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The hardest thing about being a full time chef is leaving my work behind when I go home at night. I'll toss and turn about a menu item or forget to order produce and wake up at 4 A.M. in a cold sweat over some artichokes.

I can make things, but I don't cook them, exactly. Like salmon, I can stick that in a pan. Or the other day I made noodles, but they were hard. It never occurred to me to check them; I just stopped cooking them when I felt they were ready. Really, I'm too absentminded.

I do loads of one-pot things because I feel like you can't go too far wrong. And I make a lot of soups and casseroles, which is so boring, but it's the only thing I can do!

You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time.

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

Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.

When I was at the Cordon Bleu things took hours and hours and hours to make. And they were beautiful dishes - and I know how to cook that way - but I was like, 'no one is cooking like this.'

I'm lucky I live near Whole Foods... so if I'm hungry, I can walk in there and grab something yummy... already made... or make it myself. I love to cook. I make a killer marinara sauce.

I don't want to make just tropical house. I want to make everything, just like, whatever I feel like making.