Indianapolis versus Denver would not be a great one gastronomically.

I might use milk if I was using a touch of milk to make like a lasagna or a baked pasta. But cream? That is totally not the way they do it in Italy, and it's not a very good thing. It's kind of a blanket for flavor.

You sit down at Katz's and you eat the big bowl of pickles and you're eating the pastrami sandwich, and halfway through you say to yourself, I should really wrap this up and save it for tomorrow. But the sandwich is calling you: Remember the taste you just had. So fatty. It's what you want. It's what you are! I've never gotten home from Katz's with a doggie bag in my hand. A pastrami sandwich at Katz's is what's bad and good about food. It's the sacred and the profane.

My kids and I make pasta three days a week now. It's not even so much about the eating of it; they just like the process. Benno is the stuffer, and Leo is the catcher. They've got their jobs down.

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

Food, like most things, is best when left to its own simple beauty.