Joanna Coles Quotes

My grandmother used to cook for eight every day - sitting down lunches and dinner, the way you do it in Italy, you sit down. And when my parents could afford their own place, I went with them but still my mother used to work but used to come back from work to cook lunch for my father, come back from work, cook dinner for my father and me.

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.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

When I was younger, on weekends, my mom would make us pancakes with our initials on them and then a tiny cup of coffee. I remember at 10 sneaking my own coffee and pouring a ton of sugar in and going up to the playroom and drinking it.

Every lesson I learned as a kid was at the dinner table. Being Greek, Sicilian and Ruthenian - we are an emotional bunch. It is where we laughed, cried and yelled - but most importantly, where we bonded and connected.

I had a great childhood, a very close-knit family. We were all overweight, and we had good times eating together, I imagine.

Some people love Sundays; I don't, particularly. I used to rather dread them when I was younger. I was brought up on Sunday roasts, which I've always loathed. If I didn't finish my meat, I had to sit with it for most of the afternoon. No wonder I'm a vegetarian now.

I like a full house because it's how I grew up. I'm one of six children.

My family is Jamaican and Cuban, but we would go to see our Jamaican side every summer for three months and every Christmas. One of the things I used to love was climbing trees and picking ackee fruit for breakfast.

I grew up as the youngest child in a big, noisy family, and there was always someone around to hang out with.

I always sang around the house. My brother and I would sing songs like 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' and stuff like that.

My embarrassing confession is that my father is a 'Camelot: The Musical' obsessive. So as a child, when we were going to visit relatives on the weekend, whenever we were driving back on these three-hour drives, he would be playing the musical soundtrack on repeat, on the cassette in our car, to the extent that we begged him never to play it again.

My parents separated when I was young, and as a result, my father had to learn how to braid our hair on the nights my sisters and I would stay with him. We would arrive to school the next morning with these incredibly endearing lopsided braids he had fashioned. This may have expedited the process of my learning how to braid my own hair.

Me and my brother just used to fight all the time; then my sister came along, and it was all about the little girl in the house. We'd always eat dinner together as a family.

Some of the best dishes I can remember are from my childhood. Sometimes, whenever I want to feel like a kid again, I just whip them up for the family.

I lived a block and a half away from four cousins, and I had three siblings. The Jaeger home was a big, messy, happy family.

Dad was known for his barbecues at weekends and bubble and squeak on Sundays. We'd all have to set the table and clear the table. We had our own seats, totally structured.

My sisters and I can still recite Dad's grilling rules: Rule No. 1: Dad is in charge. Rule No. 2: Repeat Rule No. 1.

Bringing all 45 members of my crazy family together, and watching them argue is super awesome. It's good to do it just once a year.

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

Family is something that I grew up with, and the Mexican culture has a lot of, you know - Sunday is the day you spend with your family, and you have 40 to 50 people at your house, the uncles and the cousins, and I grew up with that.

My mother's side is Italian; my father's side is Jewish. We're the kind of family where every Sunday night we have dinner with all 19 of my cousins.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my plate.

My dad always played Anne Murray in the car on the way to the dump when I was a kid.