131 quotes found
"A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe."
"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."
"I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. … Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed—eh bien, tant pis! Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile … then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile—and learn from her mistakes."
"My, I get so depressed after a poor meal; that's why I can never stay in England for more than a week."
""Too much trouble," "Too expensive," or "Who will know the difference" are death knells for good food."
"How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?”"
"I read and read and readthat's how I learned to cookfrom M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard."
"Julia Child the famous chef said, "I never feel lonely in the kitchen. Food is very friendly.""
"I do a lot of speaking engagements and sometimes I feel like I’m being paid to curse in front of people who haven’t heard it in a while."
"Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone … Bad food is fake food … food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy – it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation….as much as it is also about freshness."
"I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry."
"I have exactly the same work ethic. I don't see writing as anything more important than cooking. In fact, I'm a little queasier on the writing. There's an element of shame, because it's so easy. I can't believe that people give me money for this shit. The TV, too. It's not work. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift. A few months ago, I was sitting cross-legged in the mountains of Vietnam with a bunch of Thai tribesman as a guest of honor drinking rice whiskey. Three years ago I never, ever in a million years thought that I would ever live to see any of that. So I know that I'm a lucky man."
"Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."
"The room smelled like a gust of wind from Satan's anus."
"It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."
"You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it’s great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You’re in!"
"Anyone who refuses to let you eat your burger at a temperature less than medium is on the side of the terrorists."
"Life is complicated. It's filled with nuance. It's unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt."
"You know what causes w:Chinese restaurant syndrome? Racism. ‘Ooh I have a headache; it must have been the Chinese guy.’"
"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine. (p. 70)."
"Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic."
"Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I’m not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I’ve eaten them."
"Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can. If you’re planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won’t be able to help you."
"I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner."
"An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins."
"If there was any justice in this world, I would have been a dead man at least two times over. By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming – thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun. … [When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered."
"I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure."
"Don't touch my dick, don't touch my knife."
"Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have."
"For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food."
"They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table."
"I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies."
"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls & temaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg."
"The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca."
"I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine."
"Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures."
"Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt."
"America's most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewis—or even Baywatch reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets."
"Given a choice between being trapped on a desert island with a group of writers or a family of howler monkeys, I think I'd pick the monkeys. At least I could eat them."
"For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions."
"You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy."
"It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it."
"Good food does lead to sex. As it should."
"Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It’s about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It’s about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It’s about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you."
"Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably."
""Monkfish liver! Can you sell them? How many people order them?" one chef will say. "I herda them," says another. "The fucking burger…" groans another, "I can’t get it off the menu. I tried, but they scream." "Give them the damn burger," says another, "and fucking salmon if they want it too. Just slip them the good stuff slowly, when they're not looking. A little here, a little there, as a special. Choke them with burgers but slide them tuna rare. Give them their salmon, but make it ceviche. They’ll come around. They’re coming around"."
"There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub."
"If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go."
"We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts."
"I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy."
"I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one's own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money."
"No kid really wants a cool parent. "Cool" parents, when I was a kid, meant parents who let you smoke weed in the house – or allowed boyfriends to sleep over with their daughters. That would make Sarah Palin “cool.” But, as I remember, we thought those parents were kind of creepy. They were useful, sure, but what was wrong with them that they found us so entertaining? Didn’t they have their own friends?"
"You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese."
"I believe that, as an American, I should be able to walk into any restaurant in America and order my hamburger – that most American of foods – medium fucking rare. I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria. … I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious fucking medical waste. I believe the words “meat” and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence."
"PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die-ever-and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious."
"I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world."
"The lazy and the foolish compare him to Hemingway, which is a terrible injustice as Jim is both a better writer and a better man."
