Alexandra Guarnaschelli Quotes

I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk.

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.

My inability to follow recipes as written - without obeying the devil on my shoulder telling me to replace ingredients or change the temperature - is well documented.

Fusion food as a concept is kind of trying to quite consciously fuse things that are sometimes quite contradictory, sometimes quite far apart, to see if they'd work.

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.

One of the troubles with food is that people take themselves too seriously. This is why I'm very happy for people to change my recipes, alter them, replace one ingredient for another.

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.

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.

Ferran Adria making hamburgers... some thought it was crazy. But getting them perfect was a challenge. Plus I'm fascinated by all aspects of food.

One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.

I would try doing a dish 30 different ways.

If you're cooking and not making mistakes, you're not playing outside your safety zone. I don't expect it all to be good. I have fat dogs because I scrap that stuff out the back door.

I do not stick to rules when cooking. I rely on my imagination.

My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?

I'm really a scientist. I follow recipes exactly - until I decide not to. And then I'll follow something else exactly. I may decide I could turn this peach tart into a plum tart, but if I'm following a recipe, I follow it exactly.

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 don't always succeed in creating a delicious dinner for my family; I would, however, argue for the likely success of Taco Night. Who doesn't love a taco? Make it with veggie crumbles! Add fish! Have you tried ground buffalo? The results are always impressive.

I love the idea of cooking, but I don't like using recipe books, so I'll put a mish-mash together, and it might be amazing by total accident, or it will be a catastrophe.

Nothing is going the way it was supposed to.

Short ribs in the middle of a hamburger? That was pretty groundbreaking.

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

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.

The Korean taco was a phenomenon... It just came out of us. We didn't really think about it.

Spaghetti is good with ranch, and spaghetti is good with sugar. You put all of that together and make a sandwich out of it, and you get greatness. People shouldn't judge unless they try it.

I'm just trying to cook good food, and I'm not afraid to do whatever I need to do to keep the food evolving.