Quotes from Rick Bayless

I love collecting market stuff in Mexico. I have an etagere built onto the wall of my living room, which has cubicles that are lit and filled with super inexpensive pottery. You see them in a new way; they become museum pieces.

Great food, like all art, enhances and reflects a community's vitality, growth and solidarity. Yet history bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture.

By a decade after the 1521 fall of Tenochtitlán, the Mexican natives had already adopted a new set of flavors into their existing large assortment. There seemed to be an "absence of strong cultural resistance to the introduction and use of foreign plants," as one researcher found recently when he tried to discover what had become of so many of those pre-Columbian crops in modern Mexico.11

I know Los Angeles has it better than Chicago when it comes to produce year round!

My earliest memory is making peach cobbler with my grandmother. A wonderful memory. I grew up in a restaurant family - B.B.Q. restaurant.

One of my favorites is chilaquiles. It's corn tortilla chips in a simple, brothy tomato sauce with a little chile for heat. It's wonderfully homey. It has irresistible crispy bits and I love to eat it. And you can play around with it - add chicken, sliced red onions, or all these different things that can easily dress it up.

I usually get up around 6 A.M. It takes me a while to get going. In our household, I am the first one up. I usually make coffee for myself, draw a bath and have a big soak. I read in the bath.

I cook all the time, and I cook all different kinds of things, but never Mexican at home. That's my work.

I'm meticulous about tasting everything at the restaurant, so I taste all the preparations before lunch and dinner. That means tasting around 50 dishes twice. There are times when I think I can't taste another thing.

I love that we are bringing the flavors of Frontera to Los Angeles. I think we can only add to the booming food community in Los Angeles. Our food is gutsy and soulful.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and I love that. It's cool to have different foods from all over the world within a stone's throw of my house.

I did a show a long, long time ago called 'Cooking Mexican'. It was a studio show as opposed to on-location like the one I do now. Before my first show, I was a cooking instructor, and I did a whole lot of classes for home cooks about Mexican food.

A lot of people don't like to eat on camera, but I eat on camera all the time. I'm standing in for the viewer.