These are excerpts from the author’s book “Deep,” which contains eight of his small books published in the form of Wisdom Literature covering different aspects of life: Facing troublemakers, dealing with pain, personal financial issues, gastronomy, reading, criticizing, inspiring, and feeling always good to go.

Series 4: Cuisine – Feeling Good.

Week 60: Home Cook versus Professional Chef

• Professional chef is a merit-related title and has nothing to do necessarily with the workplace. All of these may equally deserve the title: a housewife who lovingly prepares food for her family, an old man preparing food for inmates of an old inn, and an international chef in a five-star hotel.

• You should be proud if you are a home cook. Home cooking preceded professional cooking by centuries.

• Home-prepared food is not necessarily inferior to that which people eat in famous restaurants. The particular difference is that home food should essentially be prepared with love.

• The traditional housewife cooking made with love and mastery continues to be a rich source of inspiration for the greatest professional chefs.

• An international chef who supervises preparing food for hundreds of people in an international hotel needs a partner who lovingly prepares one dish for him or her to eat when he or she comes home exhausted at the end of the day.

• Talent is not made in cooking schools. It is just discovered there. And when the talent is weak, the school brings out the best that can be brought out from the learner. Great talent develops itself through the means and tools available around it.

• The home cook is usually experienced in specific varieties preferred by the family, but the original talent and great passion urge him or her to reach international standards between the walls of the home and its small kitchen.

• Even if you are an excellent home cook, the challenge is not easy when you decide to become a professional chef. The issue is not related to mastering the culinary arts as much as it is related to other factors, but at the core of the professional work: cooking when asked and as required of you and not according to your own desire or mood, having the need to satisfy the customers’ different tastes, making sure to present a wonderful dish that does not exceed the estimated cost of selling it, and so on.

• A good home cook is in a state of constant passion to learn the newest in the arts of cooking. He or she is not content with anything less than mastery, whatever his or her circumstances and temperament.

• There is a big difference between being a home cook and just cooking for the family. The second is a home task, while the first is a passion practiced at home in a professional spirit.

• A professional chef cannot be a bad home cook, but he or she is very likely a lazy home cook.