Quotes About Cooking

I'm actually a very shy person, which is why I always chose to be in the kitchen. You can make people happy and entertain them, without really being there. You can make a very short appearance and then say, 'I've got something on the stove, gotta go!'

Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.

My nanna was an extraordinary lady, and a good old-fashioned cook. She'd just be pottering around, cooking dinner for 25 people on a wood-fired stove without a problem.

My earliest memory of cooking is my grandmother showing me how to make chicken gravy on the big combustion stove in her kitchen. I still use Nana's gravy recipe.

The first time I was cooking for my wife, Stephanie, way before she was my wife, I actually put three chickens on the rotisserie and I closed the grill, which is really a bad idea. But I just wasn't thinking very straight that day. And I looked outside and I saw, like, smoke and flames.

Sometimes when I'm making a potato salad I don't boil my own potatoes, I take them straight out of a can.

The best things - when I really feel that I'm communicating, and when I really feel that people are getting it - are simple, straightforward recipes. I think simple is the hardest to achieve because you don't have all those elements to hide behind.

I love cooking. I cook for myself every day. I like the ceremony of it. It takes me into a different zone. I make a lot of pasta. But cooking for a crowd of five or ten or, heaven forbid, twenty? No, thank you. I don't like feeling like a slave to the care and feeding of my guests.

If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are.

You don't need more recipes. You need to learn to cook without them.

Most good chefs believe there is no such thing as too much garlic.

I eventually learned to cook by focusing on two principles. Both of them apply to all learning and will be your constant companions throughout this book: failure points and the margin of safety.

As chef Mehdi Chellaoui says, "I use lemon like I use salt." Mario Batali would agree: if something is missing, it's probably acid.

use fat, not water, to counter hotness. Capsaicin is fat-soluble.

When I'm cooking or doing other physical work and I get overwhelmed, it's usually because I'm not taking care of myself, so I'll take a break. I'll make a snack or a cup of tea. Or I'll just drink a glass of water and sit down outside for a few minutes. It's usually enough to get me calm and clear.

We'd all be happier and more successful if we could learn to be chefs more often—which just takes some self-awareness of the times we're being a cook and an epiphany that it's not actually as scary as it seems to reason independently and act on it.

To boil water, the MED is 212°F (100°C) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it "more boiled." Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive.

The Art of Simple Food by Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters lined

When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is." And: "Good cooking is no mystery. You don't need years of culinary training, or rare and costly foodstuffs, or an encyclopedic knowledge of world cuisines. You need only your own five senses.

book Culinary Artistry, Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page provide

A) You should taste the food as you go, which a surprisingly small number of people do; and B) salt and olive oil actually are cheating and they're secret weapons and they always work." Audiogon

Language is infinitely expansive (much like cooking) and therefore horribly overwhelming if unfiltered.

Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn't matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn't matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.

Fifty Shades of Chicken That's the title of Shaun's "most-gifted" book. Totally serious. I assumed it would be a complete joke, but it has nearly 700 reviews on Amazon and a 4.8-star average.