cooking

This is the body's nurse; but since man's witFound the art of cookery, to delight his sense,More bodies are consumed and kill'd with itThan with the sword, famine, or pestilence.

Wine is just a conversation waiting to happen.

Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end.

Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavour of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems (p. 124).

I'll go further and say she was one of the best cooks in the world! The compimentary expression, "This food will make you slap yo' Aint Emma" was apt in her case.

Mark came home late one frozen Sunday carrying a bag of small, silver fish. They were smelts, locally known as icefish. He__ brought them at the store in the next town south, across from which a little village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of shacks with holes drilled in and around them. I__ seen the men going from the shore to the shacks on snowmobiles, six-packs of beer strapped on behind them like a half dozen miniature passengers. __it and rest,_ Mark said. ____ cooking._ He sautéed minced onion in our homemade butter, added a little handful of crushed, dried sage, and when the onion was translucent, he sprinkled n flour to make a roux, which he loosened with beer, in honor of the fishermen. He added cubed carrot, celery root, potato, and some stock, and then the fish, cut into pieces, and when they were all cooked through he poured in a whole morning milking__ worth of Delia__ yellow cream. Icefish chowder, rich and warm, eaten while sitting in Mark__ lap, my feet so close to the woodstove that steam came off my damp socks.

I could smell the food fill up my hunger before the order was even placed.

Without another word, we began to eat. I was hungry, but no appetite would excuse the way we set upon those dishes. We shoveled food into our mouths in a manner ill befitting our fine attire. Bears would have blushed to see us bent over our plates. The pheasant, still steaming from the oven, its dark flesh redolent with the mushroom musk of the forest floor, was gnawed quickly to the bone. It was a touch gamy - no milk-fed goose, this - but it was tender, and the piquant hominy balanced that wild taste as I had hoped it would. The eggs, laced pink at the edges and floating delicately in a carnal sauce, were gulped down in two bites. The yolks were cooked to that rare liminal degree, no longer liquid but not yet solid, like the formative moment of a sun-colored gem.

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

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

I__ a big believer in cooking your own meals. It makes it much easier not only to ensure that you eat fresh foods but also to follow the second rule of eating (see previous chapter), which advises incorporating as many colors, tastes, textures, and aromas as possible into one__ meal. Beyond those benefits, I feel that cooking celebrates self-respect, and it__ especially important on the Warrior Diet. Through cooking, you can control exactly what you put inside your body. It__ a creative process, where you use trial and error to determine what you like.You can use different herbs and spices to increase or balance flavors, aromas, and textures.You__e not a scavenger on the Warrior Diet.

Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don't burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellower and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it.

I had a dream about you last night. You were at my door. We had forgotten what we used to fight about. So, I let you in and we made coconut pancakes like it was the very first time.

Many Detroiters, for example, are beginning to see urban agriculture as a real part of the solution; to grow things right where people live, where they work, and definitely need healthier food on the table. Green city gardens are scattered throughout Detroit now, from the schoolyard at Catherine Ferguson Academy for pregnant teens and teen moms, to reclaimed land owned by a local order of Catholic friars (Earthworks), to a seven-acre organic farm in Rouge Park. Together, city gardeners, nonprofit organizations, and the Greening of Detroit resource agency are writing a new local-food story of urban Michigan.

Pork and chicken grease, the aromatics of choice for the Cajun.

The idea is to make the ingredients sing, not a grand opera, but a jolly chanson.

Cooking is not a science but an art, mistakes are okay, messes are fine__he pleasure is in the creating and the sharing of the result.