The smells of slow cooking spread around the house and impart a unique warmth matched only by the flavour of the food.
Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.
It really started cooking when I moved to Houston. I bought a house and got my own barbeque pit.
The process and organization leading up to cooking the egg can tell you a lot about the cook.
I've always been known for bold flavors and rustic cooking, but there is another side to me. As you evolve as a cook, you understand life and how serious it is. There comes a point where there's got to be a better balance.
The cool thing is that now that people have made this evolution where cooking is cool, people are doing it on weekends, they're doing their own challenges. It's back to cooking. And it's real cooking.
I love cooking for myself and cooking for my family.
I can cook because my life depended on it when I lived in Thailand. Either I learnt cooking, or I learnt how it felt to starve. I chose cooking.
Everyone has something that they desperately need that makes them feel good, that they don't want anything to get in the way of. Whether it's a man's golf game, whether it's a woman's cooking. I have a friend who has to clean. She's addicted to cleaning.
This June, I'll travel once again to the Food and Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. For many years, my dear friend Julia Child and I have teamed up to teach classes together at the event; for the past seven years, my daughter, Claudine, has been my cooking partner on stage.
It's a 12-hour cooking class for me on the set of 'Chopped.' You'd think I'd get sick of it, but it's a source of endless interest to me. The only thing I don't like about it is it's a long day and my feet hurt. Otherwise, I love it.
I have a weird thing with knives. I don't like knives very much. Like when my parents are cooking in the kitchen and using knives to chop vegetables, I can't be in the same room. For whatever reason, knives just terrify me.
Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on.
I've been a model for 15 years, and I've been on 'Top Chef' for eight seasons, and before that I had other cooking shows, so I've learned a thing or two about how to camouflage certain areas and how to draw the eye to a preferable area of the body.
If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it's not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others - it's the same with music.
I really like rustic mediterranean cooking. And I like trying out curry takeaways.
Whenever anyone asked me what I'd do if I wasn't a singer, I'd say, 'Oh, I'd have a cooking show.'
You know, this is really a way of cooking. It's not my way. I'm deeply influenced by the Mediterranean way of being. I've spent a lot of time there. And I've sort of translated it; I've tried to make it available to people in this country to whom it might not be familiar.
I sometimes think the chef end of cooking is not the real end of cooking. Cooking is all about homes and gardens, it doesn't happen in restaurants.
In my generation, there was no sushi school, no cooking school, so people have to learn from working.
In rowing, you're always striving for that perfect stroke, that repetition, each one being as good as the last. Same thing with cooking. You can't say, 'Oh, I don't feel well, so I'm going to put out a crappy plate.'
I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.
I'm a big cook and prefer to make meals at home when I can. I'm either cooking, or we're going to a drive-through somewhere. I'm really proud of my homemade sweet potato pie. At Thanksgiving I make five of them because they go quick.
My husband is the chef of the family; he's a brilliant cook. Actually, it makes you quite lazy when you have somebody that's so good at cooking under the same roof. It's all beans or spaghetti when I'm left to run it.
If a child plays sport early in childhood, and doesn't give it up, he will play sport for the rest of his life. And if children have a connection with, and are involved in the preparation of, the food they eat, then it will be normal for them to cook these kind of meals, and they will go on cooking them for the rest of their lives.
I think my cooking these days is a lot more relaxed from when I was working in professional kitchens. Spending time in people's kitchens made me realize that people want to eat healthy meals that are easy to prepare, with minimal ingredients that can be made on a budget.
I found that if I offered to cook for a girl, my odds improved radically over simply asking a girl out. Through my efforts to attract the opposite sex, I found that not only did cooking work, but that it was actually fun.
And I love to cook! I've impressed hundreds of women with my cooking. And they always come back for more.
I think, when I was younger, I was cooking to impress. Sometimes the dish would have 15 things on the plate. That's cooking only for yourself. As you get more mature, you take all the superfluous things away, and you get the essential flavor. Now I cook for people, not for myself.
Many rock musicians are excellent cooks, I've found, and those that are prefer to eat their own cooking in the studio. I encourage this behavior as I also enjoy the benefits of fresh food.
I do probably 80 or 90 per cent of the cooking at home.
I can't conceive of cooking in a sunny place like Florida because my motivation comes from the changing seasons. That's why I decided to live in New York.
I would love to go on 'MasterChef'. But while I really like cooking, I'm doubtful anyone would ever want to pay for what I'd cooked.
I'm a home cook and love to read about food, but I'm not trained as a chef. I'm just really into cooking and passionate about it.
I wouldn't exactly call it 'cooking' but I can make noodles. That means I can boil water, put the pasta in and wait until it's done.
There are three reasons why this book came into being. First, throughout the 33 years I've been writing recipes - although I'm not vegetarian myself - I have greatly enjoyed creating vegetarian recipes, and cooking and serving them at home.