I wasn't passionate about food until I'd been cook...

My contribution I hope is to get people to eat full-flavored food. If I could come away with that alone, that would be a fantastic accomplishment. I'm also very proud of being a very American chef.

Even if the chef has a good business head, his focus should be behind kitchen doors. A business partner should take care of everything in front of the kitchen doors.

I want to go to college and go back to Georgetown. It's a really cool place.

I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.

My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.

We incorporated new tastes and flavors into our kids' diets from a very early age, which helped to develop their palates and prevented them from becoming picky eaters. We don't buy junk food and give them options of fresh fruit, yogurt, raw almonds, or dried whole grain cereals for snack time.

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.