Food Quotes - Page 2

Considering what a hot, wed dog smells like, dog stew has a surprisingly savory odor To tell the truth, it tastes pretty good, like oxtail. To be perfectly honest, it's delicious. (Anything about this to my golden retriever, and I'll punch your lights out.)

Nothing rekindles my spirits, gives comfort to my heart and mind, more than a visit to Mississippi... and to be regaled as I often have been, with a platter of fried chicken, field peas, collard greens, fresh corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes with French dressing... and to top it all off with a wedge of freshly baked pecan pie.

At the end of every diet the path curves back toward the trough.

If you ask the hungry man how much is two and two he replies four loaves.

It's not over till the fat lady eats!

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.

If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it.

...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

Fuck! How many times do I have to tell you? The butter goes into a butter dish because otherwise it absorbs all the other smells! And the cheese too! Transparent wrap wasn't invented for dogs, shit! And what the hell is this? Lettuce? Why did you leave it in a plastic bag? Plastic ruins everything! I've already told you, Philibert. Where are all those containers I brought home the other day? And what about this lemon? What's it doing in the egg compartment? You cut open a lemon, you wrap it up or put it upside down on a plate, capice?

To a man with an empty stomach food is god.

Perhaps the most important thing I came to understand during my decade at HoJo's was that Americans had extremely open palates compared to French diners. They were willing to try items that lay outside their normal range of tastes. If they liked the food, that was all that mattered. I wasn't constantly battling ingrained prejudices as I would have been in France, where doing something as simple as adding carrots to boeuf bourguignon could have gotten me guillotined, not because carrots make the dish taste bad (they are great), but because it wouldn't be the way a boeuf was supposed to be made. In France, unless a dish was prepared exactly "right," people would know and complain. In the States, if it tasted good, then fine, the customer was happy. A whole new world of culinary possibilities had opened up before me.

Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling to obtain our basic needs for food, security and sex.Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine tasks but incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and howwe do what we do. We need an upgrade. Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a drive to learn, to create, and to better the world.

A mere two days without eating and you passed out. It must be tough not being able to photosynthesize.

When you don't fit in anymore, eat less.

Eating healthy is expensive. Not eating healthy is expensive. One dents your pocket. The other dents your health.

The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else's responsibility until I'm ready to eat it.

A plate of roast duck, steamed dumplings, spicy noodles with beef gravy, pickled cucumbers, stewed tongue and eggs if you have them, cold please, and sticky rice pearls, too,' Ai Ling said, before the server girl could open her mouth. "I don't know what he wants." Ai Ling nodded toward Chen Yong.'I'm not sure I have enough coins to order anything more,' he said, laughing.

Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

They say you should treat your body like a temple. I treat mine like a fast-moving dumpster.

I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.

I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie.

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance.

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.

Our food is among the most intimate connections we make with the earth.

A chilled pea soup of insane simplicity, garnished with creme fraiche and celery leaves. Roasted beet salad with poached pears and goat cheese. Rack of lamb wrapped in crispy prosciutto, served over a celery root and horseradish puree, with sautéed spicy black kale. A thin-as-paper apple galette with fig glaze. Everything turned out brilliantly, including Patrick, who roused himself as I was pulling the lamb from the oven to rest before carving. He disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes and came out shiny; green pallor and under-eye bags gone like magic. Pink with health and vitality, polished and ridiculously handsome, he looked as if he could run a marathon, and I was gobsmacked. He came up behind me just as I was finishing his port sauce for the lamb with a sprinkle of honey vinegar and a bit of butter, the only changes I made to any of his recipes, finding the sauce without them a bit one-dimensional and in need of edge smoothing.

After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer in the back of the refrigerator...

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

You know what I really love the most in life? Food. Yep, just food. I love the cooking of food, the eating of food, the talking about food, the thinking about food, and the dreaming about food. Food, food, food. That’s what I love. Can there be anything more Hobbity than that? I reckon not.

Despite her unrepentant aversion to Italian food, which her husband put down to her nation's historic distrust of Italy, she suddenly declared: "All I want in life is to be able to get a take-away pizza!

Cooking like a Michelin star chef without a recipe requires high intuition but only a little skill, a lot of imagination, and willingness to be curious and innovative.

I hate the notion of a secret recipe. Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared - that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed. To stop a recipe in it's tracks, to label it "secret" just seems mean.

t smells in. Let the smell of hot tarmac in the summer remind you of a meal you ate the first time you landed in a hot place, when the ground smelled like it was melting. Let the smell of salt remind you of a paper basket of fried clams you ate once, squeezing them with lemon as you walked on a boardwalk. Let it reach your deeper interest. When you smell the sea, and remember the basket of hot fried clams, and the sound of skee-balls knocking against each other, let it help you love what food can do, which is to tie this moment to that one. Then something about the wind off the sea will have settled in your mind, and carried the fried clams and squeeze of a lemon with it.

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.

Tofu tacos are not Mexican. I think putting tofu on anything and calling it Mexican is an insult to my people.

It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

Listen in close, Wall Street Conquistadors, you’re spreading like vapor up through people’s floors, you’re moving en masse under the cracks of our doors and grabbing our children to work in your stores, feeding the needy to make them your whores, but you need to remember the grave you’re digging is yours.

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.

All those other girls are cake...I'm Crème brûlée...Tiramisu, if you will. Just a few notches above.

She was learning that being with Slade was like riding a roller coaster. Good news one minute and bad news the next. She could only imagine what this restaurant must be like.

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.

To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope.

The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.

Are bacon and chocolate the foundation of a good meal? No, everybody knowsthat is a deep fryer and/or gravy. However, I have long held the notion that you can't name a food that I can't improve by adding either bacon or chocolate.

It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.

Lou took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of just-cut flowers, fresh tamales from the food stands, and sunshine. She preferred the West Allis farmers' market to all others in the area, with its open sides, wide walkways, and rows of stalls. More recently, small tents serving hot sandwiches and fresh Mexican food had popped up outside the brick walls. It all looked so good, she'd learned long ago to come with limited funds or she would buy more produce than she could possibly use. She relished talking to the farmers, learning about what they grew and where. She liked to search for farmers growing something new and interesting she could use at Luella's.But today's visit was personal, not business. Sue had dragged her out to West Allis for a little lunch and some girl time with fall squash and Honeycrisp apples.

Hunger is not debatable.

I enjoy working for my heat. I don't just press a button or twist a thermostat dial. I use the big crosscut saw and the axe, and while I'm getting my heat supply I'm working up an appetite that makes simple food just as appealing as anything a French chef could create.

Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies…that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself.

It has long been my motto that if you cannot get your act together... then the very least you can do is try to make your act entertaining.

Love foods that sustain and protect you, and love you back.

When you think you can stand no more of the wolf's snuffing under the door and keening softly on cold nights, throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for your own good if not the pleasure of an admiring audience make one or another of the recipes in this chapter. And buy yourself a bottle of wine, or make a few cocktails, or have a long open-hearted discussion of cheeses with the man on the corner who is an alien but still loyal if bewildered.

If you ever find yourself in a jam, just take a moment to sit and think; calculate things, look at every angle, and then wonder where all that jam came from.

Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.

It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.