Zitat des Tages von Ruth Reichl:
What does happen in 'Gourmet,' we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, 'Taste!' and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish.
If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.
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 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.
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.
I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.
I love breakfast, and I don't see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast.
A real woman is someone who knows what she wants. If you want to stay home, that's fine, but you have to be clear-eyed.
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.
What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.
You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.
We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.
I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.
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.
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.
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 American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.
I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.
The first time you make something, follow the recipe, then figure out how to tailor it to your own tastes.
If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.
I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.
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.
What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.
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?'
Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.
My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.
I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.
The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.
For me, cooking is a way to try and please people and tell them I love them. When I fall in love with someone, I want to feed them as well.
One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my father wished I was.
What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.
Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.
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 hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.
I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.
