You Have To Be Generous If You

I've Been Lucky Enough In 20 Years In The Media To Have A Nice Soap Box That Put Me In A Position To Describe To An American Viewership That Tuscany Is Different From Umbria, And It's Different From Emilia-romagna And, Not That That Was News, But It Was Never Presented To Them In A Way That Was, "hey, Look. This Is A Different Plate From That Different Place." And Although We All Think Of "spaghetti, Lasagna, Ciao," As What Italy Is All About, There's All Of This Great Stuff... I Was Merely An Interpreter. I Wasn't The Developer Of The Content.

When I Was A Child, Our Whole Family Cooked. All My Cousins Cooked. All My Aunts And Uncles Cooked. It Was Part Of Our Heritage.

Cookbooks Have All Become Baroque And Very Predictable. I'm Looking For Something Different. A Lot Of Chefs' Cookbooks Are Food As It's Done In The Restaurants, But They Are Dumbed Down, And I Hate It When They Dumb Them Down.

Once You Become An Elaborate And Well-developed Culture, Anything From Rome Or The Etruscans, For That Matter, The Food Starts To Become A Representation Of What The Culture Is. When The Food Can Transcend Being Just Fuel, That's When You Start To See These Different Permutations.

You Know, When You Get Your First Asparagus, Or Your First Acorn Squash, Or Your First Really Good Tomato Of The Season, Those Are The Moments That Define The Cook's Year. I Get More Excited By That Than Anything Else.