Marilyn Monroe's lard and bacon order

Delivered to the Beverly Hills Hotel in March of 1960 when she was filming "Let's Make Love."

Why aren't we as critical of design as we are of food?

"If you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.”

Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer
( iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch)

 

Making even a simple dish three times in two weeks can teach you more about cooking than trying three different dishes in the same period. Pay attention to the process of making it, and to the small and large differences in the results

Judy Rodgers

Her advice is spot on and we would all do better to follow it more often. Every time I heed what she says—cook, repeat, repeat, repeat—I become far better at delivering table pleasure. It's not a terribly rigorous discipline for me since I'm also a relatively boring cook. I probably overdo it, repeating myself to everyone's boredom, the same dish coming off my stove week after week, year after year, seeking its own root cause.

Judy Rodgers passed away recently. Her restaurant, Zuni Cafe on Market Street in San Francisco has been one of my—and half the universe's—favorite for twenty-five years. Much less stuffy and reverential than Chez Panisse but equally CaliFrenchiFornia in every way. The layout still blows me away, especially the bar. Who sets up a bar to deliberately block a plate glass view? There are floor to ceiling windows, but you must look past the bartenders and their bottles to the street beyond, which is like looking at a partner partially clothed versus naked. Turns out partially clothed is way more sexy.  In the fifteen years or more I've visited San Francisco the city has gotten much richer and uglier and Market Street has stayed its poor ugly self. Judy's restaurant stays pitch perfect.

Gwyneth Paltrow on the relative positions of cheese whiz and crack in her life

"I'd rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin."

Gwyneth Paltrow

C.S. Lewis writing before cable TV

"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

- C.S. Lewis 

 For me, magazine food photography, mostly the same feeling.

Unprocessed

 "One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than the rich-bitches."

MFK Fisher

The new bread

"We have broken bacon together,
we can safely assume we are familiar."

House of Cards

Basic food math

"In order to make delicious food,

you must eat delicious food."

Jiro, Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Chris Traeger and Ben Wyatt on Fat

 "I don't know if you know this but things with fat in them taste way better than things with no fat."

"Yes. Everybody knows that."

Courtney Love says don't melt your cheese

"If you're gonna eat cheese, take it out on a picnic,
cut it up carefully, and really taste it—with wine or something.
Don't melt it on shit."

Courtney Love