"Anthony Bourdain received plenty of love for the unconventional Houston episode of his popular CNN TV series Parts Unknown. The episode's diversity was particularly praised. It turns out the bad boy chef turned travel savant achieved that with one simple edict. "No white people," Bourdain told producers about his vision for highlighting Houston according to a recent New Yorker magazine profile. As PaperCitys own Jailyn Marcel pointed out when the Houston Parts Unknown first aired, none of the city's celebrity chefs even sniffed a bit of air time. It turns out most of them never had a chance to get on. Foodie power players such as Chris Shepherd, Bryan Caswell and Ronnie Killen were out from the moment Bourdain issued his "no white people" command. It's hard to argue with the results (though when it comes to race, someone is always going to object). Bourdain's Houston show is one of the most critically-acclaimed episodes of Parts Unknown ever. Bourdain tells the New Yorker that he wanted to look at Houston "as a Vietnamese and Central American and African and Indian place." There is little doubt Bourdain accomplished his mission — no matter his methods. The episode provided a fascinating look at the Houston that many of the residents populating all the mid-rises and high-rises popping up don't even know."
"What really interested him about food was the sensual pleasure of eating it and the hard reality of the labor that went into it, and he never lost sight of either. His mission was to affirm the value of life, even as he saw it devalued all around him."
"Possessing a restless intelligence and curiosity like his can be exhausting. Bourdain was a natural writer because he was constantly observing everything around him, recording the best and the worst, processing, contextualizing, drawing out meaning."
"Better than most traditional journalists, Bourdain understood that the point of journalism is to tell the truth, to challenge the powerful, to expose wrongdoing. But his unique gift was to make doing all that look fun rather than grim or tedious. Very few storytellers offering honest portrayals of the world can still find it full of joy as well as sorrow."
"A lot of people will tell you that on meeting Tony – despite how extraordinary a being he was – they somehow felt as if they’d known him for years. In part, this was the natural result of having so much of his wit and intellect bleed across our television screens. But just as elemental, I believe, was the man’s almost unlimited capacity for empathy, for feeling the lives and loves and hopes of others. He listened as few listen. And when he spoke, it was often to deliver some precise personal recollection that was an echo or simile on what was still in his ear. He abhorred a non sequitur; for him, human communication — much like his core ideas about food and travel and being – was about finding the sacred middle between people."
"He was always that funny – either dry in his rhetorical savagery, or over-the-top hyperbolic in his foaming rage at vegetarians or micro-beer experts or elitist social or political orders. Everything built to a moment of careful, thoughtful wit. He often spoke as well as he wrote, and given the stylistic command of his prose work, this is saying something. I know a lot of writers. Only a few of us speak as we write. Shit, on a bad day, we can’t even write as we are supposed to write. Tony was never arch or florid; his comic exaggerations and rhetorical provocations were always somehow perfectly measured. He said what he meant and he meant what he said and he landed all of it. As a conversationalist, he simply delivered, moment to moment."
"For Bourdain, a man of commanding and exceptional wit and talent, the greatest and most honorable fight was to stand with ordinary men – whether a New York busboy or a vendor on a Ho Chi Minh City streetcorner, a production assistant in his crew or a fan who recognized him on a subway platform. I loved him for this. It was, perhaps, the most important predicate to the great achievement of his journalism: Wherever you go, whoever you meet – there we are, all of us, so different and so much the same. And he chose, I think, his close friends in some part for their talent, but in greater part for their ability, regardless of that talent, to be themselves with all others, in all other spaces."
