Chris Morocco

“Let's just get this out of the way: Most grocery store vinegars taste terrible. They're made from low-quality wine (or other alcohol), which gives them a flavor that's barely more nuanced than the chewing-on-metal taste of distilled vinegar.”

“If cooking isn't fun for you, then do whatever it takes to make it fun.”

“I break out in hives whenever I hear the word disrupt applied to cooking.”

“The story of my life could be told in a series of waffle snapshots. I spent childhood weekends watching the lid of our Munsey waffle maker rise and fall as it chugged through a single square waffle at a time.”

“Simply put, Hestan NanoBond cookware is the most durable stainless cookware that I have ever seen.”

“The older you get, the less likely you are to order pancakes for breakfast. That's probably a good thing. There is nothing less healthyish for an adult, or more appealing to a five-year-old, than a syrup-drenched stack of refined flour, butter, and eggs.”

“It takes a lot to get vegetables to come together into burger form and stay there. A whole lot, in fact. That is why so many veggie burger recipes require eggs, gluten, prodigious amounts of starches, and chilling or freezing before they have a chance of holding together.”

“My first foray into meatless burgers was BA's Best Veggie Burger, a no-holds-barred, maximalist veggie burger in the style of Superiority Burger. A year later I followed that up with a black-bean tofu burger designed to stand up to the high heat of the grill. So what was there left to say? Plenty.”

“My family is loud.”

“Arriving home on a weeknight is guaranteed to be the least relaxing part of my day. The door opens, and two Tasmanian devil-children fly at me, showing me art projects and asking for snacks. My bag has barely hit the floor before I'm off doing 20 things at once, none of which is preparing dinner.”

“Almondine is the kind of spot that seems to be on every corner in Paris - packed with classic French pastries, unpretentious and yet insanely good. The pain aux raisins is my favorite, a tight coil of croissant dough layered with a whisper of unctuous pastry cream and jammy-glazy raisins.”

“A lot of nights, and dinners, start like this: some panicked chopping of whatever vegetables I had the foresight to buy, a sheet pan, and my countertop convection oven.”

“I sound, convincingly, twice my age whenever I visit New York City neighborhoods I frequented in my 20s and grumble about how much they have changed.”

“When it comes to store-bought sauces, it takes a lot to impress me.”

“My freezer is a labelled-and-dated marvel of soups, stews, braises, cooked grains, bread, and the occasional half-eaten dessert. Any of them can be defrosted and ready to eat in under 25 minutes.”

“Creating a healthier alternative to barbecue sauce isn't easy. The extreme range of flavors, from piercing vinegar to salty to sweet to barely perceptible umami, isn't easy to recreate.”

“Virtually every pair of athletic shoes comes with wafer-thin, virtually non-existent insoles that have very little heel or arch support. This is where Superfeet Black Premium Insoles come in. With ergonomic support for heels and arches, they feel molded to my feet in ways that continue to astound me.”

“Volume can vary a ton when you're cooking, depending on how you measure. Do you carefully spoon the flour into a measuring cup, or do you scoop with the cup? Are you using chunky Morton kosher salt, or finer Diamond Crystal? There can be a 40 percent difference in volume depending on the brand.”

“Tasting food, thinking about it, talking about it, and deciding whether it can be better is the crux of my job - and my life. So when I discovered a tasting spoon that felt better in my hand, a touch softer against my bottom lip, and that stood a little taller on my counter, there was no going back.”

“The brilliance of nduja is that while you can certainly eat a lot of it very quickly (and nobody would blame you) it is so packed with flavor that even a small amount can go a long way.”