Excellence. Sometimes it's an additional 20 percent past "pretty good." But are you willing to put in that extra effort to polish your work, to make it gleam, to make it function irresistibly for your intended audience?
Dorie Greenspan is - and it shows. So excellent and successful a cookbook author is Dorie that all her latest book needs on the cover is a simple title:
Baking Chez Moi: Recipes from My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), a photo of something chocolaty, and her byline to make readers and cooks everywhere grab it. We spoke about her work with Julia Child, her well-fed husband, snow, butter and what it takes to do things right.