Crescent Dragonwagon Quotes

I love a good challenge of looking with new eyes at a tried and true recipe in my recipe Rolodex.

Even though I'm big on recipes, I love to make up my own dishes and when you take a risk in the kitchen, you learn a lot about food!

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

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

Ferran Adria making hamburgers... some thought it was crazy. But getting them perfect was a challenge. Plus I'm fascinated by all aspects of food.

Breakfast is my specialty. I admit it's the easiest meal to cook, but I make everything with a twist, like lemon ricotta pancakes or bacon that's baked instead of fried.

So many of the recipes that I come up with have a story. I'm a blogger. It flowed very naturally out of me, but I also knew this was a way to set my recipes apart. A, they are always using interesting ingredients but B, there is always a story behind it.

I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk.

Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.

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.

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.'

Your idea of that dish has evolved, and if you're a cook, you can start thinking in different ways about it, maybe even a different way than I think about it.

I'm trying to keep my cooking approachable and accessible but with a little fun twist.

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.

A cookery book should be there for inspiration. Recipes should be a guideline, and they shouldn't be cast in stone.

As a kid, I remember my mother always experimenting with bizarre combinations of food such as gulab jamun and pickle! Surprisingly, many years down the line, I have adapted the same.

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

My inability to follow recipes as written - without obeying the devil on my shoulder telling me to replace ingredients or change the temperature - is well documented.

My recipes aren't classic recipes; they're all fusion recipes inspired by all the places I've been to.

After opening my first restaurant in 1969, one of the regular customers suggested I write a cookbook, so I did. Then another. After my 12th one, I started to feel stale.

When I walk into a market I may see a different cut of meat or an unusual vegetable and think, ‘I wonder how it would be if I took the recipe for that sauce I had in Provence and put the two together?’ So I go home and try it out. Sometimes my idea is a success and sometimes it is a flop, but that is how recipes are born. There really are not recipes, only millions of variations sparked by someone’s imagination and desire to be a little creative and different. American cooking is built, after all, on variations of old recipes from around the world.

For me, thats one of the important things about cooking. What was good enough yesterday may not be good enough today.

A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.

Cooking is the art of adjustment.