That's one of the ironies of our time: Right when we're on the edge of serious improvements in health care, we're also cooking the planet.
Since my kitchen is the most important part of my home, I want to be creative and innovative, not only in its aesthetic, but also in the tools that I'm using to cook.
To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a 'home' might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.
I can understand why a single parent, working two jobs, would find it easier to stop at McDonald's with the kids rather than cook something from scratch at home.
My life at home is super simple. My local bar with my mates, cooking for my mother, making tables, planting vegetables: It's the classic idea of the artistic existence.
For me, having it all doesn't mean having the corner office at work and a penthouse at home if there aren't kids running around as I'm trying to cook my husband something special.
Sometimes I'll go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of groceries as though I knew how to cook, which I don't, and as though I was going to be home for the next six days, which I won't.
When I'm home, I cook and try to eat really clean. I try to eat vegetables at every meal. I stay away from pasta and bread and have brown rice and potatoes instead.
However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.
I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.
I would love to do a western. I would love to play an explorer. That is always something that has really captured my imagination since I was a kid, like James Cook or Magellan or Earnest Shackleton.
I'm the type of woman you might say is too good. I'll massage a man's feet, have dinner cooked when he gets home. But once they leave, the door is closed, and the locks are changed.
When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn't require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.
If kids can learn how to make a simple Bolognese sauce, they will never go hungry. It's pretty easy to cook pasta, but a good sauce is way more useful.
I'm obsessed with vinyasa flow yoga and Pilates. And since I live in Sweden, and we have good seafood, I tend to cook a lot of fish, preferably with oven-roasted veggies and a cauliflower mash.
If you don't use good ingredients, the outcome is never going to be excellent. But if you buy the freshest ingredients that are in season, at their peak, and you cook with them, you can't really go wrong.
I'd say I'm a good cook. I have a lot of German recipes that I can make - schnitzel, meatballs and things with cabbage. I love cabbage.
Growing up, I was always in the kitchen. Even in third grade, I made cooking videos called 'The Little Italian.' Very little production value, but it was good.
I've taught myself how to use good, fresh ingredients and to prepare them as simply as possible by cooking only to enhance their intrinsic flavors.
I really like to cook and have dinner parties and I like to clean, it really clears my head and it makes me feel good to keep my home as a comfortable place.
As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.
