Homecooking Quotes

“For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled kurobuta (Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with shichimi tōgarashi seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said.
"How do you prepare it?" I asked.
"Slice and eat."
The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo!”
― Matthew Amster-Burton, Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

“His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, and the aromas drifting up from the kitchen below reminded him of his mother's masala box, filled with all the spices she used to make their meals- zesty cumin, sweet cinnamon, fragrant bay leaves, savory mustard seeds, rich peppercorn, pungent garam masala, and spicy chilies- they were all tied up in a sense of home.”
― Sara Desai, The Marriage Game

“So what's for dinner?" she asks.
"Excuse me?"
"You said you were cooking for your family. Can I ask what a professional chef feeds her family, or is that some deep, dark secret"
"Curried prawn chowder, black sea bass en papillote with baby artichokes and red pepper coulis, frisee salad with shaved Asiago," I tell her, even though the only thing currently in our refrigerator is the other half of my Primanti's sandwich.
"I love sea bass. What time is dinner?"
So, I'm being wooed by Enid Maxwell.”
― Meredith Mileti, Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses

“Home Cooking: The Comforts of Old Family Favorites."
Easy. Baked macaroni and cheese with crunchy bread crumbs on top; simple mashed potatoes with no garlic and lots of cream and butter; meatloaf with sage and a sweet tomato sauce topping. Not that I experienced these things in my house growing up, but these are the foods everyone thinks of as old family favorites, only improved. If nothing else, my job is to create a dreamlike state for readers in which they feel that everything will be all right if only they find just the right recipe to bring their kids back to the table, seduce their husbands into loving them again, making their friends and neighbors envious.
I'm tapping my keyboard, thinking, what else?, when it hits me like a soft thud in the chest. I want to write about my family's favorites, the strange foods that comforted us in tense moments around the dinner table. Mom's Midwestern "hot dish": layers of browned hamburger, canned vegetable soup, canned sliced potatoes, topped with canned cream of mushroom soup. I haven't tasted it in years. Her lime Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, walnuts, and canned pineapple, her potato salad with French dressing instead of mayo.
I have a craving, too, for Dad's grilling marinade. "Shecret Shauce" he called it in those rare moments of levity when he'd perform the one culinary task he was willing to do. I'd lean shyly against the counter and watch as he poured ingredients into a rectangular cake pan. Vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and then he'd finish it off with the secret ingredient: a can of fruit cocktail. Somehow the sweetness of the syrup was perfect against the salty soy and the biting garlic. Everything he cooked on the grill, save hamburgers and hot dogs, first bathed in this marinade overnight in the refrigerator. Rump roasts, pork chops, chicken legs all seemed more exotic this way, and dinner guests raved at Dad's genius on the grill. They were never the wiser to the secret of his sauce because the fruit bits had been safely washed into the garbage disposal.”
― Jennie Shortridge, Eating Heaven

“I have clients that feel like family, I make far more money than I've got a right to, considering the workload, and I have amazing benefits. What could be bad?"
"I suppose I meant if you are satisfied creatively."
I'd never really thought about that. The Farbers give me free rein, but they have a repertoire of my dishes that they love and want to have regularly in the rotation, and everything has to be kid friendly; even if we are talking about kids with precocious tastes, they are still kids. Lawrence is easy: breakfasts, lunches, and healthy snacks for his days; he eats most dinners out with friends, or stays home with red wine and popcorn, swearing that Olivia Pope stole the idea from him. And I'm also in charge of home-cooked meals for Philippe and Liagre, his corgis, who like ground chicken and rice with carrots, and home-baked peanut butter dog biscuits. Simca was a gift from him, four years ago. She was a post-Christmas rescue puppy, one of those gifts that a family was unprepared for, who got left at a local shelter where Lawrence volunteers. He couldn't resist her, but knew that Philippe and Liagre barely tolerate each other, and he couldn't imagine bringing a female of any species into their manly abode. Luckiest thing that ever happened to me, frankly. She's the best pup ever. I named her Simca because it was Julia Child's nickname for her coauthor Simone Beck. She is, as the other Eloise, my own namesake, would say, my mostly companion. Lawrence's dinner parties are fun to do- he always has a cool group of interesting people, occasionally famous ones- but he is pretty old-school, so there isn't a ton of creativity in those menus, lots of chateaubriand and poached salmon with the usual canapés and accompaniments.”
― Stacey Ballis, How to Change a Life

