The foods you will always find in Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen

Anthony Bourdain‘s new cookbook, Appetites , comes out this fall. The subject matter in this book could hardly be more different than his earlier novels or even his Les Halles Cookbook. Appetites is a family cookbook, something that even the 59-year-old Bourdain couldn’t have imagined several years ago, as he explains in a recent interview.

He notes that family life has been a novel experience for him, since he didn’t have a child until he was 50: “To wake up in the morning and prepare school lunch for a small child, to concern yourself with what is she going to eat for dinner today, tomorrow, the next day. To cook for people on Thanksgiving and Christmas. These are completely new experiences for me, and I embraced them with rather more zeal, I think, and enthusiasm and organizational skills than perhaps is attractive,” he explained.

In addition to discussing the book, Bourdain answered questions about a wide range of topics. When asked about his thoughts on YouTube food stars, Bourdain replied with a positive perspective: “I don’t know any of them, but I’m all for it. I think it’s a wide open space. People are clearly interested in it. Even the worst of them in principle do good for the world, and the more we talk about food, the more people that are interested in food, the more people that are interested in cooking.”

Bourdain is known for eating an astonishing variety of foods in his various television shows, but the items he always has in his pantry are rather mundane. He says that he always keeps fresh mozzarella or burrata in the fridge, along with butter and heavy cream. High-quality olive oil can always be found in his pantry, along with elbow macaroni, which he pairs with “some processed or not particularly good, easily meltable cheddar-like stuff that I can make macaroni and cheese with. I have a deep love for that,” he says.