Quotes from Chris Morocco

My grandmother, Erminia 'Minnie' Morocco, treated cookies like a form of currency.

A normal conversation between my uncles about whether or not the lamb is done will come across as a shouting match between four guys all doing their best to impersonate Tony Soprano.

My wife is English and grew up eating Dairy Milk and Flakes and Twirls, so while she loves dark chocolate, she also has a soft spot for the milkier stuff.

The older you get, the less likely you are to order pancakes for breakfast. That's probably a good thing. There is nothing less healthyish for an adult, or more appealing to a five-year-old, than a syrup-drenched stack of refined flour, butter, and eggs.

Round, crispy-edged waffles on the DIY cafeteria station at Oberlin College brought me back to life after many sleep-deprived nights.

When my grandmother passed away in 2014, she left behind some recipes, but nobody stepped forward to follow in her footsteps and become pop-up cookie factories whenever the need arose.

I have a well-documented obsession with spoons.

I'm not a food-optional person. People who forget to eat meals are like aliens to me and, even now, in the age of Seamless and Caviar, I have a hard time relying on strangers to feed me.

My pantry pastas fall somewhere in the middle of the time spectrum. They're simple, streamlined, and flexible, with unfussy yet massively flavorful sauces that come together in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta.

Hodo Soy's firm tofu is certainly stir-fry-able, but my favorite thing to do is shred it using the large holes of a box grater and use it in vegan sloppy joes.

It takes a lot to get vegetables to come together into burger form and stay there. A whole lot, in fact. That is why so many veggie burger recipes require eggs, gluten, prodigious amounts of starches, and chilling or freezing before they have a chance of holding together.

Stir-fried spring vegetables over miso polenta is the meal equivalent of wanting it so badly to be spring yet recognizing it is 40 degrees outside with a brisk headwind no matter which way you are facing.

A lot of nights, and dinners, start like this: some panicked chopping of whatever vegetables I had the foresight to buy, a sheet pan, and my countertop convection oven.

I use a cake tester to check the doneness of everything from fish to vegetables. The point on it is duller than a paring knife, so you get a much better feel for how finished something actually is. Oh yeah, and when it comes to cake, a toothpick is the move. The rougher surface is more likely to show you what the crumb inside looks like.

Thinly slicing even the bulkiest vegetables, like cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, or cabbage, then aggressively cooking them in a hot skillet and finishing with a shower of spices means they cook and develop flavor super quickly.

Unlike meat fibers which contract and bind as they cook, vegetables, grains, and legumes just want to fall apart as they heat up. So when I said I wanted to create a grillable, totally vegan veggie burger that came together in under 20 minutes, there was a good chance this would be the mission that I simply never came back from.

I thought my early attempts at cooking tofu went well, but, in hindsight, I realize that's because I was cooking for hungry, vegetarian college students.

Simply put, Hestan NanoBond cookware is the most durable stainless cookware that I have ever seen.

In the BA Test Kitchen, I don't consider my station to be set up until there are at least 50 tasting spoons in the crock on my counter, and when I walk, my spoon-filled pockets jangle like a villain's spurs in a spaghetti Western.

Creating a healthier alternative to barbecue sauce isn't easy. The extreme range of flavors, from piercing vinegar to salty to sweet to barely perceptible umami, isn't easy to recreate.

I don't order take-out sushi for the fish. Unless I'm spending a lot of money to eat at a phenomenal sushi restaurant, I eat it for the rice, which is perfectly seasoned with a mixture of salt, sugar, and rice vinegar.

Virtually every pair of athletic shoes comes with wafer-thin, virtually non-existent insoles that have very little heel or arch support. This is where Superfeet Black Premium Insoles come in. With ergonomic support for heels and arches, they feel molded to my feet in ways that continue to astound me.

My family is loud.