I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.'

If you want to have a relationship, at some point you have to let yourself get caught. That's what I did. I got caught.

Once you make a cookbook, you live with it as your own for the rest of your life, like a yearbook.

It's amazing the relationships you forge in a kitchen. When you cooperate in an environment that's hot. Where there's a lot of knives. You're trusting your well-being with someone you've never before met or known.

I bent my head over a stove in my early 20s and picked it up in my 30s.

The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.