Copper is a superb cooking metal, conducting heat so evenly it has unparalleled control, especially at low temperatures.
I ended up turning down a full scholarship of music at the conservatory to pay to go to cooking school.
My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking, and to enjoy consuming good food and wine.
For wok cooking, use oils with a high smoke point and low polyunsaturated-fat content: grapeseed oil, peanut oil, etc. Sesame oil and olive oil will burn and taste bitter. Oils with high polyunsaturated-fat contents like soybean oil will also make your food texturally unpleasant.
I would say, probably 7 or 8 years into my cooking career, it stopped being about just food for me. Food's really fun, but I've always been about people, and I realized that food is just a really convenient tool for me to connect people and bring them together.
Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.
I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.
Once you understand the foundations of cooking - whatever kind you like, whether it's French or Italian or Japanese - you really don't need a cookbook anymore.
I love 'The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook' by Dione Lucas. A huge source of information and inspiration. The book is organized by menu, and the recipes are unusual and exciting.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Make something simple a few times until you 'master' it and move on to the next thing. Take a cooking class! Buy a cookbook that specializes in foods or a cuisine you enjoy.
I will not allow a Delia Smith cookbook in my house! It's all so precise with Delia, and it makes cooking seem so inaccessible.
Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
Lemon curd is one of the first things I remember cooking when I was old enough to use the stove without supervision. I looked up a recipe in my one of my mom's Martha Stewart cookbooks and went to work, stirring anxiously and monitoring closely for signs that the mixture was thickening so as not to curdle the eggs.
My interest in food really began with a month's cookery course in Frome, Somerset, after my A-levels. I left the course not an incredible cook, alas, but a real enthusiast. Food and cooking is at the core of entertaining, and my passion grew and grew.
I would love to do a cookery show and cookery books. I'm not a professional cook, but I can definitely cook. I know the difference between good and bad cooking. I mean, when I was in 'Big Brother' I was the glorified cook of the house, so if I got offered my own show - then why not?
I think cookery shows have become so sophisticated, and everyone's so marvellous at it, but there are people like me who aren't into the cooking malarkey, who still don't know how to boil an egg for three minutes.
Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.
I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish - too much handling will spoil it.
