Simmering Quotes

I'll get home from work on Friday night and take out some beans and soak them. The next morning, I'll put them in a pot for soup, then just keep chopping, chopping, chopping - carrots and celery and cabbage - and in two or three hours, you have this wonderful, mellow soup that fills up the whole house with its aroma.

While a pot of boiling water may not offer the char or smoke of a grill, it does give the cook an advantage when it comes to seasoning food.

I make really good pasta sauce. The secret to getting it right is just patience and love.

The key to sauces is having patience. I'm not a patient woman, but I learned with sauces that you have to get everything on a slow roll and layer the flavors. That's where you get robust tastes: it starts one way and ends another.

I have a corn creamer that I love. It extracts pulp and juice from kernels, and I simmer that down into a creamed corn that has an almost mashed potato-like consistency. I add butter and hit it with chopped fresh chives at the end for an accent of color.

A perfect chutney needs patience. If you are cooking it, cook it on a low flame; the flavors come out the best that way.

Chinese cooking is noisy - a multitasking activity that requires constant vigilance. There is no downtime.

If you cook chopped tomatoes with all of their juices, it takes a long time for the sauce to reach the right consistency. By then, the freshness is gone.

I do make a really great bolognese, and the key is putting good 'ol wine in there.

I like to get where the cabbage is cooking and catch the scents.

All-in-one dishes are among my favourites. I'm very much in favour of using the oven as much as possible - for casseroles, roasts and other one-pot meals - rather than the hob, where dishes need much more attention.

Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.

I think I can poach a pretty mean egg the old-fashioned way.

In certain European cuisines, vegetables are cooked a long time. I take the term 'al dente' and use it for vegetables.

Cooking is about the ingredients and responding, but risotto, specifically, is about the technique.

Stock is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result.

Hearty soups with relatively long cook times like minestrone, for example, are chock-full of aromatics and flavor-lending ingredients like bacon, onions, and garlic. These infuse the water with their flavor and produce a clean-tasting broth all on their own.

I like to cook things very slowly.

I always have homemade chicken stock in the refrigerator. I'll reduce it, maybe add a little cream and a few shallots. Before you know it, eureka! It's the best.

For rave-worthy soups, skip the store-bought stock. You can extract a cleaner, stronger broth from a combination of water and several pantry ingredients. It's all about layering powerful flavor-enhancers that you probably already have on hand - bacon, tomato paste, herbs, peppercorns, a Parm rind, and, of course, kosher salt.

I use vinegars to deglaze saute pans for sublime sauces.