Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information.

You know the great irony is that people think you have to have money to enjoy fine food, which is a shame.

My place in Chicago is a 105 year old house, but I really like contemporary spaces too, so it's refreshing and fun to be in a space where you can do contemporary things.

I like to have friends in the kitchen and make a big mess and use every pot in the kitchen.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

Thom is one of those wonderful people to cook for because he absolutely loves it, just loves it. He loves to eat and drink and he'd be a great guest at any dinner party.

My whole problem is that all of my favorite things at Thanksgiving are the starches, and everyone is trying to go low-carb this year, even a green vegetable has carbs in it.

It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

I had a really good time with Martha Stewart, who also is somebody I really admire a lot. I've learned a lot from her and I think all of America has, about attention to detail and using fresh ingredients and making things beautiful and special.

I went in saying I wanted to be the food guy.

Well, we don't take money from people and then show the product. It has to be a product that we like anyway, and that's true for all five of us, which is one of the really nice things about the way we make the show.

If I have committed any culinary atrocities, please forgive me.

Because the show is popular, people do recognize us on the streets.

I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles.

For each episode the five of us are all wearing clothes by the same designer. It's a different designer for each episode, but for each one we're all wearing their clothes.

No, Queer Eye has a book coming out before mine, in the Spring of 2004, in which each of us has a section and we do a brief overview of our subject area.

I really have a great deal of humility in that department, and a great deal of respect for people who spend their lives learning how to make these amazing preparations.

I'm in a loft and the kitchen is in the very center of the apartment. The whole place revolves around it.

In actuality, there was casting for the show and it was pretty difficult.

Jay Leno is not a guy who likes change. He eats the same food every day.

What I bring to the table is a huge enthusiasm and love for this stuff.

I've leased the apartment; my partner is going to come out here. But we're keeping our house in Chicago because real estate is a really good investment and also because it is just crammed with full of stuff!

Sesame oil is probably my favorite condiment, period.

I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world.

I am much more interested in the process than results.

Oh, did I tell you I have a cookbook? I have a cookbook deal.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information.

I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me.

Baking is problematic for me because I usually drink a lot of wine when I cook

People want honest flavourful food not some show off meal that takes days to prepare.

To me, the kitchen is a place of adventure and entirely fun, not drudgery. I can't think of anything better to do with family and friends than to be together to create something.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any big meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it, then go home and cook, chop, braise, and blanch. Then it's gone in 20 minutes and everybody lies around sort of in a sugar coma, and then it takes four hours to clean it up.

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

The plate at each point only sends back to the eye the simple colour imprinted. The other colours are destroyed by interference. The eye thus perceives at each point the constituent colour of the image.

One gets into a strange psychological, almost hypnotic, state of mind while on the firing line which probably prevents the mind's eye from observing and noticing things in a normal way.

Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.

More firm and sure the hand of courage strikes, when it obeys the watchful eye of caution.

A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater.

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.

Only a kind person is able to judge another justly and to make allowances for his weaknesses. A kind eye, while recognizing defects, sees beyond them.

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

I don't see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don't believe in an eye for an eye. I don't believe this is truly freedom.