Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it's too assertive to the naked eye.
I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.
For a while, I was a flight attendant. I lived in New York, and I was a bartender. I took cooking classes, martial arts classes. I taught a foreign language. I went back to college and studied acting, which I love. I was doing stunt work as well.
Look at something like cooking. Now, you would hear a lot about smart kitchens and augmented kitchens. And what do those smart kitchens actually do? They police what's happening inside the kitchen. They have cameras that distinguish ingredients one from each other and that tell you that shouldn't mix this ingredient with another ingredient.
If you're cooking and not making mistakes, you're not playing outside your safety zone. I don't expect it all to be good. I have fat dogs because I scrap that stuff out the back door.
I think the biggest thing is clean as you go. Wash all your knives, cutting boards, dishes, when you are done cooking, not look at a sink full of dishes after you are done. Cleaning as you go helps keep away cross contamination and you avoid having food borne bacteria.
The first time I was cooking for my wife, Stephanie, way before she was my wife, I actually put three chickens on the rotisserie and I closed the grill, which is really a bad idea. But I just wasn't thinking very straight that day. And I looked outside and I saw, like, smoke and flames.
Preparing food is one of life's great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That's not cooking - that's working!
Cooking is like fashion. Always, I like to try to change. If I'm traveling in a different country - to Australia, the Bahamas, Budapest, Moscow - and I see a new ingredient, I like to try it in a new dish.
I played from the time I was seven years old. My father was my first baseman coach. I had opportunities that I never really pursued - with some Miami teams and a few larger colleges, and then I ended up bailing and began cooking.
I wasn't the brightest button in the class at school, but I enjoyed cooking and baking. I wasn't clever enough at Maths O-level to get onto the cookery teaching course I really wanted to do, so I did a catering course instead.
Cooking and baking is both physical and mental therapy.
Cooking involves a deadline and hungry people and ingredients that expire in a week. It's stressful. Cooking happens on the stove and on the clock. Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking is slow and leisurely.
I stopped using plastic cooking spoons years ago and love my bamboo spoons and spatulas by Bambuhome.
I'm cooking 42 years, and I didn't know bananas are good for my brain.
The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C - not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.
My first outdoor cooking memories are full of erratic British summers, Dad swearing at a barbecue that he couldn't put together, and eventually eating charred sausages, feeling brilliant.
I get nervous cooking for our little house party barbecues. I'm very insecure with my cooking. I tend to throw things away that I'm scared of serving, even though they might be great.
You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.
Jessica Battilana has been my kindred cooking spirit for more than 10 years. Our careers as cooks and writers have taken us through the same Bay Area restaurants, bakeries, magazines, and newspapers.
