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I need to have better knife skills... for vegetables.

I have very good knife skills. I learned to butcher on my second job - I was 18 years old. Every other day we would break down six legs of veal.

I reveled in the most basic rules and techniques that are the foundation of professional cooking. For example, it is essential to use a sharp knife: the sharper the knife, the more fluid and precise your work and the less likely you are to get hurt. Dull knives are a danger - they slip far more often.

People come up to me all the time and ask how I stay the way I am, and it's no secret. The first lesson a chef needs to learn is how to handle a knife; the second is how to be around all that food.

The hardest thing for a chef is to become comfortable with what you do. Not to be too neurotic and worried with what you are doing and how wrong or right you are.

I do endless chopping and preparing things. I really find that relaxing. I do a lot of thinking as I am chopping and cooking.

I feel like there's a lot of tasks in cooking that I want to master, that I want to do better.

It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

It's amazing the relationships you forge in a kitchen. When you cooperate in an environment that's hot. Where there's a lot of knives. You're trusting your well-being with someone you've never before met or known.

I have to do so many scenes cooking that I wanted to learn how to chop like I know what I'm doing and do certain things around the kitchen that look right.