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.

My mantra was to educate people - to actually give them the know-how they could use - and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.

Flame is bad. Flame does nasty things to food. It makes soot and it makes deposits of various chemicals that are not too good for us. The last thing you really want to see licking at your food while it's on a grill is an actual flame.

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

Now my wife may think she's locked me out of the kitchen but MacGyver's not my patron saint for nothing.

Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.

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