Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

My favorite way to cook is to look in my cabinets and see what I have. That's the most fun. 'I don't have tomatoes, but I have this chili-garlic sauce from the Asian grocery store. Let's throw that in there and see how it affects my beef barley soup!'

I love the idea of cooking, but I don't like using recipe books, so I'll put a mish-mash together, and it might be amazing by total accident, or it will be a catastrophe.

Cooking is the art of adjustment.

Recipes are overrated.

You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There's nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

I love to cook when I have the time. I don't cook French or Mexican food with exact recipes. I just go to the supermarket and buy things that look good, and I mix it all together and invent something. Ninety-five percent of the time, I'm lucky. Sometimes not so lucky, and I say, 'Let's go out to dinner.'

I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I love to cook. My dad's a really excellent cook and his style is: Look in the fridge and make whatever there is with whatever ingredients you have and I like cooking like that, too.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

Give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string; I wouldn't get bored anywhere.

We must improvise, and we must experiment, and we must do things that might go wrong, and everything we bring - the people and the equipment - must serve us in that goal.

I would try doing a dish 30 different ways.

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.

Improvising things is always changing. A lot of momentum.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

There's always some room for improvisation.

To have a basic ingredient that can be prepared a million different ways is a beautiful thing.

I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.

I take everything out of the fridge and see what we can make. We talk about what we could possibly create, and if there is something on the turn that we could save, we chop it up and put it in the freezer.

When I was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I would overdraft my bank account and not have enough money to buy groceries. But I also discovered how to cook with very limited resources.

I didn't just freestyle it. At the end, it's about bread.

I just want to keep doing a bunch of stuff that I don't really plan. I'm so fortunate and lucky that people keep giving me these platforms. Because I'm kind of a crazy person.

One day, my bike tire broke miles from home and I found a way to fix it. That's what I learned: Even if you don't have all the tools, you can improvise.