"...with the focus on food and cooking [on Bourdain's No Reservations], we can see what it is that drives daily life among the Haitian multitudes. And what we find is surprising in so many ways. In a scene early in the show set in this giant city after the [2010] earthquake, Bourdain and his crew stop to eat some local food from a vendor. He discusses its ingredients and samples some items. Crowds of hungry people begin to gather. They are doing more than gawking at the camera crews. They are waiting in the hope of getting something to eat. Bourdain thinks of a way to do something nice for everyone. Realizing that in this one sitting, he is eating a quantity of food that would last most Haitians three days, he buys out the remaining food from the vendor and gives it away to locals. Nice gesture! Except that something goes wrong. Once the word spreads about the free food—word-of-mouth in Haiti is faster than Facebook chat—people start pouring in. Lines form and get long. Disorder ensues. Some people step forward to keep order. They bring belts and start hitting. The entire scene becomes very unpleasant for everyone--and the viewer gets the sense that it is worse than we are shown. Bourdain correctly draws the lesson that the solutions to the problem of poverty here are more complex than it would appear at first glance. Good intentions go awry. They were thinking with their hearts instead of their heads, and ended up causing more pain than was originally there in the first place. From this event forward, he begins to approach the problems of this country with a bit more sophistication."
"I think if you are a chef who thinks that vegan cooking has less taste and flavor than other foods than that just speaks to your own inability. Vegetables can stand on their own they don’t need all your duck blood on them, thank you. Also people tend to think vegans are emaciated self sacrificing, well tell that to my big ass jew hips."
"… the single most important activist thing we could do is invent a good vegan cheese. If someone’s receptive to veganism, but they don’t feel like they can do it, it always is, “But I love how this or that tastes!” And it seems like as much as they’ll agree with you about the ethical arguments, their own taste preferences win out."
"They say that black-eyed peas bring you luck when eaten on New Year's Day, and New Year's is also the time of year many people go vegan, so not only will you be lucky, so will the animals!"
"Like our sauce — we harvest a whole crop of organic tomatoes — 10 tons of tomatoes every year. Can them all, store them in the basement, have like a harvest party when it gets loaded in."
"They ignore basic truths, we don't even have a basement'."
"Last year, Alefantis estimates, he bought 12 tons of Toigo tomatoes, which Stello turned into sauce and canned before trucking the jars to the basement at Buck’s Fishing & Camping, Alefantis’s other restaurant just a few steps down the block on Connecticut Avenue NW."
"James Alefantis is also the owner and operator of Buck’s Fishing and Camping, where I work. The two restaurants are sort of sisters; Comet the larger, more casual, family-friendly spot, and Buck’s her slightly more upscale older sibling. Some employees work at both. We share supplies and storage space when necessary. We have a joint holiday party every year. You get the drift. .. I explained that there wasn’t even a basement in Comet as the theory posited, and that the basement was actually in Buck’s. I explained that, yes, employees from both establishments used it for storage, and then the caller started laughing. He said, Come on, we both know you’re lying. Two restaurants can’t carry food and supplies from one to the other. What do you do walk the food down the block on the sidewalk? That would violate every health code on the books! I tried to explain that the back doors were only ten feet apart in the back parking lot, that we weren’t carrying cooked food, but bottled and canned ingredients."
"I’ve never considered myself a strong reader or writer. When I was younger, I had some hardships with reading and writing, and I never thought of myself as someone who could pull this off. To a degree it was challenging. In my everyday life, I’m pretty private and reserved, so the hardest part was taking personal emotion and putting it on the page and putting myself out there…"
"Everything I've learned in these nine years has been self taught — that's not to say I've had a lot of help along the way in terms of meeting so many amazing people in this industry. But I have always loved cooking, and I grew up cooking with my grandfather and my mother, and entertaining and cooking for people was always such of strong importance. And so I’ve just applied that same passion for food to truffles."
"At the end of the day, I don’t think it had anything to do with my age; I was successful because I could speak intelligently about the products, and because I had, at the end of the day, a really high-quality product. Obviously, there was some initial pushback from customers due to my age, but it just got to the point where I found my niche and got into a rhythm."
"There’s just so much unknown information exotic ingredients, so my hope is to educate the reader, and take them on this journey to procuring and exploring these exotic ingredients around the world—from Serbia to meth heads in Oregon."
"The urgency of now is yesterday."
