Kate Christensen Quotes
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Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I'm a snob, it's about quality, not cuisine.
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Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.
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There's a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour.
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Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.
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With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.
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Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.
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I've cooked plenty of meals when I was sad, lonely, depressed, angry, bored, and/or under the weather. My primary aim in these circumstances is generally to cheer myself up, to fill my stomach with something warm so I can feel comforted and fed, usually just with a quick soup or an omelet.
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Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
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It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?
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My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.
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If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.
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Across the Atlantic, in the scattered, far-flung, rural settlements of colonial America, hospitality had become a central concern, and hostesses, like peacocks displaying their iridescent plumage, tried to outdo one another with their creative food displays.
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My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved tomato-based, celery-heavy Manhattan chowders.
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Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.
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In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.
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It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.
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For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.
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There are two kinds of ham: raw and cooked. Raw ham is cured with salt and/or smoke over time; cooked ham is boiled. Every culture that makes ham has its own unique and various methods.
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In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.
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A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.
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I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.
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Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.
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I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.
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I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.