As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.
Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.
I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.
I don't feel that I've had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional.
When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.
Broccoli, when overboiled, produces a sulfuric stench that causes children to gag the instant they enter the house.
'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.
I remember the moment I first became aware of aging. I was 30. I looked down at my knees, and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, 'And so it begins!'
I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.
For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.
Even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice.
My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.
'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.
I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.
Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.
I've never been an outward rebel, but inside, I just rebel deeply.
In the case of the cashew, someone, somewhere, a long time ago determined that it had to be roasted. The cashew was once nicknamed the blister nut, because if you try to eat it raw from the tree, your mouth pays the price. The cashew is not a nut, however; it's a seed.
Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I'm a snob, it's about quality, not cuisine.
The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat.
In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless.
A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.
I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry.
There's a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour.
Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.
I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.
To taste fully is to live fully.
It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.
I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies.
If there's a rift in the marriage - if someone feels neglected, frustrated, tempted by others, or unsure - then trouble can easily arise.
Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.
Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it's important to wait, because once it's picked, it can't ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous.
There's almost nothing you can't do with a cashew. Not only does it lend its nutty sweetness to savory dishes, it also gives desserts a deep richness.
I've always written about adultery because it raises the question of transgression and trouble.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.
I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.
My youngest sister belonged to a group called the Twelve Tribes for many years. She recently left, with her husband and four children. Talking to her about her experiences in the group is fascinating, moving, and enlightening.
After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths.
Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.
If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.
David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.
Of course, eating broccoli raw, nutritionally and aesthetically speaking, is no doubt the best way of all. Raw broccoli makes a delectable salad when sliced into thin strips on a mandolin, marinated in lemon-mustard vinaigrette, then tossed with toasted pecans or hazelnuts, halved cherry tomatoes, and fresh minced basil.
I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast.
I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.
In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.
Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn't figure in European history until 1493.
In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.
Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.
I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.
Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