"The progress of the last 40 years has been mostly cultural, culminating, the last couple of years, in the broad legalization of same-sex marriage. But by many other measures, especially economic, things have gotten worse, thanks to the establishment of neo-liberal principles — anti-unionism, deregulation, and intensified, unconscionable greed — that began with Richard Nixon and picked up steam under Ronald Reagan. Too many are suffering now because too few were fighting then."
"I think what TikTok has done with Gen Z and teaching people how to cook is just make it more relatable."
"For many kids, politics feel very distant. This might be the first time it hits home for a lot of kids."
"It’s really less about the followers and really more about entertaining. If you’re entertaining, it will find the people that you can entertain."
"I love cooking and learning more every day in cooking. I look at food as I would languages or art and my vocabulary and palate keep expanding. I continue to do pastry and have been doing savory all along and it's a beautiful marriage. (discussing her interest in both pastry and savory cooking)"
"Traci Des Jardins and Mary Cech. Traci Des Jardins took a chance hiring me to do the desserts at Elka after I had just a bit of fine dining experience. It was an early Pacific Rim restaurant with excellent food. I told her I could do better with the desserts. I realize now that my approach to getting that job was unusual! I had tried the desserts, and they sucked, with nothing more imaginative than green tea crème brulee. So I designed a menu, and brought in samples incorporating Japanese ingredients and using a bento box. I got the job, dessert sales soared by 60%, and I later went with Tracy to Rubicon. Mary Cech taught me how to do chocolate work, pull sugar and build showpieces. I also learned what it was like to temper for 3 days straight without sleeping to help Jemal Edwards prep for a competition and then I started to compete myself – I was always going to break the rules! (discussing her mentors when she entered the food industry)"
"What I love about those shows is what I love about teaching. I love the discovery of new ingredients, and what can be done with them. I also studied film production, so I love seeing how the scenes are shot, and the story telling that is edited together. I also like “the game,” and going from being the “underdog” in the first The Next Iron Chef series to being the “scary chef” to watch in the second year! (discussing her motivations for doing cooking competition TV shows)"
"I would say that many women (and men) in the restaurant industry are, in fact standing up and have always run safe and professional kitchens and dining rooms. Let’s pay attention to those chefs and restaurants who have been doing so. This is an evolution into a new time of awareness and acceptance. Finally, women are getting closer to playing on the same playing field with the same rules if not changing the rules and the field altogether. When we clean up and move into a better workplace and support system for all, we will all more fairly get equity we deserve. (about sexual harassment, discrimination and abuse in the food and restaurant industry)"
"As a pastry chef, I never wanted to make super sweet dishes because that was not a driver for me. I like to look at classic themes and ask, “what else can we do with it?” We can’t just make and sell regular brownies. For example, instead of lemon cake, let’s make it with passionfruit. Often, it’s really about surprises in the familiar. My goal is to amplify certain tones while making others subtler, like sound design but in food. I enjoy remodeling aspects in pastries to create a new architecture for flavors, which also helps me in savory cooking. I also try to integrate a lot of spices and herbs into what I’m making and will look to different cultures, languages and people to understand the foundations of certain cuisines and dishes to re-interpret without being offensive. (her techniques of flavor pairings as a pastry chef and her process of incorporating unexpected ingredients)"
"My advice; understand the foundations of cuisines and then take it from there. Whether a savory dish inspires a pastry or a cocktail inspires a dessert, aspiring chefs need to make things that can be understood. They must study and learn a given ingredient and then experiment from there. As badly as we’d like to just be able to jump into crazy experiments, doing so from the get-go can get frustrating and will likely require an actual framework, not unlike any other medium. Whether you study music, dance or cooking, you simply cannot perform without guidance, planning and practice. (advice for chefs looking to experiment with different flavors)"
"I know firsthand what a life-changing difference charitable organizations can make, especially to a child, because I was one of those children"
"Some would say I was born into underprivileged circumstances. I think of it as a gift. It made me who I am today, and that is a woman who is committed to working hard, having a clear perspective, putting my family first and giving back."
