But when spring and summer happens, it's intuition. Everything is based on intuition. There's not too much time to overthink, over-complicate. Those wild strawberries, they might be there for two days.

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch.

I started to change. It was sort of a restaurant mid-life crisis, you could say. I lost a lot of confidence, not so much as a father or as a friend, but as a boss, as a chef that's to make decisions throughout the day all the time. I just slowly started burning out. Once you lose your confidence like that, you start being angry in the kitchen. I couldn't recognize myself anymore. I started writing the journal. It was never meant to be a book, but the editor at Phaidon read parts of it. As editors do, I guess.

The traditional roots of Scandinavian cuisine are not that spectacular, to say the least. When we write about the traditions that we are inspired by, it's more techniques like smoking, preserving. Many of them are not made to make food delicious; they're just around so that you can make food last through the winter. There isn't a great deal of tradition to tap into.

Summer's the same, autumn is even more extreme. Then winter is when you sort of condense all of your ideas. You process all these things and you try to look for new concepts. In that sense, your intuition is in hibernation. What you fill up is your imagination; you fill up your memories there.

My last meal on Earth, I would love it to be a bowl of blueberries with cold cream.

Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.