My Body Wants to Crave Healthy. I Just Need to Give it the Opportunity.

My message is, as it alway has been, moderation: meat as a main course on three days a week, eggs on one, fish on one other and some form of vegetarian meal on the rest constitute a perfectly acceptable, interesting and varied diet.

I have a lot of time for vegetarians (though apparently not all of them have a lot of time for me), and that’s because I respect anyone with principles about food.

If God had created celery, it would only have two stalks, because that’s the most that almost any recipe ever calls for.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

Catherine [of Siena] sent the Pope five oranges which she had candied and covered with gold leaf… She develops the theme of the difference between the bitter and the sweet pain, and gives the Pope a recipe for making candied oranges.

For me, cooking is very connected to my family and friends.

Looks delicious,” he lied. “A mite crispy along the edges – but then, I like it that way.”Incredulous eyes met his own. “You like your potatoes burned?”Ah, so he’d been right about that. If he could still recognize what it was she’d cooked, then surely he could eat it.

The restorative effect of a tasty dinner is quite remarkable. When the going gets tough, the tough get cooking.

Cooking is not about convenience and it’s not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention.

…if you can’t find any grappa, half a cup of cough medicine should achieve similar results.” [Audrey’s advice]

I’m not defending it, and we are concerned about consumer perceptions, but the fact of the matter is, cooking destroys any virus, so canned food, as long as the canning is done properly, doesn’t present any food safety problem.

I’ve swallowed fish-eyes wholelike an endoscope.I once ate a trout cooked inside a dolphin. Felt like a shark eating another shark,inside the cold-blooded womb of yet another shark.

I need my fill of Indian home cooking.

Nowadays films and television are what I like to call “Microwave Media”. I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes time. Slow, precious, tempered time. A script is a film’s recipe. It’s just a piece of paper to the novice...

Somewhere close behind air and water is the need for food.

In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. “The trick is moderation,” he said.

Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, “No, I’m not going to do that.

In Berlin, I worked from home, were the only other women sat sedately on my bookshelves. They were good company, it has to be said, but a little quiet.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

I’m a big believer in cooking your own meals. It makes it much easier not only to ensure that you eat fresh foods but also to follow the second rule of eating (see previous chapter), which advises incorporating as many colors, tastes, textures, and aromas as possible into one’s meal. Beyond those benefits, I feel...

There are some things in life that shouldn’t be given so much importance, if they don’t change what is essential.

Fanfare for the MakersA cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?To the small fire that never leaves the sky.To the great fire that boils the daily pot.To all the things we are not remembered by,Which we remember and bless. To all the thingsThat will not notice when we die,Yet lend the passing moment words and...

Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.

There ain’t a body, be it mouse or man, that ain’t made better by a little soup.

Cooking is not a science but an art, mistakes are okay, messes are fine—the pleasure is in the creating and the sharing of the result.

Melissa had never really caught the culinary bug; in fact, she’d all but had herself vaccinated against it.

Reading is Intriguing…it can take you on a great Adventure!

Invest in what’s real. Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It will be what it will be.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

When I got home I peered down at the lobster to see how he was doing. The inner plastic bag was sucked tight around him and clouded up. It looked like something out of an eighties made-for-TV movie, with some washed-up actress taking too many pills and trying to off herself with a Macy’s bag.

If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really...

To make my meal in a box taste better, I decided to tweak the logo, rather than the ingredients.

freedom.

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest – on behalf of the senses and the microbes – against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer...

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of...

C’è un alone di stregoneria in tutta la cucina; la scelta degli ingredienti, il modo in cui vengono mescolati, grattugiati, sciolti, le infusioni e come si insaporiscono, le ricette prese da vecchi libri, gli utensili tradizionali

Pork and chicken grease, the aromatics of choice for the Cajun.

mudbugs” out of their burlap sacks. Other than an onion or maybe an ear of corn, if it wasn’t alive when you threw it in, then it shouldn’t be in the pot, she’d say. Did her Mama mind that Lucy didn’t cook those old family recipes? Was she turning her back on her culinary heritage...

She looked at the produce stalls, a row of jewels in a case, the colors more subtle in the winter, a Pantone display consisting only of greens, without the raspberries and plums of summer, the pumpkins of autumn. But if anything, the lack of variation allowed her mind to slow and settle, to see the...

Shit or get off the pot,” because I rarely cook with feces.

Maybe your mind won’t remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.

Cooking gives you the opportunity to meet the things you eat. You can touch each carrot or olive and get to know its smell and texture.You can feel its weight and notice its color and form. If it is going to become part of you, it seems worthy, at least, of acknowledgment, respect, and thanks....

Without another word, we began to eat. I was hungry, but no appetite would excuse the way we set upon those dishes. We shoveled food into our mouths in a manner ill befitting our fine attire. Bears would have blushed to see us bent over our plates. The pheasant, still steaming from the oven, its...

The only thing that will make a souffle fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.

I don’t like gourmet cooking or “this” cooking or “that” cooking. I like good cooking.

Roasted Roadkill and Hitchhiker’s Surprise” (this recipe is a secret concoction handed down from my great grandfather to my grandfather, who told it to my dad just before he ran him over).

No matter our age, everyone in our household knows that cooking and eating together is where the fun is