Lidia Bastianich Quotes

I lived the first five years of my life on a farm in Union City, Michigan, with my mom and grandparents. It was the most magical time of my life.

I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world - I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key.

I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.

I lived in a hut with no roof, and I rode to school on a donkey. I used to shoot birds with a slingshot to cook for dinner. Now I prefer to get my food from KFC.

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.

I've always been in love with Melbourne. When I was 12, I was taken into the city by my grandmother to go to the ballet for the first time.

I have the best memories as a kid eating ice cream. It was a family tradition that I had with my father. It was nice.

I was working on the farm to get in shape, about a mile away from my parents. You know, I did everything as a kid to stay in shape - jogging, work on the farm, driving the tractor. I'll never forget.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

When my parents went off to Knoxville to work, I lived with my father's mother. She was strict - the kind who starched and ironed dresses. I had to sit more than I played. Oh, I was miserable. I liked being out with the animals. I'd come in the house with my hair pulled out, sash off the dress, dirty as heck. I was always getting spanked.

Call me All-American, but I love Ham and Cheese sandwiches. And not just any old ham and cheese sandwich... My mother's is the best. I've tried many times to make these sandwiches on my own, but it's never the same.

One of my early childhood memories was my grandmother always having a bowl of Nestle chocolate bars at her house. My sister and I would argue over who could eat the chocolate bars. Looking back, I don't know why we just didn't share. We could have split them.

I was raised on a farm in Kansas where we lived next door to my Grandma Dew, and I was her shadow. We went everywhere together - to the bank, the doctor, the Early Bird Garden Club, and to an endless procession of Church meetings.

I developed my taste for coffee at five, staying with my grandmother in Connecticut.

I've come to realize how much it really was a part of my upbringing, the Georgia part. We were away from town. It was just dirt and trees and spouses. And a lot of kids - my cousins, who were all like brothers and sisters to me - just a lot of kids at one time.

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.

I still miss my gramma. I can see her at the farm, in her apron, babushka and support stockings. My Slovak gramma spoiled us with pig in the blankets, kalachi, pop, chips and a drawer full of lollipops. It was heaven.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.

We had nothing, no television, no radio, nothing to get in the way. We read by the streetlight at the top of the lane, and we acted out the stories.

I used to spend summers in the Czech Republic with my grandmother. I'd watch Czech cartoons.

I baked the coffee cake recipe from 'The Joy of Cooking' over and over again when I was a kid.

I spent much of my childhood on stations up north, loving that life and with many, many special memories, and so the country holds a very real place in my heart.

As a little girl, I remember always wanting my grandmother to make blackberry cobbler for me. I'm obsessed with it.

My earliest memory was going to my grandma's house, milking the cows, and collecting the eggs from the chickens.