I had lunch with Julia Turshen a couple months ago (mostly so I could fangirl out and try to sponge up some curl tips for my moppet) and one of my favorite things she told me was that when she moved from Brooklyn to upstate with her wife her cooking changed because all of a sudden she was doing it everyday. She felt she got better at cooking from her gut, throwing meals together with whatever they had -- it's simply not an option to eat out or order in every night the way she could before so not every meal could be a performance piece. Sometimes it's just chicken on the grill with a good sauce and salad on the side. If you're anything like me -- but with a cleaner apartment, I bet -- you're thinking "wait, tell me about the sauce!" because odds are, like the avocado-cucumber salad I spied on the side of her plate a year ago and ran off to tell you about, it's something crazy simple that you didn't realize you knew how to make and now you're 300x more excited to grill chicken and make salad tonight. The good news for us is that Turshen, who previously only hid her cooking talent behind larger-than-life names like Mario Batali, Gwyneth Paltrow, Dana Cowin, Hot Bread Kitchen, Buvette, Fat Radish... seriously, I'm just getting started... finally penned her own book with all the great simple sauces and 400 other things I cannot wait to cook.