"If it were not for the charity of others, I never could have provided for my siblings"
"You have to cook with your heart in order to make your guests feel the soul of your cooking. You can be a great cook and a great chef, but if you don’t have the passion then it is not going to translate to the guests."
"I get my inspiration from everywhere, and admittedly mostly from places that aren’t food related. I love going to museums, because art really inspires me. When I look at cookbooks, I tend to like the ones that are super artistic- more art books than cookbooks."
"When I was younger I tried to be the chefs that I saw and thought were successful, but that doesn’t work. I was young and trying to make a name for myself. I was trying to make their style of food or personality, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere."
"I will tell you this, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing children winning awards and seeing the boost in confidence they get"
"We’re for all kids, but we make a point of trying to appeal to those with special needs, and not everyone is an athlete either. But everyone can learn how to barbecue."
"They think they’re learning about barbecue, but it’s life skills, it’s a work ethic. It’s more than barbecue."
"Life is too short not to follow your dream. I liked working in finance, but I didn't love it. I have a passion for food."
"I have met some very helpful people who have mentored me over the years. I have friends who are editors, chefs, writers, and producers; they have made time for me and I am forever grateful."
"It’s not about making space at the table, because we’ve been at the table. Filipinos have been working our butts off for chefs cooking other people’s cuisine. It’s time to cook our food."
"The thing that I’m most excited about is the sense of pride. There is a sense of pride to be Filipino again, and that has come from food."
"When we talk about pride, we are reclaiming it. We are giving value to not just food, but to ourselves, and to our history, and honoring the struggles that our parents went through. And I can talk about my dad a lot, but my mom, she has been my biggest cheerleader. She has been at every single event."
"Because of the colonization that occurred in the Philippines, we were never given a sense of value. Because of that, we never gave value to our food"
"The farmhouse was like a lot of farmhouses, I imagine. I was in love with that place. Everything about it was outrageously enchanting. It was in that house that I cooked my first s, gathered from my grandfather's farm. I stood on a footstool and stirred in the butter. My mom and I added salt and pepper. The earthy aroma filled my sense memory. I never forgot."
"My grandfather’s farm, 100 acres of corn fields, s, trees, ponds, abandoned cabins, sand, wild berries, and mushrooms, was nothing short of another universe full of magic. My dad’s father, George, was handsome and sweet. We drove up the side drive, past the house, and stopped just before the large barn and gate, which led back to the woods. The path to the woods was lined with wild and and sometimes if I was there on Sundays after the Lone Ranger episodes, I’d walk the trail and pick them into a small basket. Then I retreated back to the porch with the basket on my lap and ate every single one."
"FISHERMEN AND HUNTERS WELCOME. MICHIGAN CHERRIES. SUGAR BEETS AND CORN. The banner at the truck stop rotated with these simple phrases. ... The seasons out here were determined by there was to fish, hunt, forage, pick, and so on, you understand. Most people were hunters and fishermen and animals were their prey, which left the flora to people like me. ... I liked truck stops. Sometimes I had cravings for that sort of meat and potatoes type of American cuisine you could find at a truck stop. Because I'm a fine-dining chef, people think I eat fancy most of the time. That is very far from the truth."
"Summers were everything because I didn't have school, and I hated school. I wasn't good at like some other kids. And there were a lot of kids at school. I liked to keep to myself, so things like school or anything that brought kids together made things sort of difficult. It was a people thing. In the summer, I kept track of time by what we foraged, like , s, , s, , , and by event's like Mom's birthday, the , my birthday, the county fair."
"“Burn the Place” is divided into three parts, focussing on Regan’s childhood, her alcoholism, and her present-day recovery and restaurant ownership. The sections are constructed of scraps and vignettes, fragmentary pieces of memory that hop around the time line, following their own ordinal logic. Regan’s recollections are concrete and achingly precise—she is particularly attuned to scent, conjuring wafts of decaying oak leaves revealed under thawing snow, the earthy, fungal funk of a sourdough starter, the sharp tang of a metal key bearing a bump of cocaine—but they break and flow with a dreamlike disorientation."
