Growing up in Northern California, I've only seen snow at Christmas maybe twice in my life! I was always jealous of my cousins on the East Coast with their white Christmases.

I once saw professional soccer up there in Seattle, the Sounders. I went and saw that. I'm not a big soccer fan, but watching a live game is unbelievable. And then I went to Italy and saw a soccer match; it's something everyone should do once. It'll blow your mind.

Cooking is like snow skiing: If you don't fall at least 10 times, then you're not skiing hard enough.

When you love the competition, the opportunity to achieve at simple but challenging games, some people are really into it, and I'm one of them.

I'm actually half Brit and half American. I have a British father and an American mother, but as far as I'm aware, no Middle Eastern blood.

Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.

We found that our kids enjoy those simple adventures we take as a family. I'm driving, my wife's the copilot and we give one kid a choice of what they want to go do. We eat a lot of bad food and sleep in some interesting hotels.

I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a small town where there was no guidance in the high school at all. It was a mill town, and I never knew anyone who made their living from the arts. When you did go away to college, you went away to be something - an engineer, or a teacher, or a chemist.