Geoffrey Zakarian Quotes

I may find something that looks interesting and then go on to alter the recipe by adding spices, things of my own. I also look for time-saving recipes, dishes that can be prepared ahead and stored.

Since we married, Peta's taken over a lot of my cooking and she's incredible. She'll do different meals for me and the kids, depending on my regime. If I name 10 ingredients she'll change the recipe every day.

What's wrong with transforming food?

Omit and substitute! That's how recipes should be written. Please don't ever get so hung up on published recipes that you forget that you can omit and substitute.

People have been manipulating food ever since they realized cooking a whole animal was difficult. Cows don't come in hot dog form.

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.

You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.

I'm a really good cook. I bake a lot. I cook dinner most nights. I cook everything from Italian food to Mexican food. But if I'm going to some place and it's a potluck, I'm always the one to bring dessert!

I want to make simple food new.

It's a lot harder to get people to 'ooh' and 'aah' over beets and carrots than it is to get them to 'ooh' and 'aah' over artichokes or asparagus, and I enjoy being able to take these humble, 'lowbrow' foodstuffs up a few notches and serve them with great exuberance.

Once you know the fundamentals of cooking, then you don't need to follow a recipe - you just know what herbs go well or what meats, or what combination of what goes together, and then you can just branch out from there. But if there's something specific that I want to make, I work on the recipe and tweak it to my own.

I know how to bring recipes down to the level where people with no experience can feel comfortable making them.

I've never made a meal that I wasn't able to eat, but it that doesn't mean anyone else would ever eat it, haha!

It wasnt until I was a sophomore in high school that I asked Mama if I could come into the kitchen and have her teach me how to cook something. Well, I wasnt in there five minutes before she said, OK, honey, you have to go now. I made her so nervous she was about ready to throw up. So I really didnt have an interest in being in the kitchen until after I was married, when I was 18. It didnt take me long to realize that Mama was not going to show up at my house every day and cook.

the more experience you have, the more interesting cooking is because you know what can happen to the food. In the beginning you can look at a chicken and it doesn't mean much, but once you have done some cooking you can see in that chicken a parade of things you will be able to create.

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

I wasn’t a fabulous cook. I didn’t have a boyfriend, much less a husband. And I wasn’t a big financial success. I could live with all those failings as long as I knew that once in a while I looked really hot.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

Frying gives cooks numerous ways of concealing what appeared the day before and in a pinch facilitates sudden demands, for it takes little more time to fry a four-pound carp than to boil an egg.

The most challenging obstacle I've had to overcome was my endometriosis diagnosis. Besides the physical pain that I had to endure, I had to completely change my perspective on food. It was a huge challenge to have to change the way I'd eaten for so long.

Do you know who Karl Marx is? He is this strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain to lay hold upon millions of human lives!

The work I prefer to do are the smaller budget pictures, television can be great but it ties you up for quite a long time.

How many films are there about friendships between teenagers? And how many projects are there dealing with friendships among adults? True friendships - really dealing with the intimacy behind what happened then, and how long you've known each other, and the wounds that haven't healed. That's what [About Alex] film is about.

Piper went a little crazy. She cried out with relief and dove straight into the water. What was she thinking? She didn't take a rope or a life vest or anything. But at the moment, she was just so happy that she paddled over to Leo and kissed him on the cheek, which kind of surprised him. "Miss me?" Leo laughed. Piper was suddenly furious. "Where were you? How are you guys alive?" "Long story," he said. A picnic basket bobbed to the surface next to him. "Want a brownie?

...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.