Also, in a funny way, if you have been happily married there are no unresolved areas, nothing to prove to yourself after the other dies.

I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater.

You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?

Sometimes...we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.

I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble.

Some people did take the domestic goddess title literally rather than ironically. It was about the pleasures of feeling like one rather than actually being one.

Cake baking has to be, however innocently, one of the great culinary scams: it implies effort, it implies domestic prowess; but believe me, it's easy.

I do think awful things may happen at any moment, so while they are not happening, you may as well be pleased.

In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.

(In cooking), there is always room for careful tinkering.

Glamour really has to do with good lighting, doesn't it?

I know the crew so well, so I forget I'm being filmed. It's like cooking with a friend in the kitchen - you're talking, as you do, and maybe you're telling her about this wonderful way to prepare lamb chops - it's more natural, more honest.

I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do.

There is a vast difference between how things seem from the outside and how they feel on the inside.

I put the kitch into kitchen.

I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy.

Good olive oil, good butter, milk - they give food taste and depth and a richness that you cant reproduce with low-fat ingredients.

On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.

I'm not someone who's endlessly patient and wonderful.

You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

I think maybe when you live with someone who is really very ill for a long time, it somehow gives you more of a greedy appetite for life and maybe, yes, you are less measured in your behaviour than you would otherwise be.

I can understand why those primitive desert people think a camera steals their soul. It is unnatural to see yourself from the outside.

There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.

People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.