406: How The Essence of French Cooking Elevates the Everyday and is Simple to Learn (even if you don't like cooking!)
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
Shannon Ables
4.7 • 915 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"Food need not be extravagant, complicated, or mysterious to be good. Quite the contrary." —Patricia Wells in her Introduction to Robert Olney's Simple French Food cookbook
Whether you love cooking, loathe cooking or fall anywhere in between, we all need to eat.
And if we eat well - a marriage of nutritive and delicious - we give ourself a very good shot at living a long and wonderful life. But we aren't born knowing how to cook. We have to choose to learn it, and depending upon our experience with food and the approach others took in how meals came together, we may have a whole host of beliefs about what constitutes good food, how to make it or why or why not we want to learn how to cook due to cultural expectations and pressures.
Similar to living a life of contentment, we cannot just go pull the skills of cooking off the shelf, but instead, we do have to invest some time, effort and initially some money (for the tools), but the money need not be much, and the time need not be terribly lengthy if we have the right teachers and ingredients.
Enter the French approach to cooking. The French have long been known for their prowess in the kitchen and with good reason. Auguste Escoffier began cooking at age 13 (1846-1935), and is known for both popularizing and modernizing traditional French cooking methods. You may recognize his name as it is often associated with The Ritz or with the five mother sauces. Rest assured, you do not need to know how to make these traditional French sauces to utilize the skills of the French approach to cooking. You may choose to learn all of them as you begin to find more enjoyment and reward with the basics that will be introduced to you today and further taught in TSLL's Introduction to French Cooking course for everyday deliciousness, but don't be intimated by the fanciness that often is paired with French food. Yes, it is fancy and beautiful and thoughtfully presented, but it is the creation that we are going to talk about today, and for everyday life, that is all you need to know.
So let's get started!
~Explore the detailed Show Notes on The Simply Luxurious Llife blog - https://thesimplyluxuriouslife.com/podcast406
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the simple sophisticate, where in 2014, this podcast premiered. |
| 0:08.9 | And now in its 11th season, the show continues to focus on the same principles it was founded upon, |
| 0:15.0 | the art of living a life of quality over quantity. |
| 0:19.0 | Topics range from creating an everyday life you love living, |
| 0:22.2 | strengthening mindfulness practices, building a capsule wardrobe, |
| 0:26.1 | preparing seasonally delicious meals, |
| 0:28.4 | traveling and exploring France and Britain, |
| 0:30.9 | and living life to the fullest without breaking the bank, |
| 0:34.5 | because living well really is quite simple. I'm your host, Shannon Ables, |
| 0:40.1 | and whether you're listening on your commute, exercising, working in the garden in route, |
| 0:44.7 | or returning from that dream destination, or sitting down with a hot cuppa or a cafe |
| 0:50.5 | au lae, thank you for tuning in. Let's get started. Welcome to the 406th episode of the |
| 1:01.7 | simple sophisticate. And today we are stepping into the kitchen, so to speak, and not to |
| 1:10.1 | deter anyone who doesn't like to be in the kitchen, because in all |
| 1:14.0 | sincerity, this is exactly the episode you'll want to tune in for because we're talking about how |
| 1:20.4 | the essence of French cooking or French cuisine elevates the everyday and is simple to learn, even if you don't like cooking. |
| 1:30.1 | What am I talking about here? Well, as many of you know, this August, I am launching the first |
| 1:36.8 | cooking online video course, and it is introduction to French cooking everyday deliciousness. |
| 1:44.1 | And it's just that. It's the basics. It's |
| 1:46.3 | the fundamentals. It's all you need to make whatever food you love doesn't have to be friend food, |
| 1:52.0 | but it's the skills and techniques. And so today's episode is basically an introduction to the course |
| 1:58.0 | in the sense of we're going to talk about how is it possible for cooking to be easy |
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