Tag: Cooking

Dinner (Together)

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Q: In your memoir The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, you talk about the importance of having dinner as a family, having everyone together to discuss the issues of the day.

Jacques Pépin: For me, the kitchen is the center of the house. When a kid comes back from school, you sit down in that kitchen and you do your homework. You hear the voice of your mother, your father, you hear the clink of pots and pans, you see the ingredients, the smells. All of that will stay with you the rest of your life. You know, that becomes very important. For a child just home from school, the kitchen is a great place to be.

~ Don’t miss full interview @ GQ.com: Jacques Pépin  (April 11, 2017)

Sources: Quote – Thank you Harvey @ The Happy Curmudgeon. Photo: L.A. Times

I’m an American. I don’t want to be that guy.

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Nobody likes paying high taxes, but I don’t mind. Maybe that’s a luxury, but I don’t need to hire some hotshot to spend 12 hours a day figuring out how to chisel the government out of an extra few thousand dollars. If getting that extra money means a lot of phone calls and talking to financial analysts and lawyers, I don’t want it. I don’t want to have those conversations. A friend said, “You live outside the country more than half of the year. Create a bogus residence in the Caymans and pay no U.S. taxes.” I’d feel like a shit doing that. I’m an American. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to have those kinds of conversations. I’m putting myself to sleep just thinking about it. I’d rather make a lot less money. It’s honest dollars. Everybody gets theirs: my partners make money, I make money, the government gets theirs. If they call me in for a full audit, great, here I am. It’s all there. I lived a lot of years afraid of the bank, the landlord and the government calling. Nowadays, it’s nice to not be afraid.

~ Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain Does Not Want to Owe Anybody Even a Single Dollar (Wealth Simple, March 14, 2017)

Hearty Soup

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Yes,
I like seven pounds of short ribs and
twenty-three cloves of garlic in barley soup.
Some will settle for less
but they’re not writing barley poems.

~ Jim Harrison, from “Courage and Survival” (Brick, November, 26, 2012)

Notes: Photo: thefoodcharlatan.com. Quote: Thank you The Hammock Papers

There’ll be days like this

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Home at last, I haul in the grocery bags, swallow a couple of extra-strength Tylenol, put the entire Van Morrison play list on the stereo, and spend the afternoon roasting vegetables and making pasta sauce, salad, and a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Outside, the rain comes down in sheets. I am singing “Days Like This,” belting out the song. The kitchen fills with good smells.

~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment

Notes: Related posts: Katrina Kenison

Yellow, pure, and flawless

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butter

There are few perfect things in this world, and one of them is your common everyday pound of butter, cool in its box, printed in blues and greens with pleasant images – a farm, a farmer, a cow at a fence – and divided into quarters wrapped in immaculate paper as neatly tucked and folded as a soldier’s bunk, each section as easy to slide in and out as if riding on soundless rollers, like drawers in a filing cabinet, two two-drawer cabinets placed side by side, the files packed in manila, clean and fresh, with evenly spaced dividers arranged by a tablespoon. To press it to your cheek and then, with a fingernail, to carefully lift the triangular folds at each end, one end at a time, and then, without tearing the paper, to open the final flap and find there butter, yellow, pure, and flawless, too good to be true.

Photo: Rose Water & Orange Blossoms