Helen Jordan: If only I had been raped as a child! *Then* I would know authenticity!
Helen: [on the phone with an old friend] Snug, I'm calling in a solid you owe me.
Buy the best you can find or afford and don't over manipulate it. If I cook a scallop, the best praise you can give me is that it tastes like a scallop.
Don't try to be the next Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay, we already have those people. We want someone who is going to make their own mark on 'Food Network.'
Hunger is a political issue, and there are several things politically that are keeping people hungry - not funding food stamps adequately, not funding school lunches adequately. So there is a political solution to the problem of hunger.
For me, it's all about moderation. I don't kick things out of my diet, like carbs. But I'm not going to eat fast food.
Keller Dover: He's not a person anymore. No, he stopped being a person when he took our daughters.
My contribution I hope is to get people to eat full-flavored food. If I could come away with that alone, that would be a fantastic accomplishment. I'm also very proud of being a very American chef.
That was courage, Keller thought. Not doing something without being afraid, but doing something even though you were afraid.
The best meal I was served was ribollita, an Italian bread soup at the Castello di Ama winery in Tuscany. I usually hate ribollita, and the people I was traveling with thought I was crazy for ordering it.
I wasn't passionate about food until I'd been cooking for a while. I started long before food became part of the mainstream media. I just wanted to cook, period.
We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.
In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.
Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.
Go to the grocery store and buy better things. Buy quality, buy organic, buy natural, go to the farmers market. Immediately that's going to increase the quality of the food you make.
Food feeds both the body and soul - there are clear reasons to eat a balanced diet, but there are also reasons you cling to your mom's secret chicken noodle soup recipe when you're sick.
There are many great wine producers from all over the world making fantastic wines. Italian wines especially are making an enormous comeback after sometimes being labeled as inexpensive jug wines.
It's just an American tradition to make sure people don't leave hungry. The worst thing is to have them say, 'Great dinner, but now I have to go get a burger.'
Keller Dover: You wasted your time... you wasted your time following me. You let that happen.
She kind of reminds one of Helen. There's something very similar about Elizabeth Perkins.