The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on.

Passion is what adds so much value to life. And if you think about the things that you do, there's so much juice potential for them if you do it.

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.

Italy itself has 21 different micro-regions. You go within each of those regions, there's even super-micro-regions; and the beauty is that when you go from place to place, although there's a common thread of pasta and joie de vivre - in the way that they approach their meals and the simplicity of cooking, celebrating more the product than the chef - there's still so much variety that as you go, it's always an exciting moment.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.