Criticism is part of the creative man's journey, and I appreciate it.
— Marcus Samuelsson
Most of my education has been around food.
I don't have memories of Ethiopia as a child. I didn't learn about Ethiopian culture until after I moved to New York and started meeting people from the Ethiopian community.
I would love to take a cooking class from Gandhi. Maybe I could teach him how to cook, and he could teach me his message. I wouldn't mind learning how to make couscous from scratch from a North African woman, either.
I think that if you grind your spices and keep them in small batches, you can use them in endless ways. The key thing is to have a spice mill or a coffee grinder, and to keep your spices cold and in tightly lidded boxes.
To become a good cook is to know yourself, and I, at this point, know myself. I know myself, and I know the cook I want to be and the cook I am striving to be.
I had great schooling, and my parents were always in front of me, or next to me, or behind me, making sure I had whatever I needed.
We know so much about the European food story, and we're getting to know about the American food story; but we know so little about the African food story.
I love cookbooks for completely different reasons. I love 'The Harry's Bar Cookbook' and Marco-Pierre White's 'White Heat' for their feel. For pure learning, Gray Kunz wrote a great cookbook, 'The Elements of Taste', published in 2001. The first time I read Charlie Trotter's, the Chicago chef's first cookbook, I was blown away.
Food has always been in my life. Being born in Ethiopia, where there was a lack of food, and then really cooking with my grandmother Helga in Sweden. And my grandmother Helga was a cook's cook.
As an adopted person, once you find out about that 'other' side of yourself, it's almost like you find out who you really are.
Like all food, whether you're talking about Persian food, or Chinese food, or Swedish food, it's always a reflection of wars, trading, a bunch of good and a bunch of bad. But what's left is always the food story.
I love using rice as a flour; I'll grind roasted rice and dip fish in that. It gives a beautiful, crunchy texture.
