This June, I'll travel once again to the Food and Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. For many years, my dear friend Julia Child and I have teamed up to teach classes together at the event; for the past seven years, my daughter, Claudine, has been my cooking partner on stage.

If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter.

The menus that remain, for me, are really the menus that you have with your good friends, with your wife, with your mother, with your kids. These are what stay in your mind.

When you are at home, even if the chicken is a little burnt, what's the big deal? Relax.

One of the biggest problems with young chefs is too much addition to the plate. You put cilantro and then tarragon and then olive oil and then walnut oil or whatever. It's too much.

My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.

When I left to go into apprenticeship in 1949, it was only four years after the war, and people don't realize, we still had tickets for butter, meat and so forth in France until 1947. It's not like the end of the war, everything was plentiful - it wasn't.