I'm so grateful every single day for 'Real Girl's Kitchen.'
I love cooking... I'm quite domestic.
I'm a good cook, I am not a great cook. I'm an absolute fraud.
I felt I'd earned the Good Housekeeping Seal when I designed an oval-shaped spaghetti pot, because spaghetti is long.
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 said I was a chef - I think I make great food. I will never open a restaurant to do, like, tasting courses.
In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking.
Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.
I have a full Tuscan lunch and dinner every day in my home; my husband's a fantastic chef.
I am in love with my La Cornue custom-made stove - it's a dream to use and my favourite part of the kitchen.
I love lifestyle stuff, I love housewares. I'm really a homebody, honestly. Anything to do with my kitchen, or my house, I'm all about it. I'm working on a sauce line, so that's kind of exciting. I'm a saucier.
I'm OK with messing up sometimes and not getting everything perfect - and there's something really relatable there for people that aren't so seasoned in the kitchen.
I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.
I still cook at home. A lot of chefs I think don't cook at home. But I still do, I love cooking at home, I love having friends.
I could lie and say my wife cooks for me, but she doesn't. My wife has never learnt cooking but she has great cooks at home.
I don't consider myself a food person. I'm no Bobby Flay. I'm no Emeril or Paula Deen, and I'm certainly not Rachael Ray.
I think people know that I love food, but maybe people don't know that I cook a lot.
A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.
My husband is the chef of the family; he's a brilliant cook. Actually, it makes you quite lazy when you have somebody that's so good at cooking under the same roof. It's all beans or spaghetti when I'm left to run it.
I think that a lot of us at home are iron chefs in their own right in that we have to come up with meals real quickly.
I have a chef who cooks for me. I like to eat healthy.
Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
For years, I've felt that there's an inner cook in me just waiting to be unleashed. But I have to confess I'm having an awful lot of trouble finding her in real life.
Too many books are full of recipes that aren't doable at home. They are purely aspirational. They are quite frightening, even for me.
I love good food. I'm an epicurean, that's for sure... But I am not really a good cook.
