At the start of each week, I generally cook a box of quinoa, and while it's simmering, I saute onions, garlic and any veggies I have on hand in a separate pan. I season the vegetables with Spike, a seasoning blend my mom always used when I was growing up, or a little Bragg Liquid Aminos. I always add crushed red pepper and chopped fresh herbs.

I almost chopped my thumb off once. Just before I left home, I was about ten or eleven years old, and I was trying to open a bone. Can you imagine that? A bone! I was trying to get the marrow out of a bone, and I took the ax, and I went to chop it, and something slipped, and the ax went right down there and damn near cut it off.

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

Anger has been a really big deal for women: how can we express it without feeling that, as the physically weaker sex, we won't get killed. The alpha-woman was burned at the stake and had her head chopped off in days of old.

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

If I'm playing in the morning I'll get some carbs early: porridge with chopped banana. If I'm playing in the afternoon I'll start with less carbs and have some eggs and fruit for breakfast then a light lunch about 90 minutes before I play so I don't feel sluggish or full.

Back a hundred years ago especially around Woodrow Wilson what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

Believe me I understand the need for easy and speedy. After a 12-hour day of shooting 'Chopped ' say I'm talking stir-fry spaghetti heck peanut-butter sandwiches. But that's not about the joy of food. That's survival.

I've always hoped 'Chopped' would telegraph our enormous affection and love and admiration for chefs and food but at the same time we are inflicting extraordinary cruelty on them.

I grew up in a family where the women were just nuts. They didn't stand around in cardigans making polite conversation while they chopped tomatoes.