France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.
Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist.
Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!
Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it's a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won't mix with it. And then there's how much energy it takes to heat water.
Cooking turkey every year doesn't have to be monotonous - I want people to always mix it up using different spices and preparations.
All around us right now, tucked into the valleys and along the coasts, bookshops glow in the winter light. Think of them like singular, magical, and multi-dimensional recipe boxes. They wait for us to pluck out a card, to stand over the stove, to start cooking.
Fifty thousand dollars' worth of cabinets isn't going to make you a better cook; cooking is going to make you a better cook. At the end of the day, you can slice a mushroom in about three inches of space, and you can carve a chicken in a foot and a half. So it doesn't matter how big the kitchen is.
I love cooking, and I can make real good rajma chawal. It is a time consuming process and only for the consumption of a select few very special people. Also, I can make delicious mutton biryani, but I must confess I have stolen the recipe from my mother.
I've got my foot in 'Saturday Night Live,' and my heart is there in a lot of ways, but I'm really pushing myself to do these new projects. It's scary as hell, but it's fun to have other things to keep my creative brain cooking.
I am a nice guy. I love having a good time. I love cooking. I love hanging out with my friends.
I can make things, but I don't cook them, exactly. Like salmon, I can stick that in a pan. Or the other day I made noodles, but they were hard. It never occurred to me to check them; I just stopped cooking them when I felt they were ready. Really, I'm too absentminded.
The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.
It's amazing to think of the nutritional responsibility you have in cooking for a kid, which then makes you wonder if you're getting enough yourself.
I love my cooking tools because I enjoy cooking - a Vitamix for smoothies and a rice cooker for steel-cut oats. I travel with a small rice cooker. I soak oats overnight, and when I get up, I just turn the rice cooker on, and it cooks the oats perfectly every time.
Apparently, in the olden days, nawabs would get bored with their cooks very quickly and throw them out. All of them set up shop in a place called Bawarchi Tola. That's how royal food came to the streets. I started hanging around there. That's when I realised food is a lot more than just cooking on Sundays.
One pillar of my cooking is that salad dressing is sacred and that you always make it with the most delicious oil you can find. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.
I have lots of older siblings, and as they started to leave the house, I went from cooking once a week to twice, three times, and so on. After a while, it was just like making the bed.
Onions and bacon cooking up just makes your kitchen smell so good. In fact, one day I'm going to come up with a room deodorizer that smells like bacon and onions. It's a fabulous smell.
I found that if I offered to cook for a girl, my odds improved radically over simply asking a girl out. Through my efforts to attract the opposite sex, I found that not only did cooking work, but that it was actually fun.
If you're not clipping coupons before going to the grocery store, you're overspending. If you're ordering in or going out to dinner because you don't feel like cooking, you're overspending. If you're not tracking where your money is going, you're very likely overspending.
