related activity and entire weekends with some frequency. Tomorrow night I'm going to make some Norcina sausage and some fresh pasta for dinner which I expect to take somewhere between 2-3 hours. But what else would I want to be doing with that time? I've gone as far as ordering ingredients internationally before for certain things I wanted to try. Recently I've been contacting local farms trying to get them to sell me their next year's pullet eggs (no luck yet) for a ravioli filling that won't work with adult chicken-sized yolks. Many of my other hobbies--gardening, foraging, hunting, fishing, and fermentation--were all branched out from my interest in cooking. I briefly flirted with going into the food industry in my last year of high school, finishing an occupation program offered by the school for culinary arts, before deciding against it when I found out how miserable most people in the industry were. The only person I know in the industry who is relatively happy is a guy who does part time work as personal chef. Now it's my belief that the fastest way to kill a passion is to turn it into a job.

What this all really means, though, is that you, >>707, should just stick with today's special.