CRESCENT DRAGONWAGON

To hunger is to be alive and to hope.

I tend to be a person who, when I get interested in something, I get obsessed by it... What happens to me is that I will fall in love with a particular ingredient or a particular dish... Once I make the decision that something has intrigued me enough to draw me in, there is no end to it.

Cooking and eating are among the most important ways we weave days into lives.

I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.

All the time we wondered and wondered, who is this person coming/growing/turning/floating/swimming deep, deep inside.

Writing is how I metabolize life and how I give and receive.

One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.

[it's about] being bitter but patient with your own bitterness so you could learn to be wise and be kind of returned to whatever innocence you might have once had before you became bitter.

First of all, you want to do the soaking with almost all of the larger beans because that will take care of the gas, and second of all... they want to be seasoned and flavored.

There is a water soluble sugar that is in beans called oligosaccharides, and they are indigestible by human beings. They ferment during the digestion process, and hence, you have gas.

Beans are such a nice, neutral canvas, you can make a big, basic pot of them and then play around with them differently every day.

I always have this sense of food as triangular, in that one point is nourishment, one point is connection, and one point is pleasure, and I always come at it from the pleasure and connection points, and the nourishment follows.

There is a water soluble sugar that is in beans called oligosaccharides, and they are indigestible by human beings. They ferment during the digestion process, and hence, you have gas.

To hunger is to be alive and to hope.

First of all, you want to do the soaking with almost all of the larger beans because that will take care of the gas, and second of all... they want to be seasoned and flavored.

One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities.

Writing is how I metabolize life and how I give and receive.

Cooking and eating are among the most important ways we weave days into lives.

I tend to be a person who, when I get interested in something, I get obsessed by it... What happens to me is that I will fall in love with a particular ingredient or a particular dish... Once I make the decision that something has intrigued me enough to draw me in, there is no end to it.

[it's about] being bitter but patient with your own bitterness so you could learn to be wise and be kind of returned to whatever innocence you might have once had before you became bitter.

All the time we wondered and wondered, who is this person coming/growing/turning/floating/swimming deep, deep inside.

I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.