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

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.

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.

One of the most important leadership lessons is realizing you're not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

Could anyone fully understand the wonders of how a baby develops in the womb of a woman? This is the mystery about birth. Birth is by divine power of God.

#Twitter: proudly promoting ghastly grammar and silly misspelling since 2006.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

It's hard to have a film and television career and do music work at the same time.

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

Chocolate ... is not something you can take or leave, something you like only moderately. You dont like chocolate. You dont even love chocolate. Chocolate is something you have an affair with.

When a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, requests breakfast and taxi money.

From the self-confidence with which he spoke no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

Do I think I was put here on earth to be a journalist and to seek truth? No, I don't.