Kitchen Experimentation Quotes

Learning to cook at school gave me the confidence to experiment in the kitchen when I left home in my late teens - I wasn't intimidated by it.

The first time I ever deep-fried something, I was terrified. I was making yeasted jelly donuts, and I was so nervous that I fried them, unblinking, with a pounding heart and sweaty palms.

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.

It was improv that really helped me start coming up with recipes and just believe in my instincts. That's why the first recipe I made up was 'I Ain't Chicken Chicken' because I finally felt bold and fearless in the kitchen, which was an entirely new feeling for me.

I feel like it's so important to get your little ones' hands dirty in the kitchen. It gives them kitchen confidence, and it makes them feel accomplished.

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

Certainly, cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.

When I cook, it's something nobody else would enjoy.

When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it.

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

My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.

My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?

People come up to me all the time and say, 'Oh, I love to watch Food Network,' and I ask them what they cook, and they say, 'I don't really cook.' They're afraid, they're intimidated, they know all about food from eating out and watching TV, but they don't know where to start in their own kitchen.

I'm a very improvisational cook. I sort of like to make things up as I go along. I'm quite creative in the kitchen.

Too often, chefs just want to experiment - they want to use liquid nitrogen before they know how to use heat.

When I make a recipe for the first time and it's fabulous, I know I'm in trouble because I don't know exactly what I did, and I can't replicate it.

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.

I almost never make stuff out of cookbooks because they're either too complicated or there's an ingredient in there that I can't find.

I was mixing iced tea and lemonade in my kitchen since as long as I can remember. It wasn't until some time in the early 1960s that it became associated with me publicly.

Dad likes my food, but he probably thinks it's too busy. He is a wonderful cook but only uses three ingredients. My mum rips out my articles and makes my recipes.

Some of the best kitchen discoveries come about through total kitchen disasters.