100 Quotes by Rick Stein

My grandparents were born in England but spoke German and had a German name.

I left England when I was 19 for two years travelling on my own and since then I've always had an urge to go abroad.

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.

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

Cooking in Japan is regarded as an art, like music or painting. Every dish has a reason, including the garnishes. This is cuisine with philosophy, and the apparent simplicity belies centuries of culture.

I particularly like writing on planes. You've got nothing else to do but concentrate.

There is something wonderful about the way you glaze a fruit cake, nonchalantly drop some orange on as a topping, dust the sugar on top of a sponge cake or fan the apples on a tart.

If you want to eat my fish, you have to come to Padstow. It's like the Med - people want local fish in a local restaurant. I think it tastes better in Cornwall.

Lunch is a problem because my office is above our chip shop - everything is fried in proper beef dripping. It smells so good that by 12 o'clock it's hard not to think very lovingly of fish and chips.