SAMUEL M > SAMUEL's Quotes

“Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeondong Gyoja after an afternoon of shopping, the line so long it filled a flight of stairs, extended out the door, and wrapped around the building. The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi. My aunt scolding her for blowing her nose in public.
Crispy Korean fried chicken conjured bachelor nights with Eunmi. Licking oil from our fingers as we chewed on the crispy skin, cleansing our palates with draft beer and white radish cubes as she helped me with my Korean homework. Black-bean noodles summoned Halmoni slurping jjajangmyeon takeout, huddled around a low table in the living room with the rest of my Korean family.
I drained an entire bottle of oil into my Dutch oven and deep-fried pork cutlets dredged in flour, egg, and panko for tonkatsu, a Japanese dish my mother used to pack in my lunch boxes. I spent hours squeezing the water from boiled bean sprouts and tofu and spooning filling into soft, thin dumpling skins, pinching the tops closed, each one slightly closer to one of Maangchi's perfectly uniform mandu.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Joy begets joy, nice begets nice. She believes with her whole heart that if you do something lovely and thoughtful for someone--especially when it's unexpected--they'll realize how good that feels, and they will start doing the same for others.”
― Christina Tosi, Dessert Can Save the World: Stories, Secrets, and Recipes for a Stubbornly Joyful Existence

“But that, right there, is why embracing our dirty dessert secrets matters so much. On the surface, they are just hilarious indulgences, but dig down a little deeper than the whipped cream and cherry on top and you'll see that they are powerful reminders to cultivate and celebrate our inner selves as fiercely as we do our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds. Because what good, really, is all that public success and admiration without the private joy at the center?”
― Christina Tosi, Dessert Can Save the World: Stories, Secrets, and Recipes for a Stubbornly Joyful Existence

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Cooking my mother's food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. Food was an unspoken language between us, had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I love recipes like this, reading them and making them. There’s something brilliant about a recipe that doesn’t ask too much of you; a recipe, in fact, where getting it exactly right would be exactly wrong; a recipe you can fiddle with, and tend to when you remember.”
― Ella Risbridger, Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

“He taught me to enjoy cooking, to delight in cooking, to use cooking as a kind of framework of joy on which you could hang your day. A breakfast worth getting out of bed for. Second breakfast. Elevenses. Lunch. Afternoon tea. Dinner as glorious reward for a day done well, or consolation for a day gone badly, or just a plain old celebration of still being here, of having survived another one. Supper. A midnight feast.”
― Ella Risbridger, Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

“Adventures remain; wheat fields remain; the stars remain. Somewhere outside the city, it goes on. It must. They say this kind of thing doesn't happen any more, and perhaps they are right, but I hope they aren't. It would break my heart.”
― Ella Risbridger, Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

“In my life I have had several moments of total clarity. Not revelations, necessarily, but times and places where I have, fleetingly, felt that everything in the world was more real than usual, and that everything was brighter and truer and clearer than ever before.”
― Ella Risbridger, Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

“Sensuality is food for the soul.”
― Lebo Grand

“Sensuality is the real soul food.”
― Lebo Grand

“When we first started dating, my talent in the kitchen was a turn-on. The prospect of me in the kitchen, wearing a skimpy apron and holding a whisk in my hand- he thought that was sexy. And, as someone with little insight into how to work her own sex appeal, I pounced on the opportunity to make him want and need me.
I spent four days preparing my first home-cooked meal for him, a dinner of wilted escarole salad with hot bacon dressing, osso bucco with risotto Milanese and gremolata, and a white-chocolate toasted-almond semifreddo for dessert. At the time, I lived with three other people in a Columbia Heights town house, so I told all of my housemates to make themselves scarce that Saturday night. When Adam showed up at my door, as the rich smell of braised veal shanks wafted through the house, I greeted him holding a platter of prosciutto-wrapped figs, wearing nothing but a slinky red apron. He grabbed me by the waist and pushed me into the kitchen, slowly untying the apron strings resting on my rounded hips, and moments later we were making love on the tiled kitchen floor. Admittedly, I worried the whole time about when I should start the risotto and whether he'd even want osso bucco once we were finished, but it was the first time I'd seduced someone like that, and it was lovely.
Adam raved about that meal- the rich osso bucco, the zesty gremolata, the sweet-and-salty semifreddo- and that's when I knew cooking was my love language, my way of expressing passion and desire and overcoming all of my insecurities. I learned that I may not be comfortable strutting through a room in a tight-fitting dress, but I can cook one hell of a brisket, and I can do it in the comfort of my own home, wearing an apron and nothing else.
Adam loved my food, and he loved watching me work in the kitchen even more, the way my cheeks would flush from the heat of the stove and my hair would twist into delicate red curls along my hairline. As the weeks went by, I continued to seduce him with pork ragu and roasted chicken, creamed spinach and carrot sformato, cannolis and brownies and chocolate-hazelnut cake.”
― Dana Bate, The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

