Quotes About Cooking

Make gifts meaningful by putting the time in creating them, whether baking and cooking, or in making arts and craft. It will all have more meaning for the giver and receiver.

The new 'Joy' was needed for a number of reasons. Recent developments in nutrition and new ingredients were two of the major reasons for the revision. One of the other big reasons was America's new love for big flavors. Yay!

Recently I've been doing risottos. Some of them have been amazing. Some of them, not all of them.

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.

When I do a cooking class now, I tell people that the most important part is to read the recipe many times so you know what you're doing. What I don't tell them, though, is that sometimes I do parties where I'm rushing so much I don't have time to follow my own advice.

I have my great grandmother's recipe for black beans, all the way from Cuba, and I know how to make those. I'm actually pretty good at it now. But my first time, the beans actually exploded in the pot, so I had black beans just dripping from the ceiling - which is actually a dream come true for most Cubans. It was a nightmare to clean.

I baked the coffee cake recipe from 'The Joy of Cooking' over and over again when I was a kid.

If you have an Ina Garten-level roasted-chicken recipe, it's a game changer. I bring that to dinner parties and make a lot of friends.

If I had one piece of advice for people - if they are cooking from the Alinea cookbook, the Betty Crocker cookbook or the back of the box - read through the entire recipe first before reaching for any ingredients, and then read again and execute the directions.

I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in 'Gourmet.' It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course - everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did.

It's always good to go over the recipe beforehand, so you can easily think of the next thing that needs to be done.

A big thing that gets people in trouble in the kitchen is not reading the recipe from start to finish before you cook it. Before you start anything, read through the entire recipe once.

Most cooks try to learn by making dishes. Doesn't mean you can cook. It means you can make that dish. When you can cook is when you can go to a farmers market, buy a bunch of stuff, then go home and make something without looking at a recipe. Now you're cooking.

If I'm doing a pavlova, for example, I need a recipe as I can't remember it well.

I keep trying to perfect my mother's meatloaf recipe. I will never get it perfect, but I'm getting closer.

There are so many things that come into writing a recipe, and it's really important if you're writing for home cooks to be cooking like you are at home.

I love cooking. I like to make lasagna - it's authentic Italian-style. I also do a great chicken recipe for a barbecue.

Be sure to read a recipe all the way through before you cook. The time it saves you in the long run is invaluable.

In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.

My son loves my carbonara. I've tried to master that recipe - it's very simple but very delicate. Once prepared it must be eaten quickly.

I always feel like a script is a recipe, and then you bring the elements into the recipe, and you cook with it.

On TV, I really try to go back to the basics and break down a recipe until it's very easy.

The holy grail of recipe developing is the recipe that turns out so much more impressive than you would expect from the effort it took to produce.

The first recipe I made was a disaster. I'd been chopping and pressing dates to create a raw brownie, and I thought it would work even better if I blended them in a food processor. So I went and bought one specially. When my boyfriend at the time came over to try the results, he took one bite and spat it out - I'd left the plastic on the blades.