Ruth Reichl Famous Quotes
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We waited, eating resilient, deeply satisfying bread dipped in spicy oil that tasted exactly like fresh olives. Doug reached out and stroked my knee and I had a sudden conscious thought that I was happy.
There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.
The implications of Americans devoting their lives to fast food are more profound than the fact that our kids aren't eating well. There are real repercussions that we need to know about and think about.
You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.
Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'
I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.
You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.
We were having a class on civics, talking about what makes America a great country. I said I thought one important reason is that we've all come from different places in the world and that we learn from one another.
If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.
I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.
When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.
I lay there unable to move, reading about disasters in the far corners of the world. What could I do? Write letters, send checks. But there will never be a time when terrible trouble is not stalking the earth, and I began to see how important it is to appreciate what you have.
For too long I'd been waiting for the wonderful. But there is so much joy in everyday occurrences: a butterfly in the sun the first crisp bite of an apple, the rich aroma of roasting meat. Maybe I had to break my foot to open my eyes, but I finally understood why cooking means so much to me. In a world filled with no, it is my yes.
The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.
There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.
If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.
M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.
I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.
By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
I felt for the first time that the library belonged here. The house was reclaiming its spirit, and the library, which had stood aloof and apart for so many years, was turning back into what it was always meant to be: the heart of this home.
I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'
I feel as if there's a huge gulf separating me from all the lucky people in the world; they have so much to look forward to.
I like to work. I believe that work helps us find our self worth.
I decided that it wasn't pretty that I felt, but confident.
I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.
American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.
Anyone who thinks they're too grown up or too sophisticated to eat caramel corn, is not invited to my house for dinner
My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.
The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.
It was Mac who first made me think about the way food brought people together - and kept them apart.
I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.
I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.
I don't think there's one thing more important you can do for your kids than have family dinner.
The first time you make something, follow the recipe, then figure out how to tailor it to your own tastes.
Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane.
When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.
What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.
I don't think I hate any food trends.
What I learned is that how we present ourselves to the world is really how we get treated. So if you want to be treated really well in a restaurant, you really have to dress up. You cannot just show up.
The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.
Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.
I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.
When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.
I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.
It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.
It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.
Writing about food is my default.
I've named my cookies Snowballs, but not because that's what they look like. It's the way they make you feel. You know how it is when a snowball is flying toward you on an icy-cold night? The stars are glittering, and the snow is twinkling, but you're wrapped up in mittens and boots, so you're toasty warm. It's surprise and comfort, all at the same time; that's how I want them to taste. Do you know what I mean? Here's the recipe: It has chocolate, marshmallows, and pecans in a very buttery batter.
A great meal is an experience that nourishes more than your body.
I love breakfast, and I don't see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast.
The meal began with pickled squid, oyster shooters, marinated anchovies, and scungilli salad. Then Rosalie set an enormous bowl of pasta con le vongole in front of Sal, who ladled it out, talking the entire time. The pasta was followed by huge platters of scampi, which we passed around. It was almost eleven when Rosalie set three enormous stuffed turbots on the table, and it was near midnight when she appeared with a plate of warm sugar-dusted sfinge.
"So our first taste of the New Year will be sweet," Sal whispered in my ear.
I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.
Lacy little green fronds waved up through clear liquid; it reminded me of a forest stream in early spring, just after the ice has melted. I picked up a frond, and as I put it in my mouth, I experienced a moment of cool, pure freshness.
"What is it?" I asked Jake, enchanted.
"Mozuku, a special kind of seaweed from Okinawa. You don't think it's slimy?"
"Slippery, but I love the way it feels in my mouth.
When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.
That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.
I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.
Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.
I like poached eggs, but I'll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.
I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.
Plain fresh bread, its crust shatteringly crisp. Sweet cold butter. There is magic in the way they come together in your mouth to make a single perfect bite.
If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.
The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.
