Julia Child Quotes

There's nothing wrong with a plan, but remember Von Moltke's famous dictum that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The danger is a plan that seduces us into thinking failure is impossible and adaptation is unnecessary - a kind of ‘Titanic' plan, unsinkable (until it hits the iceberg).

I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that's about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time - make a chicken or slice vegetables - and all day long I just read it over and over and over.

It doesn't always happen according to the way you have planned things out but I feel if you have covered most of the aspects, it does help out there in the middle.

Organizing ahead of time makes the work more enjoyable. Chefs cut up the onions and have the ingredients lined up ahead of time and have them ready to go. When everything is organized you can clean as you go and it makes everything so much easier and fun.

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

Cooking is chemistry, really.

For the most part this is a place to find down-to-earth advice on everyday cooking, eating, food shopping, cooking equipment, and nice things to put on your table.

There is still need to think and plan, but on a different scale, and along different lines.

The most important thing for having a party is that the hostess is having fun. I'm very organized. I make a plan for absolutely everything. I never have anything that has to be cooked while the guests are there. The only thing I might have to do is take something out of the oven and carve it.

I'm trying to learn how to cook.

In a house without a genuine kitchen, one of the delights of growing up is lost.

As far as cookbooks go, I think Joy of Cooking is a classic. I've used it over and over again. Julia Child frustrates me. By the time you get all her herbs together, you're exhausted

Always plan for the fact that no plan ever goes according to plan.

We must prepare for everything.

No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.

Look, when you are starting to put something together, you want the pudding to come out good. You're trying to put in the right ingredients.

Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.

I always give my bird a generous butter massage before I put it in the oven. Why? Because I think the chicken likes it -- and, more important, I like to give it.

I memorize my lines and I show up. I think it's just instinctual, and sometimes it's wrong and the director says, "No, do it this way." And then I can change, because I didn't spend all night practicing it this one way. All I do to get ready for the day is the night before, I read my lines once or twice, memorize them, and then I show up.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

A potato is a poor thing, poorly treated. More often than not it is cooked in so unthinking and ignorant a manner as to make one feel that it has never before been encountered in the kitchen.

I spend more time in the kitchen than I have in the dining room, for obvious reasons, however, I just want to sit and indulge.

Back then, it's weird, because I wasn't consciously thinking about it and I think that's why the doors opened and I had the opportunity. It was a big shift and I realized that you can plan and think your life is going somewhere, but you also have to surrender to what opportunities present themselves and really go for those as well.