Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It seems that the more we travel, the more we want flavour and variation in our food - and the bolder it is, the more addictive those flavours will be.
You can't blame another person for your world being different - or things like divorce. It gets right on my goat when people don't take responsibility.
Cooking is what I do professionally and it is my way of life, but it is also the way I relax. It is the thing I dream about the most; it makes me smile.
People think the restaurant industry is hard and takes no prisoners, but so does baking, so does retail and so does bus driving. You can't blame your job.
The most used thing I have is my wok. I prefer it to a pan or pot. It is my wonder. They're really easy to clean, I am a lazy cook like that, so it appeals.
As I'd travelled, I'd seen more and more people drinking rose. Given the amount of grapes we grow in Australia, I just said, 'Why wouldn't we be making rose?'
Australia is an extraordinary country full of people who eat extraordinary food. There are Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Brits. It's so varied.
My earliest memory of cooking is my grandmother showing me how to make chicken gravy on the big combustion stove in her kitchen. I still use Nana's gravy recipe.
I have no qualms with people who want to be vegetarians; it's just foolish. They are missing out on the best things in life: meat, cheese, proper Christmas pudding.
My nanna was an extraordinary lady, and a good old-fashioned cook. She'd just be pottering around, cooking dinner for 25 people on a wood-fired stove without a problem.
The culinary world is a fascinating place that has been influenced over the centuries by culture, religion, fashion, war, art, science and, more recently, globalisation.
That's one of the things that concerns me - vegan steak or whatever. It is a hard terminology thing, because what are you eating? With beef you know it's a piece of beef.
Markets have long been at the centre of communities, not just somewhere to drop in and grab a bag of groceries, but a hub, a meeting place, and always a place to stop and eat.
What I'm trying to do as an Australian is to say to people, 'You've got to go back out to Australia,' because there are rural communities that really rely upon tourism to continue to go.
In our family a whole ham on the bone would be bought three days before Christmas, and then stored in a pillow case and left in the fridge so anyone can take the huge thing out and slice it.
I do think about how different my life might have been had my mother not died so young, but I try not to delve into it too deeply, as it's like 'Sliding Doors,' isn't it? You just don't know.
My grandmother would let me stand on a stool stirring gravy in a large roasting dish in front of a wood-fired stove at the age of six. She wasn't worried about the whole health and safety stuff.
There are three types of palate. There's the palate that can't taste anything, there's the normal palate, and there's the Super Palate. I don't think I've got a Super Palate, but it's pretty good.
There is no way in the world that a vacuum cleaner will ever be obsolete - they use them for swimming pools, they use them for houses, they use them for industrial purposes. They're fantastic things.
Sydney has the world's best swimming pool. Walk through the Botanical Gardens and you come to the Andrew 'Boy' Charlton Pool on Mrs Macquaries Road, with incredible views of Finger Wharf and the Harbour.
The food I had as a child was not complicated, but by heck it was tasty. My Nanna's cauliflower cheese was awesome, her caramel slice wonderful and I am still searching for a recipe to make her apple tea cake.
My kind of cooking is not a single style - French, Asian, Australasian or British - it's not modern, old-fashioned or classic; it's a mix of all these things. And at its core is a boy who loved to cook with his Nanna.
I grew up in a world with my father where you learnt to iron, you learnt to cook, you learnt how to clean the toilet... I want my children to be the same... I want them to be anywhere in the world and be able to cope.
Street stalls, be they in Korea, Thailand or anywhere else in Asia, in a covered market or simply on a street corner with a few brightly coloured plastic stools and tables, are my favourite places in the world to eat.
Let's be honest, we all love a roast, but Sunday lunch could be a huge plate of salade nicoise; it could be eggs benedict; it could be a barbecue. The important thing is you're making an effort, and you're all together.
Tomatoes and mozzarella work very well together because the milk is rich in summer when the grass is very very green, and makes the best mozzarella in the world, same time as the tomatoes are around and beautiful bushy basil.
I think a robot butler would be a great idea for certain things. But the idea of anybody coming into my bedroom and doing stuff for me, besides my wife and I - such as giving you tea in the morning - I just find a bit irksome.
I think restaurants and family homes and stuff are about conversation and about chatting. Food is there because you want to enjoy it and have fun with it but I'm not there to study it - I'm there to spend time with my friends.
I think that most things, if you want to use them properly, take quite a lot of time and I don't necessarily have the patience to sit down and read the instructions and follow the first bits to actually get the starting point.
The inspiration to cook came from my grandmother and my father who were both wonderful home cooks. But I would say I taught myself. You travel, you discover the world, you explore books - it is these things that make a great cook.
I want people to throw on a hat, head out into the outback and see the real Australia. You can do it how you want - independently in a 4WD, camping under the stars, or being treated like a king in a luxury homestead or on a cruise.
My food hero would be someone like Elizabeth David, because I think what she did for Britain was amazing. Also David Thompson, an Australian chef who does Thai food and really understands the basis of it, has always been very inspiring.
I absolutely love jumping on a plane. I find it to be one of the most wonderful, releasing experiences in the world. Nobody can call me and I have my own space where I can do whatever I want. For some people a long-haul flight is an ordeal, but I love every bit of it.
Restaurant kitchens are highly pressurised environments, with lots of young men, and that means one thing: testosterone. It's not brutal - it's military. It is regimented, tough. People are put into compartments and have to do exactly what they're told or the whole thing falls apart.
When you grow up in a family where you have lost a parent, everybody joins together to instil the correct values in you, to give you guidance and and show you the moral ways of the world. Most important to my father and grandmother was the idea of treating people as you would like to be treated.
Those who know me well will tell you that I love a market, and when I say market, I mean food market. No matter where in the world, they allow me to soak up the culture, to hear the rhythmic chattering of the local people and traders, and take in the all-important smells, pungent and intoxicating.
My father did lots of things. He had an orange-juice factory. He did real estate. He did commercial selling. He was always up and about doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things and being adventurous. I always admired his self-discipline. He was very good at getting everything done. He was very tidy.
Yes, I am a judge on 'MasterChef,' where I taste thousands of dishes, and yes I am a trained chef which has had me commanding some of the biggest brigands a kitchen has ever seen. Yes, I have travelled the world and cooked on television and at food shows up and down the country, but in my heart I am a home cook.
I never use organic vegetables. Why would you want to? The idea of taking a courgette grown in a third-world country in an organic field, packed into a polystyrene box, flown across the oceans, washed in chlorinated water, packed into a foam box, driven halfway across the country, wrapped in plastic and stamped 'organic,' what's the point?