People may not know this about me, but I've always loved cooking. My favorite thing to cook is my mom's spicy spaghetti.
My life just got taken over by my cooking. If you don't have any discipline, which I don't, you can make 10 gallons of chocolate mousse, take a spoonful and another and another, and you won't realize you've eaten like five servings of it. It's just what you do.
It's about getting the kids up and fed, getting one to school, getting the other down for a nap, going to the grocery store, picking one up from school, getting the other one down for another nap, cooking dinner... I live my life at these two extremes. I'm either a full-time stay-at-home mom or a full-time actress.
Stuffing is evil. Stuffing adds mass, so it slows the cooking. That's evil because the longer the bird cooks, the drier it will be.
To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a 'home' might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.
The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: Even the simplest food is a gift.
'Wild Swans' showed me there are Chinese traditions that still affect my life. For example, it's not that women are inferior, exactly, but my dad and my brother are the most important men in my life and I would do anything for them. I feel like I should be the one cooking and looking after them.
When I cook at home, most of the people I cook for want to be in the kitchen while I'm cooking. I love nothing more than someone monitoring how much salt I put into something, how much pepper I add - but nothing that you can offer is going to sway how I decide to deliver information to you; you'll either receive it or you won't.
Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.
Yoga has trimmed my body in a way that the gym never could. I used to be a gym rat, but I switched to yoga and am now almost 10 pounds lighter. One important thing I've gotten from yoga is breathing. When I'm cooking, the top part of my body collapses down. It cuts off my diaphragm.
I watched my mother waste her life on housework and swore I'd never do that. Dave does the cooking.
I was given a lot of homework: I had to practise ironing as a synth, practise washing up as a synth, cooking a meal as a synth. It's definitely the most prep I've had to do for a role.
Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.
At home in Ghaziabad, everyone is a pure vegetarian. In fact, when I want to cook non-veg there, my mum shoos me out on the terrace where I have my cooking utensils. I'm told categorically that whatever non-veg or egg, etc., that I have to cook, I should do upstairs and not enter her kitchen at all.
I have a weird thing with knives. I don't like knives very much. Like when my parents are cooking in the kitchen and using knives to chop vegetables, I can't be in the same room. For whatever reason, knives just terrify me.
I can cook because my life depended on it when I lived in Thailand. Either I learnt cooking, or I learnt how it felt to starve. I chose cooking.
What is cooking? 'Cooking' is a loose term. It's understanding energy or the lack thereof.
The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.
Before I cook, I always have to put on music that parents listened to while cooking. I remember waking up in the morning and seeing my dad making breakfast with music and cutting up the tomato and singing to it and just handling food with such care. So when I cook, I put on salsa, vallenato, cumbia, or anything that reminds me of Colombia.
Sometimes I look up a recipe for chicken and tomatoes and end up cooking pork. The inspiration gets lost in translation.
