The Culinary Student: About TCS

I'm a big food fan, but I also have a lot of other quirks that make me singular in this world. I'm the kind of girl who drives around in the middle of bad weather just so I can see it happening around me. I read cookbooks for fun. I like the sound a knife makes while chopping celery. Country music and I do not get along. I am deathly afraid of spiders and most things that crawl. I forget things easily unless I write them down. I'm not really at peace until I write in my journal. I wrote a ten page paper on the history of pickling. Napping makes me very happy. Pettiness makes me very grumpy. I have a hilarious inner-monologue that I have difficulty suppressing. I love deeply. I frequently worry about everything. If weather wakes me up, I'll stay up to listen to it. I love being home. I hate being cold. Home-grown tomatoes excite me. I enjoy the discussion about food as much as I enjoy sampling it. I have a lot to say, which can sometimes come out jumbled when I speak. Mostly, though, I'm a quiet girl with simple taste and a mostly happy frame of mind.

If this sounds like something you can handle, come along with me on this ride. There is no destination, but to me, that's the best part.

Food Quotes

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."
-Anton Ego, Ratatouille

"A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world."
-Louis Pasteur

"A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom."
-M.F.K. Fisher

"A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish."
-W. H. Auden

"A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness."
-Elsa Schiaparelli

"A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
-Virginia Woolf

"A hippo sandwich is easy to make. All you do is simply take one slice of bread, one slice of cake, some mayonnaise, one onion ring, one hippopotamus, one piece of string, a dash of pepper. That ought to do it. And now comes the problem... biting into it!"
-Shel Silverstein

"A little garlic, judiciously used, won't seriously affect your social life and will tone up more dull dishes than any commodity discovered to date."
-Alexander Wright

"A man in the wilderness asked me, How many strawberries grow in the sea? I answered him, as I thought good, As many as red herrings grow in the wood."
-Mother Goose

"A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs."
-Clifton Fadiman