Quotes from Michael Ruhlman

A kitchen is a good place to be, almost always the best place in the house.

As a culture," Pollan writes, "we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.

the coffee had splashed over the rim of the cup and into

when a baby or a child or an adult is on the table with his or her chest open, disaster is never more than a breath away, no matter how routine or simple the case may be. One small breath.

It seems to me that all these factors—from the industrialization of our food to the belief that cooking for our family is a chore rather than a fundamental luxury with unrecognized benefits for the people we love—are directly responsible for our food-related diseases and illnesses, and what will ultimately drive our need to turn our food confusion into knowledge and our anxiety into assuredness.

Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato's cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes

Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato's cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes me.

If you're toasting walnuts, put a walnut in the corner of your cutting board. It really works, I'm telling you.

My response to those asking how they can become a food writer is the same: first, become a writer.

I believe it's a cook's moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.

Stories--from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings--appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.

Living in this world will change you," she confides. "It makes me value life. When a friend has a healthy baby, I don't think it's normal; I think it's a fucking miracle.

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.

In the kitchen, the egg is ultimately neither ingredient nor finished dish but rather a singularity with a thousand ends.

He carried the deep, intuitive understanding of the power of food to connect people, knew that food was not simply a device for entertaining or filling our bodies and pleasing our senses but rather that it served as a direct channel to the greater pleasures of being alive, and that it could be so only when that food was shared with friends and lovers and family.

Always look for sparrows before you look for canaries.

There are people who can afford to eat healthfully and there are people who cannot. I'd say that represents a fundamental brokenness of our system and our food supply. It doesn't have to be like that.

The social food researcher Harry Balzer noted without prompting that Americans are not cooking more, they're simply eating more meals at home.

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.

Everything is relative but there is a standard which must not be deviated from, especially with reference to the basic culinary preparations. A. Escoffier The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery

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.

Food is about community. It's about the earth and really taking care of the earth.

If you have a passion for food then it's not only your life and your avocation but it's also your vocation and maybe that's the lunacy.

And we're going to be here for fifty years, so whatever is not right, we'll get right.