The best antidote for sadness, I have always believed, is tackling something that you don't know how to do.
I got back into the car thinking how lucky I was to be aware of happiness. Most people don't recognize their own good fortune until it has departed. And then it is too late." "What about Remy? What
We in the media have been guilty about not doing a better job of making people understand how really simple cooking is. We've made everyone feel like they have to be a chef.
She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.
My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.
Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.
'Comfort Me with Apples' is a love story, or better, two love stories. And since it deals with a later period in my life, most of the people who appear in it are living.
Go ahead into life, full-blooded, courageous and leap for the adventure. But you must do it soon - before the summer of your youth has cooled off into caution. You are magnificently charming - and you come like a torrent. But you will be spent on the futility of little things. You are not a watercolor. You are carved out of life - and there can be no petty hesitancies about you.
I felt that I was really living in the moment. I did not know where my life was going, but right now the future did not trouble me.
Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.
Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.
It takes a great deal of strength to be an optimist.
In really good times, you say, 'No, I'm not taking that ad.' But in bad times, you'll take anything.
The way we allow children to be advertised to is shocking. Eating is a learned behavior, and we've made these kids sitting ducks for all the bad messages about industrialized food. The fact that we allow that to go on is horrifying.
Don't you just love the idea of cooking flowers? I imagine them bursting into bloom, right in the pan.
The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I'm interested in happiness.
I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.
My kitchen was built for my body. It forms a 'U' in the middle of the living room and dining room. It's not huge, because I don't like huge kitchens.
I've been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it's very deliberate: There's this idea that somehow it's more fun if there's a roar in the room.
But when I told her they didn't cost one penny and were very nutritious (I made that part up, but I'm sure it must be true), she ate them up. She packed them into her lunch pail this morning, and when I looked
World War II really fascinated me because it's the only time that everybody in this country sat down at the same table, because eating on rations was your patriotic duty.
How young you are. When you attain my age you will understand one of life's great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.
Hunger, I discovered, is very much a matter of the mind, and as I began to study my own appetites, I saw that my teenage craving had not really been for food. That ravenous desire had been a yearning for love, attention, appreciation. Food had merely been my substitute.
I wish you could have seen the kitchen when I was done: It looked like a hurricane had blown right in the door! But I cleaned it all up, and when Mother came home the whole house smelled warm and spicy, Bing Crosby was singing "White Christmas" on the radio, I was wearing a clean apron, and she called me her "little homemaker."
What would you think about tomato mincemeat cookies? I bet no one else will think of that!
She's always sniffing the bottles in the spice cabinet."
I didn't know she'd even noticed. At first it was just curiosity; why did fennel and cumin, identical twins, have such opposing personalities? I had crushed the seeds beneath my fingertips, where the scents lingered for hours. Another day I'd opened a bottle of nutmeg, startled when the little spheres came rattling out in a mothball-scented cloud. How could something so delicate have such a ferocious smell? And I watched, fascinated, as the supple, plump, purple vanilla beans withered into brittle pods and surrendered their perfume to the air. The spices were all so interesting; it was impossible to walk through the kitchen without opening the cupboard to find out what was going on in there.
Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.
Giving people presents is such an intimate act; you're basically telling them who you think they are,
I think it's hard, when you're someone who likes to please people, as I am, to be a boss. I had to learn how to rein myself in and not terrify people.
My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.
My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.
I am telling you that if things can change for the worse, the opposite is also true. But only if you open yourself to the possibilities.
To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.
Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.
I love to make pies - pot pies, quiches, savory tarts, fruit pies. I use an old-fashioned pastry blender with wires and a wooden handle. I never use a recipe.
But I have always been persuaded that someday, when I grow up, I am destined for great things. And then I wonder when, exactly, I expect that will be.
Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.
I meet people, and we can get past small talk pretty quickly if they've read my books. It's a great shortcut.
I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.
People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they're going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they'll be over the moon.