chef

We can't all be bakers or chefs. Many of us have modest ambitions. But we can all buy a piece of the pie.

Because I'm a chef, I eat out frequently, so it's hard for me to control what I consume in terms of calories. But when I'm at home, I eat what my wife cooks for me. She works hard to avoid making foods that are high in calories and cholesterol, so most of the time, she makes vegetarian dishes.

The hardest thing about being a full time chef is leaving my work behind when I go home at night. I'll toss and turn about a menu item or forget to order produce and wake up at 4 A.M. in a cold sweat over some artichokes.

'Chef' is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.

They say never trust a skinny chef, but the fact is, to stay healthy when you're a chef means you have to work twice as hard.

It wasn't the traditional cooking most people do. For me, as a young chef, Thanksgiving meant going to work in the kitchen at places like Gotham, JoJo and Jean-Georges.

Being an Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef, there's nothing traditional about my Thanksgiving spread.

I wanted to learn everything I could about what it takes to be a great chef. It was a turning point for me.

One thing I always say is being a great chef today is not enough - you have to be a great businessman.

To me, there's no great chef without a great team.

I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. 'If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.

I learned so much from 'Iron Chef' about ingredients, about the courage to put yourself out there.

You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts. Fancy ingredients or recipes not required; simple, made-up things are usually even better.

I have a pet lizard named Puff, five goldfish - named Pinky, Brain, Jowels, Pearl and Sandy, an oscar fish named Chef, two pacus, an albino African frog named Whitey, a bonsai tree, four Venus flytraps, a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys.

A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

When you're a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don't actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I'll do, and especially when I'm in New York, I'll go for a run. And I'll run 10 or 15k on my - and I run to gain my appetite.

Everybody has their role in the food world and what they choose to appreciate. I'm not a fine dining chef. I appreciate it. I think Thomas Keller is amazing. But I really like where I'm at I like what I do. I like how it makes people feel.

Cooking is not difficult. Everyone has taste, even if they don't realize it. Even if you're not a great chef, there's nothing to stop you understanding the difference between what tastes good and what doesn't.