Step Outside Your Kitchen Comfort Zone With Paul Qui's Top Cooking Tips

— -- It can be tough to spice things up in the kitchen -– when pressed for time, the same old dishes have a way of being too easy to fall back onto.

Paul Qui is here to change that. Qui is chef/owner of qui and East Side King restaurants in Austin, as well as winner of “Top Chef” season 9, winner of the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Southwest 2012, one of Food & Wine’s 2014 Best New Chefs of 2014 and “Esquire” magazine’s 2014 chef of the year. Safe to say the guy knows how to cook really, really well.

As part of a partnership with American Express Blue Cash and Whole Foods Market, Qui took five seasonal ingredients and created two recipes with each: one more tried-and-true and one with an unexpected twist.

“The recipes that I’ve worked on definitely came from a comforting place – at least comforting to me – and the other part of it is definitely trying to inspire home cooks to try different things with their food,” Qui told ABC News. “The inspiration for a lot of these dishes is to inspire the home cook to try something different and new. That’s the whole theme. So don’t be scared. Just go for it.”

Read on for Qui’s top tips to cook outside the box, and then get started with his recipes below.

1. Food that grows together works well together. “I usually find inspiration from the ingredient and where it’s from and what grows around it,” Qui said. “I kind of let the ingredient tell me where to go from there.”

2. Stay within the same color family. “This is a little random, but things of the same color taste good together, like corn and squash. The same monochromatic hues,” he said. “This is just from experience and working for chefs who have felt the same way, and oddly enough when I come up with a dish of the same shades and color, it always tastes really good.”

3. Don’t be afraid to fail. “In the restaurant, inspiration comes from a lot of trial and error as well. So if you’re cooking at home, you shouldn’t be scared of your food,” he advised. “You should try to fry, steam, boil it, do whatever you can to it and figure out what might work for you. It is just food.”

Raspberries
Raspberry Pancakes with Raspberry Chili Maple Sauce and Spiced Chicken Meatballs: Click here for the recipe.
Raspberry Albacore Crudo: Click here for the recipe.

Butternut Squash
Roasted Butternut Squash with Garlic Yogurt and Pine Nuts: Click here for the recipe.
Butternut Squash Slaw with Roasted Peanuts and Nouc Cham: Click here for the recipe.

Ham
Ham Ramen with Kimchi and Navy Beans: Click here for the recipe.
Thai-Style Ham Omelet: Click here for the recipe.

Watercress
Watercress Fried Rice: Click here for the recipe.
Tinola Filipino Chicken Soup with Watercress and Chayote Squash: Click here for the recipe.

Chocolate
Champorado Filipino Coconut Chocolate Rice Pudding with Bacon Bits: Click here for the recipe.
Green Curry Mole Chicken: Click here for the recipe.