“I envision a trendy upscale diner, not too expensive, where you can get well-made, beautifully presented homestyle cooking- savory meat loaf, steaks, roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, wiener schnitzel, pie à la mode, little baskets of five different kinds of homemade bread.”
― Hannah Mccouch, Girl Cook: A Novel

“Tender short rib, soused in sesame oil, sweet syrup, and soda and caramelized in the pan, filled the kitchen with a rich, smoky scent. My mother rinsed fresh red-leaf lettuce and set it on the glass-top coffee table in front of me, then brought the banchan. Hard-boiled soy-sauce eggs sliced in half, crunchy bean sprouts flavored with scallions and sesame oil, doenjang jjigae with extra broth, and chonggak kimchi, perfectly soured.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“In the evening, Kye used our rice cooker to make homemade yaksik. She mixed rice with local honey, soy sauce, and sesame oil, adding pine nuts, pitted jujubes, raisins, and chestnuts. She rolled the mixture out on a cutting board and divided the flattened cake into smaller squares. Fresh out of the rice cooker it was steaming and gooey. The colors were golden and autumnal, the jujubes a rich, dark red, the light-beige chestnuts framed by the bronze, caramelized rice.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Raf inhaled the scent of cardamom-infused chicken, pickled beef, eggplant, and steaming saffron rice simmering on the stove. They tried to approximate the spices in Moonlight Bay to their tastes of home, but it was difficult to replicate some--- like lak, which turned meals into savory and sweet, or min, which gave food an extra thickening.”
― Aisha Saeed, Forty Words for Love

“And Miss Marvina, could you bring me my charger? And something to eat from your kitchen? The food here is horrible."
The request for food never landed on better ears. "You got it."
Marvina whipped up a batch of chicken salad using some of the chicken breast from the Christmas meal surplus. After peeling off the crispy fried skin, the tender meat made for a perfect light sandwich filling. But just in case Kerresha wanted the extra seasoning flavor, Marvina grabbed her container of seasoning, wrapped sandwiches, a bag of chips, and napkins to take back to the hospital.
She made enough chicken salad sandwiches to feed all four of them, including Falcon, as well as anyone else who might want a taste 'cause that's what folks with the gift of hospitality do,”
― Michelle Stimpson, Sisters with a Side of Greens

“And Miss Marvina, could you bring me my charger? And something to eat from your kitchen? The food here is horrible."
The request for food never landed on better ears. "You got it."
Marvina whipped up a batch of chicken salad using some of the chicken breast from the Christmas meal surplus. After peeling off the crispy fried skin, the tender meat made for a perfect light sandwich filling. But just in case Kerresha wanted the extra seasoning flavor, Marvina grabbed her container of seasoning, wrapped sandwiches, a bag of chips, and napkins to take back to the hospital.
She made enough chicken salad sandwiches to feed all four of them, including Falcon, as well as anyone else who might want a taste 'cause that's what folks with the gift of hospitality do.”
― Michelle Stimpson, Sisters with a Side of Greens

“The reason that she loved cookbooks so much was that the people who wrote them were experts at food who weren't chefs. They could tell you how to make the coziest roast chicken with root vegetables, how to bake up a lasagna, they'd probably roll all the pasta sheets from scratch, using 00 flour imported from Italy; they'd add some rare and unexpected cheese, char the sides of each individual piece in a skillet to give it a restaurant sheen, add microgreens, and swirl some unneeded sauce around the plate before making the waiter give a speech on how to eat it properly. Why go through all of that trouble when a basic, familiar lasagna is the kind of comforting, rib-sticking goodness that most people want?”
― Adam D. Roberts, Food Person