“You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.”

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

The crowd is not us. It never is.

In normal life, ‘simplicity’ is synonymous with ‘easy to do,’ but when a chef uses the word, it means ‘takes a lifetime to learn.’

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can’t do.

May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.

Hooves clomping over the whitewashed planks, Doren sprinted along the boardwalk after Rondus, a portly satyr with butterscotch fur and horns that curved away from each other. Puffing hard, Rondus cut through a gazebo and started down the stairs to the field.

Anything that’s left that’s remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It’s not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

Classic Christmas cookies are really time-consuming. Instead, make a bar you can bake in a pan and just cut up, like a brownie or a blondie or a shortbread, which still has that Christmas vibe.

Obama and the Democrats’ preposterous argument is that we are just one more big tax increase away from solving our economic problems.

I think we should worry about Social Security first and then tax cuts second.

After several years in the league, when a player becomes a vested veteran in the NFL, they play under a different set of rules. For instance, if you cut a vested veteran mid-season and they don’t get picked up by another team, you owe them the remainder of their salary.

Government spending is being restrained, the economy is making progress and moving forward, and the pro-growth, tax cutting policies put in place have allowed businesses to grow, which has brought in additional tax revenue to help pay off the debt.