Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I say don't overreact; cool your jets. Focus on things that you can control: your business, your employees' welfare, your guests, and the quality of the product that you dish up. Do that, keep your chin down, pay attention to business, and the sun will come up tomorrow. That's the way I figure it.
You know how someone - something - surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That's done through Chinese cuisine - for example, through dishes of artifice. That's a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.
I cook a little bit. I make a Hungarian dish called chicken paprikash that's out of this world. I'll give a heads-up to all of your readers that it doesn't have to be between Thai and Mexican every night. Toss some Hungarian in every once in a while. You will not be sorry. Good, solid peasant food.
Over the years, I've had a lot of different jobs - newspaper boy, dish washer, naval flight officer, Amtrak board member, Governor and chairman of the National Governors Association - just to name a few. But my most cherished job - and frankly my most important job for that matter - is being a father.
It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.
My mother did a fried vegetable dish called 'stuff.' It's fried potatoes and carrots. Then you add bell peppers, mushrooms and other softer vegetables. At the end you add onion. Then, you steam the dish with hot pepper cheese on the top and it melts down through the dish. It's delicious. It's wonderful.
One restaurant I visit without fail, whenever I'm in the Bay Area, is the Boulevard at 1 Mission Street, a few strides from the waterfront. It has excellent food and wine very much in the modern California style, but I go there less for any one dish than for the pleasure of dining with the restaurant's chefs.
At Babbo, each dish grew out of a conversation, trying to put something forth that was new and different. It was a combination of culinary adventurism and the dining-room experience with respect for the classic but with an eye toward innovation. And it was about eating locally, whether produce or fish or meat.
In my home I tend to eat a very simple version of what we cook at the restaurant, which is vegetable-oriented, with a little bit of fish and very little meat. For instance, a dish in my home could be steamed spinach with spruce, where I take a spruce branch and put it in the pot and that infuses into the spinach.
I think there are a very few pro-lifers who would say that a zygote in a petri dish is the equivalent of you or me; it's just younger. If you can say that without laughing, maybe you are a true pro-lifer. But I think most people are able or willing to make distinctions that show they maybe don't quite believe that.
I love food: biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken-fried steak with white gravy... but my favorite dish is my wife's beanie weenie cornbread casserole. It's so good. It sounds stupid, but if you eat it, it's heaven. Of course, it's only something you can eat if you've got a lot of money.
I used to do volunteer work in poor areas of Cairo, and people would gather their money together to get a satellite dish. You'd see them huddling around and for the first time seeing issues being debated on TV that had never been talked about before. And that is the biggest promoter of democracy you could possibly have.
I really believe, especially with 3D, you kind of have to approach it as this holistic thing. You have to kind of mount a 3D movie; you can't just add 3D as a kind of a special sauce sprinkled on top of a dish afterwards to give you an extra 20-percent in theater grosses, which I think is the way a lot of studios perceive it.
Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating - soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield.
We had this thing at Stanford called the 'Campus Loop,' and then we had another run called 'The Dish,' and you'd run up to this giant satellite dish, which was probably extremely unhealthy. I would do those two runs, and I just found it so therapeutic. My girlfriends and I would have these great conversations about guys and school and life.
Southern food certainly carries a stereotype, but I feel like that's turning around a little. There are great Southern chefs who are finding ways to showcase our traditional recipes in deliciously healthy ways. For me, the key is to use fresh fruits and vegetables and cut some of the butter and fat without sacrificing the yumminess of the dish.
There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called.
