I would definitely be interested in doing a cooking show or something related to cooking, and I think probably most immediately, I would do a cookbook.
I've never taken a cooking class. I've never gone to a cooking show. I've never read a recipe in my life.
'Top Chef' is always entertaining - it's hard to stop watching, like a good hockey fight, but no one gets hurt. It's great that the format is so inherently dramatic and can make cooking so entertaining to people who might not ordinarily be interested in a cooking show. Good for the industry all round.
You don't just turn on a camera and do a cooking show. If you want to go somewhere with something, you've got to make it look like what it's supposed to look like five years from now.
North America was ready for something other than a vanilla cooking show and we were providing the double dark chocolate fudge.
I have a cooking show that's coming on that I did in Albany. It will be on The Cooking Channel.
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.
My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.
For me, I am very much a champion of home cooking and home cooks.
The cool thing is that now that people have made this evolution where cooking is cool, people are doing it on weekends, they're doing their own challenges. It's back to cooking. And it's real cooking.
We're not best in the world at burritos and tacos. What we're best in the world at is building a people culture, sourcing really great ingredients, cooking according to classic cooking techniques, understanding the corresponding economic model and how to tweak that and drive that and provide this really great, new fast food experience.
Years of cooking have taught me that the harder a flour is, the 'thirstier' it is. In other words, harder flours tend to have a greater capacity to absorb water than their softer counterparts.
The cooking profession, while it's a noble craft and a noble calling, 'cause you're doing something useful - you're feeding people, you're nurturing them, you're providing sustenance - it was never pure.
In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.
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.
Having realised that in cooking there was a vast field of study and development, I said to myself, 'Although I had not originally intended to enter this profession, since I am in it, I will work in such a fashion that I will rise above the ordinary, and I will do my best to raise again the prestige of the chef de cuisine.'
I can't resist South Indian cuisine, particularly what is prepared at home. My mom is my favourite cook. She can cook a variety of cuisines. I savour her cooking at home, and she's undoubtedly the best.
I'm a firm believer that the world should be your oyster when you're cooking. People should open themselves to other cuisines - there are a lot of hidden secrets all over the world.
American cooking is one of the unknown cuisines in America.
I went to L'Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I think French cooking is the basis for a lot of classical cuisine, a foundation of a lot of other cuisines. That said, it's not the only way to approach a cooking career.