Quotes from Chris Morocco

Meatloaf has never quite risen above its name. It offers comfort and predictability, but rarely fireworks.

Everyone's definition of healthy (and delicious) is different.

I have half a cutlery shop's worth of spoons in my pocket at all times designated for tasting.

Tasting food, thinking about it, talking about it, and deciding whether it can be better is the crux of my job - and my life. So when I discovered a tasting spoon that felt better in my hand, a touch softer against my bottom lip, and that stood a little taller on my counter, there was no going back.

I don't want to hack my dinner, and I don't want to disrupt my cookware. I just want to cook tasty food like everyone else, using cookware that works. But if someone comes along with a product that is genuinely better, well, I'm all ears.

When I was a kid, brown rice felt like punishment. Like the ever-increasing amount of whole wheat flour that would appear in my mom's pancakes and waffles, brown rice with dinner felt like we had done something really wrong.

Almondine is the kind of spot that seems to be on every corner in Paris - packed with classic French pastries, unpretentious and yet insanely good. The pain aux raisins is my favorite, a tight coil of croissant dough layered with a whisper of unctuous pastry cream and jammy-glazy raisins.

Growing up, my parents were health nuts who tried to deprive me of sugary and processed foods so that I would grow up with an appreciation for healthy, delicious homemade food.

I break out in hives whenever I hear the word disrupt applied to cooking.

A refrigerator, to me, isn't as clever an appliance as people would have you believe. To me, it's a cold limbo, a temporary reprieve from the inevitability of spoilage. The freezer, on the other hand, is a far more satisfying solution for keeping foods at their best.

The deliciousness of a bowl of pasta isn't proportional to the time it takes to make it: A three-hour ragu doesn't necessarily taste 15 times better than a 10-minute butter-and-Parm weeknight affair.

I've found that grilled chicken is one of the fastest, easiest ways of getting protein on my family's plate, but it needs a massively flavorful sauce to finish it during the final minutes of cooking.

I would rather have 1/4 of a cookie for four days than a big cookie on day one followed by three days with nothing - this has been documented by my colleagues.

I can't keep pumpernickel bagels at home because just knowing they are in the freezer makes it hard for me to fall asleep.

My dad had a wildly embarrassing habit for a while, that luckily only came out when he was traveling abroad. When trying to decide what restaurant to eat in, he would boldly stride in to the kitchen of every possible contender and have a look around.

Kombucha is a great just-walked-in-the-door, sweet-tart wine replacement.

O-Med doesn't make vinegars that you would ever consider cleaning with. They're lush, like burying your nose in a platter of lavender and peaches, with the concentrated, fruity essence of a good glass of wine.

Let's just get this out of the way: Most grocery store vinegars taste terrible. They're made from low-quality wine (or other alcohol), which gives them a flavor that's barely more nuanced than the chewing-on-metal taste of distilled vinegar.

The secret to sheet pan dinners is having a sauce, condiment, or other raw-and-crunchy finisher that comes together outside of the oven, otherwise everything on the plate has the same, monotonous roasty-dry texture.

Remember in 'Goodfellas' when Joe Pesci stops by his mom's house to get a knife but within minutes is served a full-on red-sauce dinner despite his mom having been asleep when he arrived? That is the constant state of preparedness that only a freezer can get you.

I live on a lonely culinary island, built on (very thin) bedrock consisting of things I know, or believe, my family will eat. It is a small island. Fortunately, nachos are on that island with me, and nothing gets my family fired up like nachos for lunch.

We've all been there. Your roux looks good, you add stock until your gravy is the ideal consistency, and then those pan drippings go in and suddenly you've got a sauce that's thinner than chicken soup. Before you panic, remember that there's always a way to thicken it, whether you're an hour or a minute away from dinner time.

Pepper mills (aka pepper grinders) rank just behind knives as primary causes of horrific kitchen accidents, according to an unofficial study that occurred in my life experience.

The funny thing about bowl recipes is, despite how simple they might seem, they can actually be a lot of work.