Quotes About Cooking

My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.

I'm Italian. I love to cook Italian food, so I learned from my dad how to make sauce and meatballs and all that stuff. With my wife and kids, I started making homemade pasta. The very first time, I didn't have a pasta maker, so I had to cut it with a knife, the old-school way! The noodles were all jacked up, but it was fun.

Let me start with a confession: I don't enjoy cooking. The reason I usually do it at home is not because I'm a New Man or Jamie Oliver disciple, but because my wife's cooking is so bad. In fact, to me, cooking is less a pleasurable pastime than a defense against poisoning.

Even before marriage I used cook delicious dishes for my wife and mother-in-law on Jamai Sasthi.

My wife Neelam is a North Indian, so she will make North Indian food, while my mother will make Bengali food.

I'm a huge fan of burgers, and they're not my wife's favorite, so we don't cook them at home.

What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

Nowadays I actually cook Italian-style food more than French heavy sauces. I make a good salad, some great roasted vegetables, grilled fish. I'm crazy about L.A. because at the farmers' market you find all kinds of wild mushrooms.

People get a little bolder and more wild in summer. You've got things going on kabobs, things cooking on the bone. There's something about standing over a grill or outside with the family that inspires us.

Letting the markets and seasons dictate my dinners means I never get bored or tempted to order takeout.

I would love to be better at cooking but I hate cleaning up afterwards. I love the process of putting everything together and the chance of getting it right or wrong but it takes ten minutes to eat it and then ages to clean.

I don't really cook much. I'm more of a baker. My favorite things to bake that everybody loves, and I can only keep in the house for about ten minutes, are 7-Up cake and Pineapple Upside-Down cake.

Since I don't have much time to cook, I tend to cook in bulk and eat leftovers.

We do things like a curry in a pressure cooker in 12 minutes. When you're on a diet you're hungry so you have a tendency to pick. So hopefully, if you can cook a meal quickly, you won't reach for the crisps.

I have a terrible tendency to lick my fingers when I cook. So much so that I got a telling off from my pastry teacher years ago, who said it would hinder my prospects.

Everything tastes better with butter. Meat that has fat in it is tender in a certain way, flavorful in a certain way. It's hard to deny the flavor quotient there.

Pot barley takes longer to cook than pearl, but an overnight soak in water will speed things along. It's a robust grain that, if overcooked, won't collapse but will become more tender.

Most fish require a short cooking time, but cephalopods are the exception to this fishy rule. As with some cuts of larger land beasts, the longer they're cooked, the more tender they get.

The key to great fried squid is 'flash-frying' in hot oil for only a few minutes, which keeps it tender.

Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.

The big mistake people make is eating their grilled beef hot. I prefer room temperature or cool. When the meat rests and starts to get cool, all of that fat goes back into the muscles and becomes much more tender.

Think schnitzel, and you usually think veal or pork: pounded into tenderness, battered, and fried to a golden magnificence.

The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It's in the blood.

Dolly Parton made me chicken and dumplings. That Tennessee woman can burn some pots! And we know that I am not necessarily shy to a fork!