I don't believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating.
There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.
You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.
I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.
It sounds like something on a very trite T-shirt, but life is what happens.
But if you know that something has been really vicious, you don't read it, you don't let it into your head. What's damaging is when sentences go through your head and you burn with the injustice of it.
I don't believe in low-fat cooking.
Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.
I never have plans for the future as you never know how things will turn out.
Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on.
And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up.
I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.
It s easier to impress someone than to give them pleasure.
I don't like conflict.
Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.
Then again, they're not scripted and I feel it's virtually impossible to be anything but yourself when you're in front of the cameras and cooking so there is a measure of truth in what you see.
People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.
There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.
I can understand why those primitive desert people think a camera steals their soul. It is unnatural to see yourself from the outside.
I think maybe when you live with someone who is really very ill for a long time, it somehow gives you more of a greedy appetite for life and maybe, yes, you are less measured in your behaviour than you would otherwise be.
You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.
Anyway, what makes people look youthful is the quality of their skin and I don't think you can change that.
I'm not someone who's endlessly patient and wonderful.
On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.
Good olive oil, good butter, milk - they give food taste and depth and a richness that you cant reproduce with low-fat ingredients.
I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy.
I put the kitch into kitchen.
There is a vast difference between how things seem from the outside and how they feel on the inside.
I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do.
I know the crew so well, so I forget I'm being filmed. It's like cooking with a friend in the kitchen - you're talking, as you do, and maybe you're telling her about this wonderful way to prepare lamb chops - it's more natural, more honest.
Glamour really has to do with good lighting, doesn't it?
, there is always room for careful tinkering. )
(In cooking), there is always room for careful tinkering.
In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.
I do think awful things may happen at any moment, so while they are not happening, you may as well be pleased.
Cake baking has to be, however innocently, one of the great culinary scams: it implies effort, it implies domestic prowess; but believe me, it's easy.
Some people did take the domestic goddess title literally rather than ironically. It was about the pleasures of feeling like one rather than actually being one.
I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble.
You cannot truly say you live well unless you eat well.
Sometimes...we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.
You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?
I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater.
Also, in a funny way, if you have been happily married there are no unresolved areas, nothing to prove to yourself after the other dies.
Gordon Ramsay makes me laugh because he knows that I'm not a chef.
In England and America people tend to graze all day long, but I think it's such a waste to be constantly picking at food because you then can't enjoy a proper full meal when the time comes.
The modern world is personal; people want to know intimate things.
'Statistically, people who have been happily married and then widowed tend to remarry.
I am not sure about facelifts because I wouldn't want to be someone who just looks like she's had a facelift.
At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.
...That Great Cocktail Cabinet in the Sky...
I was brought up an atheist and have always remained so. But at no time was I led to believe that morality was unimportant or that good and bad did not exist. I believe passionately in the need to distinguish between right and wrong and am somewhat confounded by being told I need God, Jesus or a clergyman to help me to do so.
I think we all live in a world that is so fast-paced, it's threatening and absolutely saturated with change and novelty and insecurity. Therefore, the ritual of cooking and feeding my family and friends, whoever drops in, is what makes me feel that I'm in a universe that is contained.
But I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.
I think sometimes that people assume because I'm on television I'm an expert, but I think the whole point of what I do is that I'm not and I don't have any training. My approach isn't about a fancy ingredient or style. I cook what I love to eat.
It's true that I wouldn't have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation. It's also this Jewish thing of naming and remembering people, and I think there is a sense of keeping that side of life going.
Everyone wants to be young, beautiful and rich. I don't say that scornfully: there are worse things to want to be. But that's why, for example, people don't begrudge Kate Moss how much she earns for a day's work but will fulminate over the take-home pay of some fat, old Water Board exec.
