We’re usually panicked, like, “When is it going to be done?!” Because he’s put it in so late. My husband often lets the juices evaporate, which is bad for the vegetables, so you don’t want that to happen. You can baste it if you remember to: just spoon up whatever juices are leaching out and throw them over from time to time. So start it really high and then turn it down, and cook it till it’s done, till the juices run clear. We start it at 450, but most home ovens suck. Then the temperature depends on your oven. Who cares, right? Butter under the skin is a great idea, but it’s optional: There’s no way I can justify eating four tablespoons of butter under the skin on a Tuesday. You don’t have to tie it up if you don’t care if it splays. He stuffs our bird with a lemon and some thyme and just ties it up and seasons it with salt and pepper.

(He has suffered from cutting the potatoes too big, which is not a good idea, because they never get cooked in the middle.) Then we put the bird on a little rack over the vegetables. We throw in carrots and onions and whole cloves of peeled garlic and little potatoes. We use an old paella pan, which is sort of cast-iron. He has made some horrible roast chickens, but with a little instruction, he’s made some pretty stellar ones for a long time now. What is the best dish for a neophyte home cook to try? Roast chicken. Her chocolate mousse was great, but you have to take out 40 steps to make it doable. She had a way of making something so fabulous take forever. And of course I can remember making some of Julia Child’s recipes, too, although they’re quite long. It’s funny, I went and ended up working for her later. But I can remember cooking through this regional French cooking book by Anne Willan. But that was pretty much frowned upon in my household. I thought I might go to a culinary institute instead of college.

In high school, I used to throw dinner parties. Then we went through some sort of matzo ball soup and brisket and Hungarian torte phase-which was less successful, mind you. I can remember making mu shu pancakes when I was like eight years old, during her Chinese cooking phase. What was the first dish you ever cooked yourself? My mother went through these cooking phases when I was little. My grandmother was a fabulous cook, but sometimes her food could be heavy. All of his tiny touches, the quality of his ingredients, it was all a revelation: that sort of updated Southern cooking-fresh but not too stupid-taking my grandmother’s food and making it lovely. We grew our own herbs because 25 years ago, when I worked for him, there weren’t all those herbs for sale at the Whole Foods. But you’d be looking at a tuna salad that was very Niçoise-ish: olives, green beans, a vinaigrette rather than mayo, a little bit of lettuce.

He trained in France, so I’m sure part of that is I’m such a Francophile myself. He just had a nice sense of balance on the palate. It wasn’t fussy or obnoxious or busy, it was just lovely. He would make a staff lunch of tuna salad and it would be transcendent. My chef when I was at Crook’s Corner, Bill Neal. You weren’t eating them in July because all the tomatoes were red in July. You ate fried green tomatoes when they were coming off the tomato plants in the late spring. She had a garden, so we ate whatever was growing in it. She was from eastern North Carolina, where they just live by the seasons, that’s just how it’s done. She taught me about using fresh and local ingredients, but not in a precious foodie bullshit sort of way. F&W Star Chef » See All F&W Chef Superstars Restaurants: Watts Grocery, Hummingbird Bakery (Durham, NC) Experience: Crook’s Corner (Chapel Hill, NC) Who taught you to cook? What is the most important thing you learned from them? Two people: My grandmother.

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