I think Tabasco brings me pure heat and Southern kind of familiarity, along with the vinegar and the barrel-aged spices.

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.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

If you want your kids to listen to you, don't yell at them. Whisper. Make them lean in. My kids taught me that. And I do it with adults now.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink.

Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that's the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.

Chefs don't actually say 'That's a spicy meat-a-ball,' except to indicate that there's a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

An unavoidable war is called justice. When brutality is the only option left it is holy

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

Music is there to enrich your life and make you aware of things in a slightly different way.

But me and my sister knew all the Doris Day and Frank Sinatra songs, too.

Much of our national debate proceeds as if China and America were locked in a zero-sum game in which one's loss is precisely the other's gain.

It was not about losing my mental power; it's about not feeling good about my contribution to the game.

Television bosses should stop insulting the public's intelligence by assuming we are all idiots.

Everyone's conscience in religion is between God and themselves, and it belongs to none other.

I had a stalker who was extremely violent. He broke into the studio with knives and I was locked in a bathroom.

No one is wise at all times.