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1 " To roast the chicken, first I peeled the onions. I juiced a lemon and placed the rind inside the bird's cavity. I melted butter and rubbed it lovingly into the skin, my Hebrew school teacher's voice be damned. I prepared the thyme, de-stemming the leaves. I snapped the carrots, rondelled the celery, cubed the potatoes, and chopped the parsnips. I splashed wine into the roasting pan, added crushed garlic cloves before trussing the chicken's leg together with cooking twine. I sprinkled pepper and pinched the salt. "
― Melissa Ford , Life From Scratch
2 " So, Rachel, what do you want to get?" he asks, even though we still haven't opened the menu.I throw open the cover and quickly scan my choices. I am hungry for everything. I want to taste their teriyaki sauce and see how they've worked yuzu into a salad dressing and sample their tempura batter. I want to sit up at the sushi bar and chat with the chef about different fillets of raw fish. And I want to be on a date with a guy who wants to hear the chef's answers too. Still, Rob Zuckerman is nice, and he's obviously smart and successful, and he has a full head of brown hair (one cannot discount that full head of hair). So I close my menu and ask him to suggest a few things since he has obviously been here before. "Why don't we start with a bowl of edamame and an order of tatsuta-age chicken?""I made that this week," I exclaim, excited that he'd pick that off the menu since I was eyeing it. "I'm learning how to cook and it's actually really easy. You just marinate the chicken and then coat it in potato starch before you fry it." I notice that Rob is staring at me as if I've just started reciting the recipe in Japanese. "I can't believe I've ordered it all these years when I could make it at home. "
3 " We forgo bagels at H&H, and instead push our way into the throng of shoppers clogging the narrow aisles of Zabar's. We travel up here usually once a month so Arianna can get the pickles she likes and stock up on their cream cheese spreads and coffee beans. We hit the dairy aisle first, dropping containers of Greek yogurt and crème fraiche into our basket."Zabar's makes me hungry," Arianna announces as we pass the smoked fish counter. I cannot think of anything more unappetizing than fish that has been pulverized into a spread."Seriously? Smoked fish? What are you, a seventy-year-old man? I understand if you said that back at the cheese counter. Did you see the fresh pasta that was on sale? Try-color cappelletti?""Their smoked sable is incredible. Not that I need to spend twenty bucks on smoked fish at the moment, but if they were giving out free sample, I'd stand in line for hours. "
4 " The name of my blog was already Life from Scratch, and the food became a natural extension. It turned out that writing about food was the perfect jumping board to discussing the rest of my life too. If nothing interesting was happening, I could talk about how I learned to roast potatoes (the trick: put the cubed potatoes in a bag; splash in the olive oil, salt, rosemary, and garlic powder; and then shake to coat each potato evenly.) "
5 " While dessert tastes good, woman cannot live on cake alone. "