I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles.

You know the great irony is that people think you have to have money to enjoy fine food, which is a shame.

My place in Chicago is a 105 year old house, but I really like contemporary spaces too, so it's refreshing and fun to be in a space where you can do contemporary things.

I like to have friends in the kitchen and make a big mess and use every pot in the kitchen.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

Thom is one of those wonderful people to cook for because he absolutely loves it, just loves it. He loves to eat and drink and he'd be a great guest at any dinner party.

My whole problem is that all of my favorite things at Thanksgiving are the starches, and everyone is trying to go low-carb this year, even a green vegetable has carbs in it.

It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

I had a really good time with Martha Stewart, who also is somebody I really admire a lot. I've learned a lot from her and I think all of America has, about attention to detail and using fresh ingredients and making things beautiful and special.

I went in saying I wanted to be the food guy.

Well, we don't take money from people and then show the product. It has to be a product that we like anyway, and that's true for all five of us, which is one of the really nice things about the way we make the show.

If I have committed any culinary atrocities, please forgive me.

Because the show is popular, people do recognize us on the streets.

I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles.

For each episode the five of us are all wearing clothes by the same designer. It's a different designer for each episode, but for each one we're all wearing their clothes.

No, Queer Eye has a book coming out before mine, in the Spring of 2004, in which each of us has a section and we do a brief overview of our subject area.

I really have a great deal of humility in that department, and a great deal of respect for people who spend their lives learning how to make these amazing preparations.

I'm in a loft and the kitchen is in the very center of the apartment. The whole place revolves around it.

In actuality, there was casting for the show and it was pretty difficult.

Jay Leno is not a guy who likes change. He eats the same food every day.

What I bring to the table is a huge enthusiasm and love for this stuff.

I've leased the apartment; my partner is going to come out here. But we're keeping our house in Chicago because real estate is a really good investment and also because it is just crammed with full of stuff!

Sesame oil is probably my favorite condiment, period.

I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world.

I am much more interested in the process than results.

Oh, did I tell you I have a cookbook? I have a cookbook deal.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information.

I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me.

Baking is problematic for me because I usually drink a lot of wine when I cook

People want honest flavourful food not some show off meal that takes days to prepare.

To me, the kitchen is a place of adventure and entirely fun, not drudgery. I can't think of anything better to do with family and friends than to be together to create something.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any big meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it, then go home and cook, chop, braise, and blanch. Then it's gone in 20 minutes and everybody lies around sort of in a sugar coma, and then it takes four hours to clean it up.

I ended up turning down a full scholarship of music at the conservatory to pay to go to cooking school.

You know, this is really a way of cooking. It's not my way. I'm deeply influenced by the Mediterranean way of being. I've spent a lot of time there. And I've sort of translated it; I've tried to make it available to people in this country to whom it might not be familiar.

You know, you've got serious pieces, you've got light pieces, you've got cooking segments, you've got health-related topics, so it's not as if they've had a unique personality from the get-go.

Are you casting asparagus on my cooking?

I just get all jacked up when we start cooking.

There are people who claim to be instinctive cooks, who never follow recipes or weigh anything at all. All I can say is they're not very fussy about what they eat. For me, cooking is an exact art and not some casual game.

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

I don't believe in low-fat cooking.

I played from the time I was seven years old. My father was my first baseman coach. I had opportunities that I never really pursued - with some Miami teams and a few larger colleges, and then I ended up bailing and began cooking.

I remember when I was in college, I used to watch Julia Child's cooking show during dinner and joke with my roommates about becoming a TV chef.

I'd love to learn to cook. I think the ladies like a guy who can cook. Also, there are lots of available ladies at cooking classes. Can you tell I'm single?

Cook ingredients that you are used to cooking by other techniques, such as fish, chicken, or hamburgers. In other words be comfortable with the ingredients you are using.

Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don't want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: Always remember to remove the bell from the cat's collar before cooking.

There are so many things that come into writing a recipe, and it's really important if you're writing for home cooks to be cooking like you are at home.

How is the government going to run without people like us? We make 35 percent of the bread in this country, and that much of the margarine, and cooking oil, and all the other things.

I guess I fell into cooking.