I get up every day, do the best that I can do, and go home and have a good time.
Instead of going out to dinner, buy good food. Cooking at home shows such affection. In a bad economy, it's more important to make yourself feel good.
I think there are two ways of eating, or cooking. One is restaurant food and one is home food. I believe that people have started making food that is easy that you want to eat at home. When you go out to a restaurant, you want to be challenged, you want to taste something new, you want to be excited. But when you eat at home, you want something that's delicious and comforting. I've always liked that kind of food - and frankly, that's also what I want to eat when I go out to restaurants, but maybe that's me.
I learned that the hardest party to pull off successfully is Saturday night dinner. This meal is expected to be elaborate: appetizers, first course, dinner, dessert, and coffee. People arrive at 7:30 or 8 p.m. and stay for hours - definitely past my bedtime - and they all go home exhausted.
People have more fun if they don't eat so much they have to be taken home in an ambulance.
With more and more fast food available, it takes an extra effort to cook delicious, healthy meals. I have always been a proponent of simple, easy food that doesn't take forever to cook so you really can eat well at home.
The dirty little secret is that I grew up in a household where there were no carbohydrates allowed, ever. No cookies, no bread, no potatoes, no rice. My mother was very extreme in terms of what she served. Since I left home more than 40 years ago, I've been making it right for myself.
When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.
