Quotes About Tradition

My mother never threw anything out. If there was a sliver of a tomato, it was in the refridge. I would come in with my friends, and Mom would say, 'Want something to eat?' In 20 minutes, there was four, five dishes to eat.

My default-setting Italian recipes that I always fall back on are the ones that we had as kids, like spaghetti vongole, which is tomato and clams with spaghetti.

When I think of summertime as a kid, I think of my Grampy's gardens full of tomatoes, buckets heaping with blackberries, and countertops lined with an assortment of Ball jars, ready to can the flavor of summer.

These days it's cool to be ethnic and to be different, but when I was a kid, it was not cool - at all. My friends would come over and my mom would make crepes with eggs, stuffed with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and spinach. And they'd be like, 'What is this?'

My goal and my mission is to cook the home-style food that I grew up with - simple, straightforward, inexpensive and homemade tortillas. Nothing fancy and no cream based sauces - just tomatoes & chiles and nothing pre-processed.

The 'Artful Tommy' will never change - and perhaps shouldn't.

When my dad, Tommy Tucker Kelly, was about six, he started out with his dad on 'The Black and White Minstrel' Shows.

If anything betrays my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage - besides the Casper-the-friendly-ghost-like skin tone - it's my love of fishy fish.

When I first came out, I was wearing full-on traditional Nigerian wear. I got told by a lot of people that I should just tone it down. I only stopped when I realized there's only so many prints you can wear.

Hindi is my mother tongue. Even though I do not get to use it as often, it's still a part of me.

My maternal grandmother made fantastic ox tongue with velvety roasted potatoes. She cooked sweet red cabbage and lovely cauliflower with butter and bread crumbs.

From the leg lamp to Ralphie's tongue getting stuck on a frozen pole to that BB-gun incident, 'A Christmas Story' has left its mark on all our brains, so much so that it sometimes feels like this story is our own.

Tamil is my mother tongue.

Apl has a lot of songs that are paying homage to his native tongue. He's from the Philippines. He has songs inspired by his culture.

Being Scottish is something you have in your heart not something that comes off your tongue.

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

There's a roots nature to Appalachia - the origins of folk and bluegrass. I know guys there who are some of the best players I've ever heard but are playing on their porch tonight because they've never chased success. There's simplicity to how they live and what they care about.

There's tons of members of the Carradine family. It's more like a clan than it is like a family, and it's rare that we can get a bunch of them together. We do once in a while.

We used to burn tons of crackers earlier, but when I realized the effects they have on our environment, I stopped burning them. We have been celebrating cracker-free Diwali for 15 years now.

One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly.

Is it too late to institute a leap year and mandate that the holidays fall on regular, convenient dates - so that Id al-Fitr will come, say, in the spring and Id al-Adha in early summer?

I've been using the same 'I Ching' since I was teenager when it was given to me by a fellow teenager; it seems too late to change now. I don't use it often, but when I do, it really does help. You can fool yourself, but not the 'I Ching.'

All around me, I saw people who were taught by their parents, as I was, to just toe the line, not ruffle the feathers, not rock the boat too much and just put your head down, do your work and that's it. And I think that as a community, we're reaching the limitations of that kind of thinking.

So I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation's hoop I thrust it in the earth.