Lidia Bastianich Quotes

I love food and am very good at improvising when preparing it - it's a really creative experience for me.

Your idea of that dish has evolved, and if you're a cook, you can start thinking in different ways about it, maybe even a different way than I think about it.

I love to cook. My dad's a really excellent cook and his style is: Look in the fridge and make whatever there is with whatever ingredients you have and I like cooking like that, too.

I'm a very improvisational cook. I sort of like to make things up as I go along. I'm quite creative in the kitchen.

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

Once you know the fundamentals of cooking, then you don't need to follow a recipe - you just know what herbs go well or what meats, or what combination of what goes together, and then you can just branch out from there. But if there's something specific that I want to make, I work on the recipe and tweak it to my own.

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.

For me, it's the unexpected and surprising combinations of produce that are the most exciting and lure me into the kitchen for a little bit of experimenting. Apples and sweet potatoes together? Who knew? Carrots with grapes? Okay. I may not be Julia Child, but I can do pretty well with a simple recipe and a lot of enthusiasm.

I've never got on with recipes. Free yourself - throw them out!

I enjoy experimenting with food and dish out innovative food items as well.

I'm yet to attack French cooking, you know, where it's intense, following recipes and stuff. I'm more of a 'make it up' kind of thing.

It's a challenge to demonstrate that you can prepare some really interesting food with humble ingredients.

You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.

After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference.

I love to cook when I have the time. I don't cook French or Mexican food with exact recipes. I just go to the supermarket and buy things that look good, and I mix it all together and invent something. Ninety-five percent of the time, I'm lucky. Sometimes not so lucky, and I say, 'Let's go out to dinner.'

I'm not a particularly good cook. Part of it is that it is the kind of cooking anybody could do if they bothered. It's improvisational. I cook with whatever I have laying around.

Why not mix this and that? If soy goes well with fish, how come no one does beef carpaccio with soy? Why do we have such a taste and not another? It's all about culture. There is something, however, that I really don't like: bell peppers.

I would try doing a dish 30 different ways.

I never cook from cookbooks.

At wd~50, we have carried on, I think, a very honest, legitimate European tradition of messing with foie gras.

Baking is too precise for me. I cook with a pinch of this or that.

Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.

I do like to cook; I'm sort of a mad scientist in the kitchen.

Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.

Being a food show and being me, I always kicked it up a notch, which means I would always elevate the spice level or the complexity of a particular dish. So, it was always like we're going to kick this up a little bit.