Tyler Florence Quotes

My great-grandmother taught my mom to cook and she passed down the recipes to me.

My mom, who left Iran in 1976, steeped us in the smells, tastes, and traditions of Persian cuisine.

More than anything, a lot of our family's history is tied to food. It's just one of those things.

Most of us have fond memories of food from our childhood. Whether it was our mom's homemade lasagna or a memorable chocolate birthday cake, food has a way of transporting us back to the past.

I have memories of my grandfather Kirkman making mashed potatoes that were so good because they tasted like a bowl of butter. I love my mom's brownies. My favorite thing about both of those recipes is that someone else made them for me.

Usually I wear my grandma's old aprons, or others I have collected in my travels. When I was young, I would sit and watch my grandma prepare stuff. She wasn't Italian, but she did really good Italian food.

Everything my mother made had to cook for 80 hours, and when she made matzoh balls she didn't know fluffy. Everything sank.

You should just feel comfortable with food and your own culinary culture, whatever your mother and grandmother know.

There is so much more than ingredients that go into home cooking. A home-cooked meal includes so much love and recipes that have been passed down through generations, and that is what I truly appreciate.

I love pies of all types. I especially love rhubarb. I grew up with rhubarb growing on our property, and my mom would make rhubarb pies and jam. I have to admit, though, my earliest memories of rhubarb were not fond ones, but over time, I grew to love it.

I can't hide where I grew up or the flavors I grew up on.

Growing up, my mother and grandparents often talked about our family's Native American heritage. As a kid, I never thought to ask them for documentation - what kid would?

There's just so much love that goes into home cooking, and I think it will really help the American family overall. I'm hoping to maybe get a cookbook out one day because I've got some great family recipes.

Macaroni and cheese was my mother's special dish. She'd also make jambalaya and dirty rice and bake a ham that would be incredible. And greens. But if you were looking for vegetables and healthy things, there weren't a lot of those.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

It's true of Irish Catholic families. They're big on story telling and big on saving stories from one generation to the next.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

I grew up in a household where we cooked all the time. My mom cooked all the time; my dad cooked. My grandmothers cooked. I have memories of sitting on the counter and snapping green beans with my grandmother.

I want my daughter to grow up with memories of home-cooked meals, just as I did as one of seven children by Moroccan parents.

When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we'd meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.

My grandmother valued her Southern roots, folk culture, and healing.

For me, food is all about nostalgia.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

Cod and clementine is one of the things my grandmother cooked for my mum when she was a child. Never one for waste, she'd keep the peel whenever she had a clementine, and this dish puts it to work.