The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.

You have to eat to cook. You can't be a good cook and be a noneater. I think eating is the secret to good cooking.

How lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.

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.

...the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.

In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?