How does one go around writing a cookbook?
Well, you hire somebody to help you. Q: To do the writing? A: Not necessarily. I think that the great success to a cookbook is if you translate a recipe from a commercial kitchen to a home kitchen. That’s really the difficulty in creating a cookbook. I didn’t have too much trouble doing that. I had help from my co-writer, Susan Simon, and she’s written cookbooks before so she was able to help translate a recipe to the home kitchen. Q: What is the biggest misconception about cooking pasta at home? People think it’s an easy, simple meal. A: Great pasta dishes are all about the marriage of the sauce and the pasta and the pasta water—which is one of the recipes that I fought really hard to have in that book, because it’s such a major part of each recipe. My editor was like, “There is a recipe for pasta water?” And there is: You have plain water and you’re putting pasta in it and there is salt and you’re using that as part of an ingredient to the finished dish. That really helps the marriag
