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.
Baking is too precise for me. I cook with a pinch of this or that.
My goal in 'Live to Cook' is to make great food more approachable for home cooks.
Whats more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.
My cooking style is really simple. Not a lot of ingredients, but all good quality, so you don't have to do that much to them.
I simplify the spices. I'm the same way as everybody else: if I look at a recipe and there's ten spices in it, I'm going to have to think long and hard about when I'm going to be able to make that... so I try to simplify the spices to three or four.
I like to cook with the philosophy of using great ingredients and not altering them too much.
There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.
I didn't want to become a chocolatier among others, buying ready-to-use couverture. I wanted to take the same approach I follow in my cuisine: putting the product first, revealing the authentic taste of the products.
