Recipe Complexity Quotes

It's kind of crazy what I can do and what I can't do. It's simple things like rice and quinoa or salads, honestly, that I'm not great at. But I can make an osso buco that takes six hours.

I can make cookies and do easy stuff. Pies are very specific and hard to do well though.

Do you really want to make risotto to order when you have eight guests sitting there? No. It won't work. Most cookbooks won't tell you that. They will say make it and it will come out perfectly. They should tell you you're probably going to screw it up the first 10 times you make it.

I'm obsessed with cooking shows, even though they make everything look so easy when it isn't.

I will not allow a Delia Smith cookbook in my house! It's all so precise with Delia, and it makes cooking seem so inaccessible.

I think the best shortcut is to choose really simple recipes. Because I think you can make simple recipes that are as delicious as complicated ones.

For me, whether it's in a book or on T.V., a recipe has to be simple. I have a short attention span, so to open a cookbook and see a recipe that goes on for three to four pages, well, I've lost interest.

The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant.

As far as cookbooks go, I think Joy of Cooking is a classic. I've used it over and over again. Julia Child frustrates me. By the time you get all her herbs together, you're exhausted

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.

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 we eat something at a restaurant, however simple it may look, there's something in it that makes you think, 'Well, I couldn't quite do this from home.'

I'm not terribly good at three-page recipes - I tend to skip bits - or anything that involves marinating things in juniper berries.

You can get bogged down in a recipe that's got a lot of steps and a million ingredients, and it takes all day to make. And then you realize, you've just got one dish. For Thanksgiving, you want an abundance of choices, and so you want dishes that you can put together really quickly, but that doesn't mean less flavor.

I've been accused of having very long ingredient lists, and I guess there's some truth in that.

I almost never make stuff out of cookbooks because they're either too complicated or there's an ingredient in there that I can't find.