Since I was about seven, I've loved cooking. I'd wake up at five in the morning and make cinnamon rolls and all these different things.
I adore my mother, and I am probably a chef because of my mother. She was adventurous.
The secret of good cooking is, first, having a love of it.
However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.
Cooking is an act of love, a gift, a way of sharing with others the little secrets -- 'piccoli segreti' -- that are simmering on the burners.
Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.
Just so [becoming a chef ] that I could support my art habit. You know? I mean, this is - this is something where you've been literally given an opportunity to put the world on pause for a second.
What I like to do when I go out is enjoy my friends and the food around it. If we have to stop and give five minutes to the chef, then I'm down with that. But if the chef has to interrupt every course to tell us how important this new revolution that's happening is, then I'm not so much interested in that.
My life is a tsunami of inspirations. Number one is that I really do just love my BBQ. I mean it's the sustenance of mankind. You know, the animal rights of people, if they had their way, 99% of the human race would parish because we sustain ourselves with dead stuff on the grill.
I'll tell you what I love. Sending back bottles of wine that aren't right in restaurants in France! Whoa! I love the French, but I do find their wine snobbery something unbearable.
You don't go into being a chef for the money.
My decision to open my first restaurant in Nashville was born from my heart. From the moment I stepped foot in Music City, I have had a love affair with the people and burgeoning culinary scene.
That's been my forever love affair - Mexican food. But yeah it has to be something savory or cheesy. I'm not tempted by sweets.
The art of cooking is among the most intimate things that we can do for another.
The most indespensible ingredient of all good home cooking: love for those you are cooking for.
Being a chef is the best job in the world.
If I wasn't an actress, I'd like to cook. I'm pretty obsessed by it. Rome was great in that sense, going to amazing cookery bookshops. No wonder their food is good because the quality and wide range of their produce is so good. It's not fair, really.
I love my food and wine; I have tried my hand at being a chef and failed miserably.
Cooking may be a creative art, but it's also a wonderful full-time hobby.
I tend to be a person who, when I get interested in something, I get obsessed by it... What happens to me is that I will fall in love with a particular ingredient or a particular dish... Once I make the decision that something has intrigued me enough to draw me in, there is no end to it.
I spend more time in the kitchen than I have in the dining room, for obvious reasons, however, I just want to sit and indulge.
The history of cooking is my passion, and cooking is my passion.
I started waiting tables in college and realized how much I loved the business and loved to cook. I decided to go to culinary school and never looked back.
My office in New York is overflowing with all kinds of cookbooks, and in New Orleans we have a huge culinary library. So yeah, I guess I'm a little bit obsessed.
I studied to be a chef as a side thing, a little hobby that I enjoyed doing, but I ended up falling madly in love with the food and the lifestyle.
