Way back when I was a junior pastry chef, I'd bake loads of muffins every morning, as many as 120 or so, while operating on autopilot.

Pasta with melted cheese is the one thing I could eat over and over again.

Brunch, for me, is an extended breakfast that should be enjoyed whenever you have time properly to engage in cooking and eating.

A well-made salad must have a certain uniformity; it should make perfect sense for those ingredients to share a bowl.

The combination of olive oil, garlic and lemon juice lifts the spirits in winter.

Breakfast is always the best time for something juicy, sweet and fresh - it just feels like the right way to open the day. There's no right way, though, when it comes to choosing the fruit.

Mothers and grandmothers: these are the people that I admire most, not so much chefs.

Just-poached vegetables show off their natural attributes, and taste fresh and light in a way you never get with roasting or frying.

Date syrup is a natural sweetener that has wonderful richness and treacly depth; I drizzle it over semolina porridge.

The way to entice people into cooking is to cook delicious things.

For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.

Great men learn from their weaknesses, and learn to use their strengths.Ordinary men learn nothing from their weaknesses, and underuse their strengths.

Were women meant to do everything - work and have babies?

Not a single leaf moves in this country if I'm not the one moving it.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

You can be a victim of cancer, or a survivor of cancer. It's a mindset.

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.

Let's try and fail because through failure you learn

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

I'm having an amazing time teaching through the lives of people much like Jesus did.

Someone once told me that something they really liked about me was that they thought that I was really down to earth and not high-maintenance. I think that was cool. It's important to stay grounded.