Marcela Valladolid Quotes

I grew up with an abundance of things from our garden, so fried food was not enjoyable.

I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself. But we do grow some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores. And potatoes, beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers. Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat. Makes you wonder.

That's a big goal of mine, to try and grow as much of my own food as possible.

We always had our own vegetables growing up and now I'm doing it with my kids at our house in the country.

My family lived off the land and summer evening meals featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream with strawberries from our garden. With no air conditioning in those days, the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.

I have an organic garden and love being able to say, 'I'm going to see what I can pick to throw in my salad.'

I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.

I just planted the family vegetables yesterday. You name it, I grow it.

And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

I don't care what anybody says: Nothing is better than a tomato you grow. There's something about it that's different than a tomato you can buy. It's a great thing.

There's nothing I like more than picking fresh vegetables then putting them in the dinner you make that night.

Homemade gazpacho tastes different than any gazpacho you can buy because you know exactly how much time it took for each plant to mature. That's why I would encourage buying at a farmers' market or at Whole Foods, because it comes straight from the source to your table.

I've got a little vegetable patch in my garden. I moved from a city apartment into a house this year and needed something to do outside football.

If you grow the food you eat, it tastes better. Seasonal vegetables are grown at the right time, and you can make sure everything matures on the plant or on the tree. It's as fresh as you can get.

I find it so exciting to grow your own food.

Last night we had three small zucchini for dinner that were grown within fifty feet of our back door. I estimate they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $371.49 each.

There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.

I bought a place in Milan, but Missoni headquarters are out in the country, in Sumirago. My whole family eats out of the same vegetable garden; my mother raises chickens. I love the city, but if you're always bombarded with stimulation, you get numb to it. I need to get bored to create.

Comedy is subjective, so if you don't like it, that's fine.

At heart, I am a country girl who grew up in Devon.

If the audience is responding very well to comedians that are hacks, and I don't do well, I don't feel as bad, because I feel like their taste is different than mine. They're laughing at somebody I would never laugh at, so that makes it okay, because obviously our tastes are not in the same place. And comedy is subjective, so I feel like maybe the failure wasn't all mine. I don't think they ever would have really enjoyed me. So sometimes that's a little easier, but not much.

The first gathering of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby - how could anything so beautiful be mine?

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.