The most overrated ingredients are garlic and extra-virgin olive oil. With garlic, it's personal; I have never been that big of a fan of its flavor. As for extra-virgin olive oil, I do use it quite often but its ubiquity serves to overshadow many wonderful oils like pistachio, walnut, argan and even grapeseed.

I do look like a walnut sometimes.

My high school was the closest thing to hell on earth that exists. I was around a lot of ultra-preppy, very mean-spirited girls, and they were very cruel to me. I ended up switching schools and going to this performing arts school near Boston called Walnut Hill.

We were filming in America and I noticed we were casting shadows like Walnut Whips! The sensible thing to do was go on a diet, so we started rewriting recipes and we're better cooks because of it.

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

One of the biggest problems with young chefs is too much addition to the plate. You put cilantro and then tarragon and then olive oil and then walnut oil or whatever. It's too much.

Try to eat more fat but choose polyunsaturated fatty acids as they help the body to burn fat so that's salmon, halibut, sardines, albacore, trout, herring, walnut and flaxseed oil.

I collect old rusty hand tools and sharpen and polish them, then use them to build things out of walnut and cherry that I harvest from fallen trees in the woods.

Of course I get drunk, my brain is only the size of a walnut.

Shrinking someone's stomach to the size of a walnut with surgery is one way to battle obesity and diabetes and may be lifesaving for a few, but it doesn't address the underlying causes.