In 1998, I began a decade of intense travel. I cooked with chefs, with grandmothers (a privilege, almost always), with granddaughters, with whole families, with celebrities, with friends and with colleagues. And I discovered that you never cook with someone else without learning something. In every case, there’s a two-way transfer of knowledge. If they know less than you do, you grow from teaching. If more, of course, you grow from learning.

Some of my favorite dishes came out of travel: pasta alla Gricia, among the most basic and simplest building blocks of pasta cooking; braised squid with artichokes (a visit to Liguria began that craze for me, along with a passion for farinata, also called socca); black cod with miso; jook; and eggplant curry, just to name a few.

There were also dishes I learned in New York, of course: spaghetti with fried eggs (thank you, Arthur Schwartz); Sichuan chicken with chilies; stir-fried chicken with ketchup (thank you, Suvir Saran). There were another 500 or so I learned from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, with whom I wrote a couple of cookbooks, but that’s a different tale.

Usually, I was either taught to make something or I modeled it myself, as best I could. I refused to buy into the notion that there was a “correct” way to prepare a given dish; rather, I tried to understand its spirit and duplicate that, no matter where I was cooking. For months I lived with a hot plate and a combination convection-microwave oven. When I needed to roast something I borrowed a friend’s kitchen. For years after that I cooked in others’ kitchens more than my own; the column never missed a beat. Thus I have no patience for “I’d love to cook but I have a lousy kitchen.”

To me the question was not, “Would I cook this as a native would?” but rather, “How would a native cook this if he had my ingredients, my kitchen, my background?” It’s obviously a different dish. But as Jacques Pépin once said to me, you never cook a recipe the same way twice, even if you try. I never maintained that my way of cooking was the “best” way to cook, only that it’s a practical way to cook. (I’m lazy, I’m rushed, and I’m not all that skillful, and many people share those qualities.)

There has been some invention as well. Before Rick dreamed up The Minimalist, I pitched a column called The Spontaneous Cook, to reflect the way I and many others actually operate in the kitchen: shop avidly, keep a full refrigerator and pantry, pull things out and get to work. Thus I “created,” usually by accident, some of my favorite dishes: crisp-braised duck legs with aromatic vegetables, braised turkey (the demands of the annual Thanksgiving column engendered much creativity, and this was an especially successful one), and the more-vegetable-than-egg frittata.

One recurring theme was restating the absolutely obvious: cooking truths that had somehow disappeared. Another, related, theme was a kind of counterintuitive  or perhaps anti-trendy  populism, a celebration of ordinary ingredients that were largely ignored by food snobs. Examples of the first were a piece reminding people that they already had a broiler, that it was arguably more useful than the much-worshiped grill and that it therefore should be employed more often; and a column outlining how, with thought, one could double the utility of the freezer. Examples of the second theme included ketchup (I mean, why not?) and frozen vegetables, which I argued were preferable to so-called fresh ones flown in from Peru.