To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it's actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami.

The Italians were eating with forks when the French were still eating each other.

I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.

Look at cookbooks with your kids and ask them what sounds good.

When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.

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

There's a pretty equitable distribution in the restaurant industry of how money gets paid, except for in the kitchen. The kitchen is the lowest-paid group of people.