"Traveling around the country gave her new perspective and a break from her everyday life of running a restaurant, which she emphasized was a 24-hour job that required her to not only create a menu, but to do the bookkeeping, run payroll and manage the staff. Regan, who grew up on a 10-acre farm in Indiana, said it helped her realize that she wanted to bring food to a table and incorporate a lifestyle element in her projects. After months of searching, Regan found the location for Milkweed Inn in in the . It’s near the and is surrounded by lush woods on multiple acres with a river running through it."
"“Slowly getting better!!! Great coaching from Mr. Curry""
""Golf lessons and champagne with @aurorajames @ericamalbon.”"
"Fun day out with the LADIES WHO GOLF..."
"There is such a great lesson to learn in having your children in the kitchen with you. Children can smell the smells and watch all that goes into the preparation of the food. It’s a five-sense experience for them."
"There is a whole generation of kids coming up who don’t know about anything but eating processed food."
"It literally changes the quality of your life to be able to eat good food. It improves the nutrition of a child, and therefore it improves his or her health."
"Parents should encourage children as early as possible to begin safely using kitchen equipment."
"I think the importance of having kids in the kitchen is to expose them to something beyond cookies and snacks. It’s like a dumbing down of a child’s palate. By associating the fun of cooking only with sweets, you’re limiting the child’s experience."
"You would be surprised at how into cooking so many kids are today."
"You can make any food fun food."
"As a woman who's 50 and has a lot of jobs that I'm grateful for, I wanted to reflect that the American dream is still alive, that if you work very hard, opportunity will come your way, that you can be 50 and over and female in this country and still be relevant."
"You can't put a cook next to a stove and not expect that two things are going to happen - cooking and talking."
"Every time I put high heels on and I have to go somewhere in a dress I feel uncomfortable in, I'm not supposed to be at the party."
"The cost of carrying will weigh heavily on ers of all sorts. successully beat small town merchants because they created a vastly more efficient warehousing, ordering and inventory carrying system, driven largely by a superior . A 'virtual Wal-Mart' which presents goods directly to customers on the Internet, or via in physical store loactions, could extend this model even further."
"The twilight of the twentieth century is driven by a mixture of technology and resources very like that which drove nineteenth-century America. This time, it is and software rather than and steel. Instead of s, we have a that links us as the railroads did, but at the speed of light. And, once again, this change is being driven by people from around the world, making possible an unprecedented level of economic growth. Workers may start out sewing , but chip plants and more diverse enterprises will eventually follow. In the nineteenth century, you had to cross an ocean to find economic opportunity, freedom from repression, or a respite from famine. The pioneers of the twenty-first century can stay put—their diaspora is to cyberspace. Still, we may not be able to gauge the real impact of the information revolution for fifty or sixty years more. Consider our cities, which in many cases have been transformed into artifacts of industrialization. Will large numbers of people begin to telecommute and, in that way, return to a pastoral America? Or will the cities somehow become even more necessary to our lives? Technomania, like its industrial equivalent in 1897, is a reminder that all this lies just beyond our knowing. What has happened already is bound to be very small in comparison to what lies ahead."
"A true Modernist revolution in food has begun only recently, as s such as began consciously developing gastronomic experiences that transform meals into dialogues between chef and diner. Avant-garde cooking emphasizes novel, unconventional presentation of familiar flavor themes—the by evoking diners’ memories of past meals while taking the dishes in novel directions. A meal at or other Modernist restaurants often exposes conventions that guests do not even realize exist until the innovative food violates them. Like other good art, Modernist cuisine is challenging and provocative. Dozens of chefs around the world are now advancing this culinary movement as it follows a trajectory that is similar, in many ways, to the Modernist transformations of other cultural disciplines. Like those predecessor movements, Modernist cuisine has faced some resistance and criticism. But it has arrived."
