Cooking may be a creative art, but it's also a wonderful full-time hobby.

The problem for cookery-bookery writers like me is to understand the extent of our readers' experience. I hope have solved that riddle in my books by simply telling everything. The experienced cook will know to skip through the verbiage, but the explanations will be there for those who still need them.

We should enjoy food and have fun. It is one of the simplest and nicest pleasures in life.

I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

Romance is the icing but love is the cake.

No one's more important than people.

Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again