My extravagance is my garden - it's the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

Anyone who tries to make brownies without butter should be arrested.

I always like to have flowers on the table. I think they make it look special.

I try to greet my friends with a drink in my hand, a warm smile on my face, and great music in the background, because that's what gets a dinner party off to a fun start.

All my life I dreamed of an apartment in Paris where I could cook, and now I have one, on the Left Bank.

You can get bogged down in a recipe that's got a lot of steps and a million ingredients, and it takes all day to make. And then you realize, you've just got one dish. For Thanksgiving, you want an abundance of choices, and so you want dishes that you can put together really quickly, but that doesn't mean less flavor.

Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don't try to 'arrange' them. It's surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table.