The journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.
My advice: write down everything you eat. It's amazing what that "self honesty" can do for you. (Do you really want to have to confess that doughnut? I thought not.)
I love poking fun at myself. I have a rather mean sense of humor.
I love to have battles of the wits with people that can dish fast and dirty - and it leads to problems occasionally, 'cause I can sound mean without attempting to be mean.
You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.
The moral of this story is not everything that's slick is non-stick, and not everything non-stick is slick.
Laminated Lettuce ... perfect for holiday gift giving.
I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don't want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don't know what I'm talking about.
I think in the end there are only 20 or 30 tenets of basic cooking. It's going at perhaps the same issue from different angles, from different points of view, from different presentation styles, that really makes things sink in and become embedded.
A balanced diet may be the best medicine. I was eating too much good eats. But people consider that part of your job, you know? Eat. And I do!
I had kicked around the idea for Good Eats when I was directing commercials.
Basting is evil. Basting does nothing for the meat. Why? Skin. Skin is designed to keep stuff out of the bird, so basting just lets heat out of the oven. That means the turkey will take longer to cook... so don't touch that door!
Take ice. Ice is fascinating to me. Ice is the one thing in our world that went from an agricultural product to being manufactured.
For me, it was kind of like going into the military or something. And anybody - any male - who has ever worked in a French kitchen knows what I am talking about when I say that.
Do not allow watching food to replace making food.
We're getting dumbed down, taste-wise.
The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.
If you really love stuffing, wait until the turkey comes out of the oven, add some of the pan drippings to the stuffing, and bake it in a dish. That's called dressing, and that's not evil - stuffing is, though.
I grill, therefore I am.
Seriously. I'm not very bright, and it takes a lot for me to get a concept - to really get a concept. To get it enough that it becomes part of me. But when it happens I get real excited about it.
I can't talk about anything or write about anything if I don't understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.
Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.
Enough people have now mentioned Bill Nye the Science Guy to me that I now desperately avoid it all costs.
My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera.
A lot of food shows need only to tempt. Some food shows only need to inspire, to empower. And there are a lot of shows that do that.
I looked for a very long time, knowing that it had to happen, but it took me a long time to find someone with the same background and whatnot and I finally found him.
The problem is I am both a procrastinator and a power junkie, so I am very frustrating to work with.
My feeling has always been that 'Good Eats' would have never happened had it been left to a committee.
So I quit my job and went to the New England Culinary Institute for the full two years and worked in the restaurant industry after that until finally I thought I had a grasp on what I needed to do what I do.
I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.
