Quote

My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.

There are so many things that come into writing a recipe, and it's really important if you're writing for home cooks to be cooking like you are at home.

A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing.

Recipes can be incredibly vague where chillies are concerned.

Cooking is chemistry, really.

A big thing that gets people in trouble in the kitchen is not reading the recipe from start to finish before you cook it. Before you start anything, read through the entire recipe once.

I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.

If you're trying to make a recipe that you're not even going to bother tasting, you're doing something wrong.

Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.

With cooking, there's always the tangible and the intangible: that which is in the domain of sentiment, of the individual.