I have a lot of plants - my living room is like a jungle. I like the idea of bringing the outside in.
Samin Nosrat
I just drink regular drip coffee, but I'm kind of a coffee baby.
We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.
One pillar of my cooking is that salad dressing is sacred and that you always make it with the most delicious oil you can find. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.
I'd never been religious, but I'd always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.
Like all Iranian kids, I grew up feeling strongly that the best part of dinner was tahdig, the crisp, golden crust that forms at the bottom of every pot of Persian rice - and sometimes other dishes, too.
I love bitter broccoli rabe tossed with Calabrian chiles and hidden under a mountain of snowy shaved Parmesan.
There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!
I've always believed that pastry chefs are born, not made. They're patient, methodical, tidy, and organized. It's why I stick to the savory side of the kitchen - I'm far too messy and impulsive to do all the measuring, timing, and rule-following that pastry demands.
Friends have warned me that I can be a bully in the kitchen. With every fledgling relationship, I'm anxiously aware that the simple act of cooking alongside my new paramour can unleash havoc.
I love roast chicken, juicy summer tomatoes, and carrot cake slathered with tangy cream-cheese frosting.
Long-stemmed broccoli should be tossed with olive oil and flaky salt and roasted in a hot oven until the florets turn the color of hazelnut shells and shatter on the tongue.
No one's born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.
Unlike leftover pasta, leftover risotto is viewed by Italians as a gift. Cooks shape it into balls or stuff it with a pinch of stewed meat or cheese. Then they bread and deep-fry the fritters until golden brown, yielding arancini, the indulgent 'little oranges' I can never resist.
I love mayonnaise. It's one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion - that creamy, satisfying third thing - feels like magic.
Growing up, I was aware of the kids-don't-like-vegetables trope, but it didn't make much sense to me. I never had any choice; all the traditional Iranian dishes my mom cooked teemed with herbs and vegetables.
At home, Mom served us turkey breakfast links that she got at the health-food store. But whenever we went out for breakfast, she let my brothers and me order pork sausages (though, inexplicably, not bacon).
I always turn to Wendell Berry for inspiration on food, community, agriculture, and, well, just being a human.
I really love the beach.
I've never tasted a store-bought tortilla that compares in texture or flavor with one made by hand, so I'm happy to invest some time. It's worth it just to see a friend take her first bite and understand, finally, that a flour tortilla is meant to be an essential component, not just a lackluster wrapper.
As a student of Alice Waters, the patron saint of salad, I'm no stranger to the art of lettuce washing.
When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we'd meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.
My mom, who left Iran in 1976, steeped us in the smells, tastes, and traditions of Persian cuisine.
While a pot of boiling water may not offer the char or smoke of a grill, it does give the cook an advantage when it comes to seasoning food.
Apricots are the most private fruit, loath to reveal their secrets.
Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.
In the wake of a failed relationship, I'm often flooded with if-onlys.
I take, like, 9,000 supplements every morning. I don't know if it's completely placebo or not, but I'm super committed to these supplements: like, I can't face the day without them.
I wake up naturally and begrudgingly around 6:10 A.M. That's wired in so deeply that I wake up at that time no matter where I am, in any time zone. I wish I could sleep later.
The people-pleasing and performing is 100% ingrained in me, partly because I was a little brown girl growing up in a very white, homogeneous community in San Diego - where, in second grade, I was called a terrorist.
Very early in my culinary career, while helping another cook prepare the staff meal, I stirred some chopped raw garlic and herbs into a bowl of leftover lentils. The atonement for this sin was so extreme that I've never repeated it: After being chastised, I spent the next 20 minutes fishing out the minuscule pieces of garlic.
I live by myself, so I derive a lot of joy from being with my friends and their families.
The classic French blanch-and-cool technique I learned at Chez Panisse yields the kind of brilliant, picturesque vegetables we all want to see on restaurant plates. Long-cooked foods, on the other hand, fall firmly into the 'ugly but good' camp of the Tuscan cucina povera, where flavor far outshines looks.
Persian cuisine is, above all, about balance - of tastes and flavors, textures and temperatures. In every meal, even on every plate, you'll find both sweet and sour, soft and crunchy, cooked and raw, hot and cold.
The apricot's fleetingly short harvest - only a few weeks long - explains the urge to save the season in a jar. But cooked fruit, no matter how expertly preserved, can never measure up to the flawlessness of its fresh counterpart.
Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.
For the timid or uninitiated, leaf-wrapped foods offer an ideal and gentle introduction to fire cooking. Liberated from the need to worry about whether the fish is sticking to the grill or burning, pay attention instead to the rate of browning on the surface of the leaf, which you'll get to discard whether it chars or remains pale.
After coating pasta with tomato-rich meat sauce, my mom would drizzle the bottom of a nonstick pot with oil and put it all back in to form a dark crust of tangled noodles. Once she unmolded it at the table like a cake, my brothers and I would excitedly cut into it, verbally laying claim to our preferred pieces.
Tart and sweet, tinged with the faint scent of almonds and flowers, the Blenheim is the ideal apricot for both eating and preserving.
A burger is a black dress; a kebab is a Met Gala gown.
There are so many food shows, really beautiful ones, that exist to elevate professional cooking and professional chefs. But there aren't that many that really celebrate home cooking or are for home cooks especially.
My inability to follow recipes as written - without obeying the devil on my shoulder telling me to replace ingredients or change the temperature - is well documented.
My favorite afternoon snack as a child in San Diego was a still-steaming flour tortilla purchased at the taqueria down the street from my school, and I've yearned for them ever since I moved away.
I love a Yorkshire pudding. It's basically pancake batter that's fried in beef fat and puffs up; it's like you can't go wrong.
A successful shrimp boil requires layering ingredients into the pot so that everything is done cooking at once. A carefully timed choreography dictates the order in which ingredients are added to ensure no one has to eat raw potatoes or chewy shrimp.
Years of cooking have taught me that the harder a flour is, the 'thirstier' it is. In other words, harder flours tend to have a greater capacity to absorb water than their softer counterparts.
I could probably go on for a long time about the differences between Northern California and Southern California Mexican food.
People love giving cooks spoons, I've noticed. Or, at least, they love giving them to me.
I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin' restaurant type - and what I had at home never measured up to that.
I'm not the number-one fan of the heavy holiday meal. And also, I didn't grow up eating them, the traditional Western holiday meals, so it's just not something I have a nostalgic relationship to.
