I wanted it to look like real cooking in someone's real home or just so out-of-there bizarre that it would be fun.

If you've ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you'll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.

We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they'll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don't really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

My tastes in what I eat at home would be very familiar to most people who cook for families. I just organize those things a little bit differently.

Do you really want to make risotto to order when you have eight guests sitting there? No. It won't work. Most cookbooks won't tell you that. They will say make it and it will come out perfectly. They should tell you you're probably going to screw it up the first 10 times you make it.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

I'd like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I'm serious. That would be my dream.