Quotes About Cooking

Cooking is one of the most zen things - you have to be there.

As a girl, I had zero interest in the stove. I've always had a healthy appetite, especially for the wonderful meat and the fresh produce of California, but I was never encouraged to cook and just didn't see the point in it.

I made lemon spaghetti in an early season of 'Everyday Italian,' and to this day people still come up to me and say they love it. It's very, very simple. Basically, you cook the pasta and mix together Parmesan cheese, olive oil, lemon juice and zest and pour it over the pasta.

I loved being a part of 'Celebrity MasterChef.' The process was scary and I was so out of my comfort zone but I've learnt so much. Doing something I'd never done before put me in the position of the celebs on 'Strictly' and because of that experience, I think i'll be a better teacher because of it.

We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

Even were a cook to cook a fly, he would keep the breast for himself.

There is no such thing as a pretty good omelette.

I don't cook very often but when I do I try and make Georgian food. I made a hinkali recently, which is like ravioli but is the size of your palm, with meat in the middle and thicker dough.

I simplify the spices. I'm the same way as everybody else: if I look at a recipe and there's ten spices in it, I'm going to have to think long and hard about when I'm going to be able to make that... so I try to simplify the spices to three or four.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone... Bad food is fake food... food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people's ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

There is an old story that says that Julia Child dropped a chicken on the floor when she was filming 'The French Chef.' And then - that, in fact, is not true. She just, you know, dropped some potatoes she was trying to flip in a pan.

Generally, Italians just eat better. They're not doing that thing where they're eating two or three hundred grams of pasta. They're never eating a carbonara sauce with a tub of cream in it.

My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.

I always put on a couple of kilos every time I film a programme. You cant really tuck into a dish and then just leave it.

Whenever possible, buy a fish whole. With tuna, this isn't practical; with smaller fish, it is.

Albacore tuna has a mild flavor that's delicious served raw or seared briefly on the outside so that it's still rare on the inside.

I make a mean tuna fish sandwich.

I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do.

Just because I am a chef doesn't mean I don't rely on fast recipes. Indeed, we all have moments when, pressed for time, we'll use a can of tuna and a tomato for a first course. It's a question of choosing the right recipes for the rest of the menu.

I like tuna when there's a definite streak of deep pink in the middle, medium rare so to speak, and it comes out best when it's not cut too thick.

I might do the odd grilled tuna steak, but I don't think you can call that cooking - it's more like heating up, isn't it?

Once I tune in to the fact that my family receives my cooking for them as an act of love - that it's actually something that makes them feel cared for - it shifts my entire perspective.

There's nothing I like better than going to my apartment, closing the door, cooking my little dinner for one and just tuning out. My apartment really is my haven. It's a nest where I go to heal.