Every time you use the word 'healthy,' you lose. The key is to make yummy, delicious food that happens to be healthy.
Marcus Samuelsson
The holidays are my favorite time of year! Christmas was always one of the biggest celebrations in Sweden, and I look forward to the festivities each year.
We struggle with eating healthily, obesity, and access to good nutrition for everyone. But we have a great opportunity to get on the right side of this battle by beginning to think differently about the way that we eat and the way that we approach food.
I love Thanksgiving because it's a holiday that is centered around food and family, two things that are of utmost importance to me.
For many of us, clean water is so plentiful and readily available that we rarely, if ever, pause to consider what life would be like without it.
Weekends are sacred for me. They're the perfect time to relax and spend time with family and friends.
While I hold my own political views, it's important not to get too wrapped up in individual candidates and personalities, but instead to focus on the real issues.
I love having a croissant and a great cup of coffee. Just one cup.
The Swedish Christmas is definitely unique, even throughout Scandinavia. Like Christmas everywhere, it's a very family-centered holiday.
Coconut is one of those love-hate ingredients.
In Ethiopia, food is often looked at through a strong spiritual lens, stronger than anywhere else I know. It's the focal point of weddings, births and funerals and is a daily ceremony from the preparation of the meal and the washing of hands to the sharing of meals.
They say never trust a skinny chef, but the fact is, to stay healthy when you're a chef means you have to work twice as hard.
Even just a few spices or ethnic condiments that you can keep in your pantry can turn your mundane dishes into a culinary masterpiece.
Clean water and access to food are some of the simplest things that we can take for granted each and every day. In places like Africa, these can be some of the hardest resources to attain if you live in a rural area.
Spices, of course, are essential.
What I love about the term 'salad' is that it can appear in so many different forms and says a lot about the cook. It could be a simple as fresh green lettuces tossed with a basic vinaigrette, or it could be as hearty as a couscous salad with grilled shrimp.
I don't distinguish the music I listen to from great music - it's just music. There shouldn't be an announcement that divides our food between what tastes good and what is good for us.
Being an Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef, there's nothing traditional about my Thanksgiving spread.
You have to balance, but you can be aggressive as a chef. It benefits the food. You have to be passionate. You can't be angry cooking.
Just like keeping a healthy diet is important to maintaining a healthy lifestyle, eating the right foods is just as important for getting the most out of your workout.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite American traditions. I quickly picked it up when I moved to the U.S. from Sweden.
Aside from the obvious chocolate cookies and ice cream, chocolate can be used in a variety of ways for desserts.
I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.
While you can find zucchini in markets in most places year-round, allowing you to make everything from breakfast dishes like zucchini and onion frittatas to snacks like zucchini-stuffed crab cakes, the onset of fall marks the beginning of hard squash season.
I learned from my grandmother, who grew up in devastating war times, how important it is to keep with tradition and celebrate the holidays during tough times.
Food has always been in my life. Being born in Ethiopia, where there was a lack of food, and then really cooking with my grandmother Helga in Sweden. And my grandmother Helga was a cook's cook.
I feel like there's a lot of tasks in cooking that I want to master, that I want to do better.
Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday - it's a day that's American to the core and it's a day that's all about what and how we eat.
Without food, we cannot survive, and that is why issues that affect the food industry are so important.
Salad can get a bad rap. People think of bland and watery iceberg lettuce, but in fact, salads are an art form, from the simplest rendition to a colorful kitchen-sink approach.
We can all agree that government can't solve the obesity crisis alone. It's an ongoing issue that will require a collaborative effort across private and public sectors if we want to see some long-term success.
I came into this environment where there was so much love, so much positive energy. I never heard my parents say, 'We have adopted kids.' The minute my sister Linda and I landed in Sweden, we were their kids.
Since truffle oil and caviar aren't always in the budget, learning to tweak and enhance just a few ingredients and flavor combinations can help you transform those ordinary ingredients into the extraordinary!
I had great schooling, and my parents were always in front of me, or next to me, or behind me, making sure I had whatever I needed.
I want people to understand my journey and to be inspired by that. You can be an immigrant, and if you work really hard, you can have your own restaurant.
I credit my grandmother for teaching me to love and respect food. She taught me how to waste nothing, to make sure I used every bit of the chicken and boil the bones till no flavor could be extracted from them.
For many sports fans, the onset of fall only means one thing: It's football season!
I've lived all over the world, but Harlem is very special to me, and when I decided to open a restaurant near my home, I didn't want it to be business as usual.
A juicy chicken breast can be the perfect accompaniment to a classic Caesar salad or a club sandwich. It's also easy to cook, and can be as simple as dressing it with a few spices and popping in the oven.
In the hot summer months, popsicles are a perfect way to cool down while enjoying a delicious, fruity treat. Frozen, refreshing, mouth-friendly candy on a stick cannot get any better... or can it?
Children want to mimic adults. They notice when you choose to prepare fresh vegetables over calling in another pizza pie for dinner. They will see that food made with love and care outweighs going through the drive-through window.
For centuries, soup kitchens have been a way for local communities to offer a way of support, both nutritional and emotional to their less lucky neighbors.
As a chef and activist, I'm particularly concerned with food politics issues such as the farm bill.
Healthy can be the new good. Eating delicious should not be sacrificed because it's healthy.
Each city should have its own type of restaurant.
I think that if you grind your spices and keep them in small batches, you can use them in endless ways. The key thing is to have a spice mill or a coffee grinder, and to keep your spices cold and in tightly lidded boxes.
When I ride the subway back and forth, sometimes I look at the other passengers and wonder if any of them are children who have been adopted or parents who have adopted.
I think it's very expensive to not eat healthy. Eating healthy is the only affordable option we have left.
I'm lucky to live in New York, a city that offers so many options for lunch. I can pick up dumplings from a Midtown food truck, grab empanadas by the dozen in Spanish Harlem or get a fantastic bowl of ramen in the East Village.
Between the ages of six and nine, my palette was taking shape as well as my identity as a chef. It was then that I learned the difference between salty, sweet, sour and even spicy.
