Gugu Mbatha-Raw Quotes

I love food and am very good at improvising when preparing it - it's a really creative experience for me.

I'm yet to attack French cooking, you know, where it's intense, following recipes and stuff. I'm more of a 'make it up' kind of thing.

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.

I enjoy experimenting with food and dish out innovative food items as well.

I write in the morning - and then I'm always experimenting and tasting recipes for the books.

I never cook from cookbooks.

I find cooking very therapeutic. As a creative person, I relish cooking because it's such a creative process. You can cook anything out of anything.

My biggest challenge is cooking traditional French dishes, which usually require very specific techniques and methods. That's just not my style... I cook from the soul.

Cooking is an art form, a creative thing.

My mother was creative in the kitchen.

I think people make it too systematic in a way, like it's a chemistry formula. Food is not like that; food is very forgiving. Connecting and making do with a lot of the food elements can be fun and exciting.

I like that talented chefs are able to keep coming up with new ways of preparing food - it really is an art form.

It is important to experiment and endlessly seek after creating the best possible flavors when preparing foods. That means not being afraid to experiment with various ingredients.

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.'

The Momofuku Culinary Lab started as a space where we could focus on creating and innovating. I didn't want us to worry about working on projects in a restaurant; there are just too many distractions in service and running a kitchen to be able to focus on creating your dishes.

Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

Baking is too precise for me. I cook with a pinch of this or that.

I do like to cook; I'm sort of a mad scientist in the kitchen.

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.

What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

Being a food show and being me, I always kicked it up a notch, which means I would always elevate the spice level or the complexity of a particular dish. So, it was always like we're going to kick this up a little bit.

For me, it's the unexpected and surprising combinations of produce that are the most exciting and lure me into the kitchen for a little bit of experimenting. Apples and sweet potatoes together? Who knew? Carrots with grapes? Okay. I may not be Julia Child, but I can do pretty well with a simple recipe and a lot of enthusiasm.

I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.

I'll read a recipe but then decide, 'Well, it's sort of like this, then.' Or I'll go to the fridge and think, 'I'll see what I can put together,' and I'll combine beetroot and sausage and prawns with goat's cheese sprinkled on top and think, 'I like that they're all slightly pink. It looks fine and... actually, it is fine.'

I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical.