If you like good ol‘ fashion Southern soul food then, yes, I am a good cook! My specialty is chicken dumplings and poke salad.

I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.

My sisters like cooking at my place. It has a bit more room, and the food tastes a little bit better. A big pot of spaghetti and sauce, some warm French bread – works all the time. I think I’ve been eating pasta for 26 years.

My wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way.

I’m frugal. I’m not a very acquisitive woman. I never waste food. If you prepare your own food, you engage with the world, it tastes alive. It tastes good.

I love Velveeta cheese.

Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start.

The Kobe craze really annoyed me. Most of the practitioners had no real understanding of the product and were abusing it and exploiting it in terrible and ridiculous ways. Kobe beef should not be used in a hamburger. It’s completely pointless.

I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.

I would say there are some foods that I strongly recommend that you do not eat. No. 1 on that list, I believe, is doughnuts. Comfort food. Zero value. Don’t eat them.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

I was always a junk food person, still am.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.

The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine’s not so great.

I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That’s God talking.

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

I’m a decent cook; I’m a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. At the request of my kids, I’m taking cooking classes. As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‚Did I do a great job as a mom, or was that an average day?‘

Another suggestion is to cook a meal, maybe not every night, but a couple more times a week than you usually do. That way you have leftovers, and you take your lunch to work.

The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C – not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother’s kitchen. If I don’t have time to cook, I’ll just read a cookbook.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

My dinners at home are startlingly simple. Every night, I stop at the market near my hotel and pick up a steak, lamb chops or some liver, which I broil in the electric oven in my room. I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all. I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

If I’m in the ‚hood, I like Chef Creole’s Haitian rice and stewed chicken.

I’m not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

My mom had Julia Child and ‚The Fannie Farmer Cookbook‘ on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

When I figured out how to work my grill, it was quite a moment. I discovered that summer is a completely different experience when you know how to grill.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.

The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.

When you’re a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don’t actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I’ll do, and especially when I’m in New York, I’ll go for a run. And I’ll run 10 or 15k on my – and I run to gain my appetite.

When I’m home, I spend Sunday with my husband. If we’re not cooking, we travel around in our camper, stop at fast-food restaurants, and picnic. We love that stuff that will harden your arteries in a hurry.

Those places I don’t understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

Cooking today is a young man’s game, I don’t give a bollocks what anyone says.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

I think I should learn French and be a better cook – basic, really good life stuff.

I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.

Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.

Who bothers to cook TV dinners? I suck them frozen.

When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon – all served with black beans and rice. It’s festive but different.

I like chicken a lot because chicken is generous – that is to say, it’s obedient. It will do whatever you tell it to do.

I’ve been my mom’s kitchen helper since I was a little kid.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

Let’s face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.