I keep the "ThunderCats" thermos safely in the kitchen.

I found that if I offered to cook for a girl, my odds improved radically over simply asking a girl out. Through my efforts to attract the opposite sex, I found that not only did cooking work, but that it was actually fun.

What tends to happen is that people will go - they've got hot broth, you know, they've added some liquid to their drippings, they've brought that up to heat. And then they try to add in a big clump of just kind of a handful of flour, and of course, it turns into library paste.

Do not allow watching food to replace making food.

Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.

My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.