Rick Stein

“South-east Asian salads are a great balance of salty, sweet-sour and spicy. Its important to have both pork and seafood, but you can vary the seafood from prawns and squid to crab meat or even small pieces of firm fish such as monkfish, John Dory or gurnard.”

“I am particularly fond of Malaysian food but strangely its not that well known in Britain.”

“One thing I don't like is those three-star kitchens where they force the cooks to do exactly the same thing again and again. There has to be an element of chance in cookery.”

“I found a great fishmonger in Southend, certainly not a place where I would have expected to find one, who specialises in skate knobs, a little nugget of meat from the head which makes for extremely agreeable eating.”

“Ive definitely got a sense of not being very good at stuff. Its sort of absurd because, you know, Ive done really quite well for myself, but I still really doubt myself. Its just the way I am.”

“My work spaces are the cookery school and all the restaurant kitchens. I eat in the restaurants a lot.”

“You might say that Britain is a world leader in cream. No other country makes the range of creams we have, and I'm not talking about any low-fat, no-fat nonsense. There's single, double, extra-thick, whipping, sour and clotted. To those, I suppose we can add crme frache from France, mascarpone from Italy and smetana from eastern Europe.”

“Add a teaspoon of single cream, say, to a sauce just before serving to give it a touch of extra smoothness and depth. You also need single cream to float on top of Irish coffee. And you should probably use the finest unpasteurised double cream to make syllabub.”

“I've always been pushy as far as the business goes.”

“I guess its the same with all children really, they have this sort of pathetic longing to be like their parents were.”

“There was a fantastic old shack I used to go to. It didn't look much from the outside but this man was selling the best stuff ever. He'd just take the catch and cook it up with butter, lemon and salt and then bung some chips with it and it was delicious.”

“My childhood was idyllic to begin with. We lived on a farm in Oxfordshire and my mum used its produce in the kitchen. She made plain, English-style food, cooked exceptionally - it's what I've based my career on.”

“In Australia you're not allowed to go down to the beach and eat anything from the rocks. You just can't do it - help yourself to mussels and things like that because there's hardly any left and the government has now legislated against it.”

“Naturally, as a little boy, I did lots of naughty things. With Les, the son of the farm manager, I was always climbing on high roofs, then tumbling off, or building dangerous networks of tunnels in the hay bales.”

“I always put on a couple of kilos every time I film a programme. You cant really tuck into a dish and then just leave it.”

“This is what London's all about for me: good local restaurants. It's what makes a civilised city. For me, as a country boy, it's a real pleasure being able to walk to a restaurant. It seems very sophisticated, somehow.”

“We did a dish called seafood thermidor, which was, essentially, a glorified fish pie. It's great because you don't use much fish in it. It's all sauce and potatoes, but people loved it! It kept us afloat.”

“Around Bordeaux the landscape is lush and verdant, then towards Toulouse it gets drier, sunnier and hotter. The food changes too.”

“Once youve got a name, whatever you do is news. If your marriage breaks up of course its big news but even if you have a row with the planners it makes the nationals.”

“Going to Goa was a rite of passage for me, because it's where I learnt that you could mix fish with really strong flavours.”