Samin Nosrat

The people-pleasing and performing is 100% ingrained in me, partly because I was a little brown girl growing up in a very white, homogeneous community in San Diego - where, in second grade, I was called a terrorist.

Growing up, I was aware of the kids-don't-like-vegetables trope, but it didn't make much sense to me. I never had any choice; all the traditional Iranian dishes my mom cooked teemed with herbs and vegetables.

There's a certain kind of dark-crusted sourdough bread I'm incapable of resisting. A sixth sense alerts me anytime I veer within a three-block radius of a bakery offering tangy country loaves with mahogany crusts. Without fail, I'll make my way inside and buy one, even if there's already half a loaf growing stale on my countertop.

Growing up, I thought salt belonged in a shaker at the table and nowhere else.

There are so many food shows, really beautiful ones, that exist to elevate professional cooking and professional chefs. But there aren't that many that really celebrate home cooking or are for home cooks especially.

Most canele recipes begin with an instruction to brush $30 copper molds with melted beeswax. Unsurprisingly, I've never made it past the Internet search for 'used canele molds' before giving up.

Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good.

I would say, probably 7 or 8 years into my cooking career, it stopped being about just food for me. Food's really fun, but I've always been about people, and I realized that food is just a really convenient tool for me to connect people and bring them together.

Very early in my culinary career, while helping another cook prepare the staff meal, I stirred some chopped raw garlic and herbs into a bowl of leftover lentils. The atonement for this sin was so extreme that I've never repeated it: After being chastised, I spent the next 20 minutes fishing out the minuscule pieces of garlic.

I think the goal of 'Chef's Table' is that you are so moved by the story that you want to go and eat that person's food at their restaurant. But I wanted the takeaway from my show to be that you go and cook the thing.

After coating pasta with tomato-rich meat sauce, my mom would drizzle the bottom of a nonstick pot with oil and put it all back in to form a dark crust of tangled noodles. Once she unmolded it at the table like a cake, my brothers and I would excitedly cut into it, verbally laying claim to our preferred pieces.

Like all Iranian kids, I grew up feeling strongly that the best part of dinner was tahdig, the crisp, golden crust that forms at the bottom of every pot of Persian rice - and sometimes other dishes, too.