When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.
I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.
For me, cooking is a way to try and please people and tell them I love them. When I fall in love with someone, I want to feed them as well.
When I came to 'Gourmet,' I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing.
I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.
I love to make pies - pot pies, quiches, savory tarts, fruit pies. I use an old-fashioned pastry blender with wires and a wooden handle. I never use a recipe.
My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.
I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.
The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.
By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my father wished I was.
What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do.
I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.
I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.
My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.
I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.
I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.
The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.
