I'm not going to claim to know what you think is important when it comes to making tasty and delicious meals, either at home or in a professional kitchen.  Well, let me re-frame that... I'm not going to claim to know what you think or feel is MORE IMPORTANT when it comes to making tasty and delicious meals.  I can, however, tell you what I think is important.  Are you ready?  What is important is: methedients.  Hold on it's actually the ingrethod.  Huh?  Right about now, you are probably flipping a double bird, or laughing, or even shaking head saying "what a dork."  Sometimes I think I am so clever, but in all reality I am just a dad that makes dumb, and almost always bad, dad jokes.  Regardless, you get the gist of what I'm saying. Method and ingredients are both important.  Are they equals or peers?  Yes and no.  When I took on my first executive chef position the owners of the restaurant and myself made a decision to use the best ingredients we were willing to pay for.  I called it the puke factor.  In fact, in my current line of work I still use this example with my potential customers.  I would take a look at my options of quality and price and make my decision on the item that was going to cause me to almost puke when I thought about the price for the quality I wanted as a chef.  Why is this important?  Because I always felt that if we started with a better product and fucked it up that it would still be better than the other guy that was starting with an inferior quality product.  Yeah, it's a little bit of a screwed up view, but it was/is still my truth.  The other side of the coin is that if we executed our dish the way it was supposed to be done we would absolutely knock it out of the fucking park and blow people the fuck away!  In essence, it's like that old-timey saying "Shoot for the moon and even if you miss you'll land among the stars."  Funny thing about that quote... isn't the closest star to our planet the sun?  I digress.

Let me get back on track.

You will have to make your own decision on the quality of ingredients you want to use when you are cooking.  I definitely can't do that for you.  Although, we may come up with a new term to get you to purchase better ingredients when I come over.  We can call it "ingredient shaming," or not.  Buy what you are comfortable with.  Period.  Because I will say that there is never a substitute for a home cooked meal that has been done out of the goodness of heart.  Holy shit, I just hijacked myself again.

Let's try this again, shall we?

Method.  I might take the stance that most cooking is about method and/or technique.  For the sake of this post I will just call it, method.  Here's why: If you have good solid methods you aren't boxed in by ingredients.  Does that make sense?  Sure ingredients will influence the overall outcome of a dish, but understanding methods allow you freedom!  Once you have a grasp of technique the world will open up and you can experiment on those recipes that seemed just out of reach.  I will even take it one step further.  If you understand methods and get a feel for ratios recipes will cease to exist...(except when it comes to baking, pastries and dessert making.  That shit needs to be precise!).  Suddenly you've become Neo and you've mastered the matrix of cooking.  Not so fucking fast there, Escoffier.  True that things will start to make more sense and your limit will be your imagination, but the fact remains that most chefs(OK, well A LOT of chefs) spend a lifetime working to perfect methods.  Like a carpenter that spends his life's work trying to make the best table or chair, they keep making them over and over and over never quite achieving perfection.  The same can be said for chefs.  Dish after dish, they-we, keep searching for ways to improve the method just a little bit at a time.

I just laughed quietly to myself...Keep refining method in search of perfection.  Make today just a little bit better than yesterday.  Isn't this what we're all doing in our lives anyway?