20 Years in the kitchen and 30 years of world traveling. These are my most favorite recipes I want to share with you.First of all there are no pictures.... Did your granny have pictures on her index cards written in her chicken scratch, So Bite Me he he he heNow here are the ............rules1 Your finger is you best tasting tool. (It was good enough auntie Marge)2 Buy a kitchen scale $10 (I use weights, its easy and you can tare the scale for each ingredient)3 I use tablespoons and teaspoons from the cutlery drawer. Plenty of them and you can wash them later.4 Preparation time (who cares) you live for this anyway; a day in the kitchen is better than a lot of other shit.No colored pictures, unless I make a fortune and re-publish. This is not like other cookbooks; I have tried to keep the bla bla bla out of the recipe. In other words they are written in the way you cook, for people who cook. The page size is US letter so you can print them and put them in a binder. Just print the ones you like. And for the ones you don't like crunch them up into a little ball and then pitch them. Don't forget to curse me out and email me with the reason.I try to keep it to one page if possible.I have written each recipe the way you would prepare it, so you might see onions or butter appear a few times. Which brings me to why; don't you just love it when they list the items at the top and use different bits of it in several places of the directions or leave out one ingredient completely (so now what do I do with $25 worth of truffles) How about this one? "When you go to make the recipe it just goes; combine the frozen duck beaks, onions, garlic and watermelon seeds then you have to go back to the list of ingredients to see how much of each you need and you end up missing an ingredient or putting the wrong amount in" Thanks for that one Darcy. If you want a cute little list of things to shop for, suck it Thanks for that one Penny. Ok if you must just look down the third tab and you can see the list of all the items.In the instructions, if words like: mix, fold, sauté, wisk or deglaze, reduce are unknown to you, just ask somebody else that cooks more than you or look it up on the web.I am going to assume you have the basic skills, ingredients and spices hanging around in the cupboards.I have not bothered with cooking times unless its important, cook till done, you know when something is done right.As a retired chef owner of a restaurant I liked to partition my recipes so you didn't have to do the whole recipe every time. I have the spice blend on hand and some sauces made already. You too can do this on a personal scale for instance the spice mix for Mexican salsa (picco de gallo) can be used for lots of other stuff too. Be experimental and the Mamou sauce is the beginnings of any great cream sauce like Alfredo. Most of the things here can be frozen as well. I use ziplock bags to portion for single meals and sometimes I can sauces, you know like in jars with lids hahaha.Tools: I am fortunate enough to have a kitchen aid mixer but the rest is basic stuff. Oven temp is always 350 degrees unless otherwise indicated. One last thing my humor, spelling and grammar don't count OK.