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.

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.

When you look at a flower with an appreciative heart and get lost in the magical beauty, you really get a vacation from the everyday stressful life.

Forgiveness is remembering the truth of who you are.

To be the love, dissolve into love.

All you have to do is to open your mind, do not be too hopeless instead stand with your feets and have faith that all things will be alright.

We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

Why can't people live with each other in peace? Why must everything be destroyed? Why must people go hungry while surplus food elsewhere in the world rots away? Oh why must people be so crazy?

There are conspiracies all over the Senate floor on any day!

We are a water-drinking people, and we are allowing every brook to be defiled.

I don't know the true meaning of happiness.

America comes from a flawed but wonderful idea. Many great things have sprung forth over the past few hundred years but there were deep issues in the beginning that now are starting to show up.