I went in saying I wanted to be the food guy.

I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles.

Two words to improve any dish. Ba, Con

It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

You know the great irony is that people think you have to have money to enjoy fine food, which is a shame.

Cooking for people is an enormously significant expression of generosity and soulfulness.

People want honest, flavourful food, not some show-off meal that takes days to prepare.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

My place in Chicago is a 105 year old house, but I really like contemporary spaces too, so it's refreshing and fun to be in a space where you can do contemporary things.

If I have committed any culinary atrocities, please forgive me.

In actuality, there was casting for the show and it was pretty difficult.

Concentrated power is bad""(name of chapter)

You will always end up doing what is better for you.

There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.

Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.

I don't think we've got the gospel right yet.I don't think the liberals have it right. But I don't think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy.

Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.

I can be humbler than anyone.

Nobody thought I would be a great coach.

We teach teens what we think they ought to know, and we never tell them what they want to know.