The most important thing for me is to walk the little alleys of the city, to find the little alcove where someone is cooking something, and just watch them do it. That's my idea of fun.
I'm a firm believer that the world should be your oyster when you're cooking. People should open themselves to other cuisines - there are a lot of hidden secrets all over the world.
Some days, just occasionally, when I've had just one too many chickpeas, drizzles of olive oil or chunks of feta, I crave a return to the sushi-filled joints of Tokyo.
Yogurt sauce, as you may have noticed by now, is a regular presence in my recipes - that's because it has the ability to round up so many flavours and textures like no other component does.
Speaking as someone who didn't go through the U.K. school system, with all the culinary baggage that entails, I am inordinately fond of custard in any shape or form.
Chinese sausage, which is widely available from Asian grocers and online, is sweet, rich, and enticingly smoky. I add it to steamed rice with strips of omelette and a few baby veg stir-fried with soy.
Black glutinous rice works in both savoury and sweet dishes. It's a popular pudding rice in south-east Asia, where you'll often come across it cooked with water, coconut milk and a pandan leaf.
Buttermilk's palate-cleansing tartness is one reason it's used a lot in southern India, where meals often end with a small bowl of the stuff served with plain rice and pickles.
Shimeji are those odd-looking clusters of small mushrooms you often find in so-called 'exotic' selections at the supermarket. They have an appealing firmness that is retained during light cooking.
Pot barley takes longer to cook than pearl, but an overnight soak in water will speed things along. It's a robust grain that, if overcooked, won't collapse but will become more tender.
The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.
I respected it. I submerged myself into it. So on a lot of days off I would go and fish with the fishermen and the families that ran the boats. I would go work the fields with farmers. I would go and talk with farmers about growing particular product...
I wouldn't ask any of my employees to do anything I wouldn't do. And I work as hard, if not harder than the rest of the staff, to set an example. I also believe in giving my employees a lot of room to be creative and to express themselves.
I don't do the media because of 'Woo-woo, Julia Butterfly,' as I call it. I'm not into promoting me. I'm into talking about why I've done what I've done, why I continue to do this work and why other people should care.
The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use th...
But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up onl...
I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.
It seems like when I was growing up there was more compromise, wanting to work with each other, and I think all of them - all of the lawmakers - have hearts to do what's right, and they all are passionate about it.
When new cooks come to work for me, they obviously make mistakes at the beginning or there's some messiness to the presentation. What I always say to them is: 'If you were cooking this for your mother or your girlfriend, would you make those mistakes...
I do try to do high-impact work, and I try to think of ideas people haven't thought about that have broad implications, but I don't restrict myself to that. I try to work on things that I find interesting.
No one will pay you for planning an expedition at first: you have to work in pubs at weekends so you can pay the gas bills. I joined the Territorial Army, which paid me when I turned up to drill nights, and so did my wife.
