I usually doze off between 7:30 and 9 p.m. while putting my baby to sleep. Then I suddenly wake up remembering I'm an adult with no bedtime. I spend the next four hours catching up on reading, e-mails, and other adult pursuits until I collapse for good until sunrise.

Most of cooking is the labor of chopping. Give yourself a break. Pretend you're on a cooking show and have all your ingredients lined up for you.

You don't want your jewelry to make you look fat. A lot of what's out there now does - you just wind up looking like a Christmas tree.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

In a way that somebody else converts to Judaism or becomes a Hare Krishna, I belong to the church of fried chicken.

Wine, like food, is so emotional. If you think about it, so much of the courting ritual is surrounded by wine and food. There's a built-in romance to wine.

I'm the kind of girl who thinks about what she's gonna cook for dinner when she's finishing her lunch.