“Baking and cooking bring me inner peace, like a tasty version of yoga, without all the awkward stretching and sweating. When my life spins out of control, when I can't make sense of what's going on in the world, I head straight to the kitchen and turn on my oven, and with the press of a button, I switch one part of my brain off and another on. The rules of the kitchen are straightforward, and when I'm there I don't have to think about my problems. I don't need to think about anything but cups and ounces, temperatures and cooking times.
When I was a freshman at Cornell, I heard a plane had flown into the World Trade Center while sitting in my Introduction to American History lecture. My friends and I ran back to our dorm rooms and spent the next few hours glued to the television. I kept my TV on all day, but after talking to my parents and watching three hours of the coverage, I headed straight to the communal kitchen and baked a triple batch of brownies, which I then distributed to everyone on my floor. Some of my friends thought I was crazy ("Who bakes brownies when the country is under attack?"), but it was the only thing I could do to keep from having a panic attack or bursting into tears. I couldn't control what was happening to our country, but I could control what was happening in that kitchen. Baking was my way of restoring order in a world driven by chaos, and it still is.”
― Dana Bate, The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

“I have to lead, and it has to follow. There's no other way to do it. But, just like a man and woman dancing, the only way for it to really be something is if there's trust. Respect. If I'm leading, I have to be in control at every turn, but that's not about power. It's about creating something special together. It's about sensing what my partner needs, and my partner knowing I've got her. That my hand on her back, directing her with such a gentle touch, is also strong enough to keep her from falling.”
― Bethany Turner, Hadley Beckett's Next Dish

“Sensuality is the real food for the soul.”
― Lebo Grand

“Great ingredients do not guarantee a great dish.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“‪Cooking is so infinitely nuanced that to write completely about how to cook any dish would require a manuscript longer than a David Foster Wallace novel and include twice as many footnotes within twice as many endnotes. And then no one would be able to follow it, let alone cook from it.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient

“In the kitchen, the egg is ultimately neither ingredient nor finished dish but rather a singularity with a thousand ends.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient

“I buy onions every time I’m in the grocery store, not because I need them, but because I fear not having an onion when I do need it. Not having an onion in the kitchen is like working with a missing limb.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto

“He says that everything a cook needs to know—everything, mind you—is contained in five books: Escoffier, Larousse, Hering’s Dictionary, La Repetoire. I tell him that’s only four. “And Câreme,” he says. He pauses. “No one wants.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

“You cook with your senses,” he said when someone did something stupid. “And one of those senses is common sense.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

“To prevent salmon from extruding that unappealing white albumen as the flesh cooks, put the fish in a 5-percent brine for 10 minutes before cooking.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto

“The need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens—second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Main Dish

“Boiling, the technique, should almost never be used, with the exception of green vegetables and pasta. Very few food items benefit from the agitation of boiling. Boiling will fray tender food, and in stocks, soups, and sauces it will emulsify impurities into the liquid.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

“You can't worry about what other people think you should do. The only way you'll ever be happy or make a real difference is by pursuing the things that motivate you and make you excited to be alive. Life is too short to waste years of it being miserable or asking 'What if?”
― Dana Bate, The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

“Baking was my way of restoring order in a world driven by chaos.”
― Dana Bate, The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

“I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“In my family, cooking and serving a meal always was, and still is, quintessential. The most important question you’d hear at our house is either ‘Are you hungry?’ or ‘Have you eaten?’ presuming that as long as you were not hungry, everything else was secondary. A good meal, according to our family philosophy, could defeat any drama, any worry, any existential crisis. Everything could be resolved once you’d shared a meal with your family or friends.” -Make Me an Omelette”
― Nino Gugunishvili, You Will Have a Black Labrador

“To assess the quality of thoughts of people, don't listen to their words, but watch their actions.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words