Yotam Ottolenghi Quotes

I cut 'Diamond in My Crown' in my home in Georgia, because I wanted to use an old 1848 pump organ that my mother-in-law had gotten for Emory for Christmas one year. His mother would be proud to know that pump organ was made use of.

I'm the youngest of three boys, and my oldest brother was super into Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and played guitar. I wanted to be like him, so I asked for a guitar of my own for Christmas in '93.

On Christmas, when I was 13, my mom got me my first laptop. I downloaded it, FruityLoops, cause I had heard about it, and started messing around.

Obviously, everyone's different, but I love just settling down and having a barbecue with my friends at the house.

The house is always full, and we're always cooking - outside, inside, for six, eight, a dozen, 20 people.

On Christmas Eve, it's my wife and my son and my daughter and I. We're home, and we open our presents together on Christmas Day, and then after we go visit the rest of the family.

The year I turned 16, I spent the weeks before Christmas dropping hints to my parents about how much I wanted - no, needed - my own transportation.

From me growing up with a large family and everybody singing around the Christmas tree, it was a wonderful, wonderful upbringing.

For the timid or uninitiated, leaf-wrapped foods offer an ideal and gentle introduction to fire cooking. Liberated from the need to worry about whether the fish is sticking to the grill or burning, pay attention instead to the rate of browning on the surface of the leaf, which you'll get to discard whether it chars or remains pale.

I got a pair of roller skates for Christmas when I was 4 or 5 or something, so I had a pair as kid. But I also lived on a gravel road so I wasn't really skating up and down the street.

Christmas Day itself hasn't always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that - I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.

For Christmas 1999, my husband surprised me with a trip to Disney World. Along with our boys, we were standing on the roof of the Contemporary Hotel at midnight on New Year's Eve 2000 watching fireworks explode over every amusement park in Orlando. It was a magical way to celebrate the millennial, and a never-to-be-forgotten Christmas present.

Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.

When I was 15, I got super into Eric Clapton. My father took notice of this and got me a guitar for Christmas.

I think people are intimidated by grilling .. maybe it's the flame, maybe it's the big grills, maybe they've had some bad childhood experiences .. but I think that grilling is actually the easiest technique in cooking.

The concerted effort to minimize Christmas has resulted in it being our national Happy Holiday holiday. The Christmas season is now the holiday season. Christmas parties are now holiday parties. Christmas is a time for giving and receiving presents and in many homes, nothing more. Who is this fellow, Jesus Christ, anyway?

This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.

I bought a Christmas tree for twenty dollars. When I came home the next day, my wife was wearing it in her hair.

There must be some deep psychological reason why we turn so instinctively toward home at this special time. . . . A place where every day will be Christmas, with everybody there together. At home.

Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

Time was with most of us, when Christmas Day, encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and everyone round the Christmas fire, and make the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

Christmas time, we can remember with deep thanksgiving the amazing Christmas gift of God Himself, when God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.

The ideal Christmas gift is money, but the trouble is you can't charge it.

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.