"Technology contains no inherent moral directive—it empowers people, whatever their intent, good or evil. This has always been true: when , the ancient world got s and awls, but also swords and s. The novelty of our present situation is that modern technology can provide small groups of people with much greater lethality than ever before. We now have to worry that private parties might gain access to weapons that are are as destructive as—or possibly even more destructive than—those held by any . A handful of people, perhaps even a single individual, could have the ability to kill millions or billions. Indeed, it is possible, from a technological standpoint, to kill every man, woman, and child on earth. The gravity of the situation is so extreme that getting the concept across without seeming silly or alarmist is challenging. Just thinking about the subject with any degree of seriousness numbs the mind."
"... I was interested in cooking long before I even knew there was a computer. ... I started, I think when I was nine years old — I discovered s at the local library. And I announced to my mother that I was going to cook , all by myself. So I got this armload of cookbooks, and I cooked Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn't that great by my current standards, but it wasn't such a disaster that it turned me away from the topic."
"... Find something you really love. ... Don’t be afraid to change your mind if you find that you really love something else more. ... It really helps if you can find people who are supportive."
"Myhrvold, whose favortie adjective is "cool," does not conform to the Microsoft stereotype, although he has a master's degrees in geophysics and and also in mathematical economics, and a doctorale in and mathematical physics. His seem endless: he is an amateur (hence the dinosaurs, a cosmologist, a zoologist, an environmentalist, a , a and , a driver, a er, a , a , a , and an . He is an accomplished , too."
"Myhrvold first made his name in technology: he became the first chief technology officer of Microsoft after the company acquired his software firm in 1986, and remained there until 1999. His scholarly credential run far and wide, from degrees in mathematics, geophysics, and space physics from UCLA (he started college at 14) to a doctorate in physics from Princeton University earned at 23 and studies with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University in England and at La Varenne Cooking School in France. Before , he spent two years as a at Rover’s in . He has also functioned as chief gastronomic officer for . He has nurtured his love of food and science-inspired cooking techniques thanks to numerous travels to the world’s best restaurants, which allowed him to get to know many of their s. The publication of ' is the culmination of many years spent researching, writing, photographing, and editing, and even launching his own publishing company, so that the book would correspond exactly to his standards. The Main Course recently spoke to Myhrvold about the book and how he made it happen, helped by co-authors Chris Young and alumnus Maxime Bilet and a large team at the Cooking Lab."
"One of my head pizzaiolos, Laura Meyer, has lived and studied in Italy and speaks fluently. So when the world championships in , Italy, rolled around, she was excited to give it a shot. We flew over together and planned her entry in the pizza in teglia ("," or what we would call ) division. I advised her not to go too off the wall—Italians don't love that, especially from Americans—but to add a little twist that would be just creative enough. Laura settled on a classic pizza alla diavola, which is made with whole milk , , and slices of the spicy oblong known as soppressata picante. Her clever addition was a scattering of on top of the finished pizza. Tasting the mildness of the Italian mozzarella, she decided to blend in a bit of ' for extra flavor. And because we were in Parma, she finished her creation with shavings of , and some for good measure. ... In addition to a title she will hold all her life, she won a , a of , and a five-kilo block of Parmesan cheese, which she hand-carried all the way back home. ..."
"Born and raised in , Mr. Gemignani started making at age 15 in his brother’s pizza shop in When Mr. Gemignani encountered his first on a visit to the city 20 years ago, he was a changed man. “In California, pizza was just that, pizza. But when I started traveling and visiting places like New York, you understand pizza in a totally different and beautiful way,” he said. I felt that there would be a renaissance in the slice business coming,” Mr. Gemignani said. He opened the acclaimed in the in 2009. Shortly after, he realized that the New York slice was just as deserving of respect as the sanctified whole and s that most pizza nerds lauded. So the following year he opened the first Slice House next door — where the pizza boxes read, “Respect the Craft!” in big, bright red letters."