There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!
I have a scar on my right arm from my ex-husband. He was cooking and he had a hot pot and he turned around and went right into my arm.
My ritual is cooking. I find it therapeutic. It comes naturally to me. I can read a recipe and won't have to look at it again.
I do all the cooking in our family. I'm a utilitarian cook, rather than an adventurous one - I only have about 15 recipes in my repertoire that I rotate - but I love being able to go down to the river and catch a 30 lb. salmon, then grill it on the barbecue.
My wife and I both love cooking - I am an advanced male - so we argue about who gets to rustle up dinner.
So, if I'm cooking, I'll be steaming vegetables, making some nice salad, that kind of stuff.
To understand how quickly we're cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites.
Stock is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result.
I'd say some of my earliest scent memories are from home - just things that were around my house, and my mom's cooking.
We spend our lives in front of screens, and cooking is one of the best antidotes.
I'm brilliant at cooking my stepmother's scrambled egg recipe. The secret is to put eggs, butter, milk, and seasoning together in the saucepan, and to keep stirring with a wooden spoon under a low heat until the preferred consistency is reached.
Once I tune in to the fact that my family receives my cooking for them as an act of love - that it's actually something that makes them feel cared for - it shifts my entire perspective.
I love big shrimp, like Japanese botan shrimp and the meaty ones from Santa Barbara, Calif. In classic Japanese cooking, shrimp like these would be dropped into a broth or boiled as served with sushi. But I think boiling dilutes their great flavor, and they are better when stir-fried.
When I got married and when my sister got married, my mom made us both individual cooking books with all of our family recipes and pictures and kind of the history with our Sicilian family, so that was really special.
Chipotle is based on a very simple idea: We start with great ingredients, prepare them using classic cooking techniques, and serve them in a way that allows people to get exactly what they want.
Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way - that's the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.
Cooking is like snow skiing: If you don't fall at least 10 times, then you're not skiing hard enough.
I make it very clear that cooking and soaking helps to reduce the lectins in troublesome foods like beans and grains.
I only get fat when I eat food cooked by other chefs. At home, my wife does all the cooking. She makes simple things like soups and salads. We both like steamed tofu.
Stone-ground grits are wonderful, but because they take so long to cook, I usually go with quick cooking grits - which I also love. But I never make the instant kind - some things a Southerner just won't do!
