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

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.

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

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

‚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.

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

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

I was always a junk food person, still am.

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?‘

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

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

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.

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.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

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

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

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

The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. When you become good at it, it’s a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: ‚Is it good? Does it give pleasure?‘

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.

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.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

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.

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

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

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.

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

I love Velveeta cheese.

When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.

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

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.

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.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.