Food Thoughts & Quotes – Julia Child

This is the start in a new series of short posts all about my thoughts about food and quotes relating to that. I was inspired to start this after a fellow blogger and friend Kavita began a series of posts based on travel quotes and memories, you can check them out here. I love quotes, I am a little obsessed by them and there are so many great quotes about food and the love of it that I thought this would be a really nice way to share them with you.

I often find myself getting lost in a cookbook, sat gazing for hours at the ingredients, back stories and photos. My favourite books are the ones which have personal stories or experiences linked in to the recipes.  I watch films and documentaries about food quite often and it is definitely my favourite thing to talk about. A lot of my favourite quotes come from my food idols such as Julia Child. I love her cookbooks but also her book My Life In France which if you read it, will surely make you want to spend at least a year living there and eating all of the food.

With Julia in mind I will share with you some of my favourite quotes of hers and why I love them:

“Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.”

I read this a little while ago when I was finding the volume of work I was doing a little much. My part time office job which I really do not enjoy enables me to be able to spend a considerable amount of time working on what I do love – this blog. I am passionate about food and writing and therefore when it gets a bit much I sit back and I think, do I still love this? Do I still want to do it. The answer is always yes. Reading other blogs, cookbooks and watching programmes about food continues to spark my interest and increase my knowledge.

“Well, all I know is this—nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.”

When you think you know how to cook it is easy to become lazy, cook the same dishes and to stop taking on new challenges which is why I find continuing to read and push myself to learn more is so important. I am planning to start a French cuisine course in the New Year and I am continuing to work through and absorb Mastering The Art Of French Cooking ( Julia Child & Simone Beck ).

I don’t always feel I have taken in anything new from a book or blog but then months later I will be cooking and a problem will present itself and I will realise I know how to fix it based on that knowledge. Try to read something new every week, even if it’s just a magazine or a few articles from a website.

“With enough butter, anything is good.” and “If you are afraid of butter, use cream”

This quote I love simply because it is true. There is a part in the film Julie and Julia ( based on the life of Julia Child and a blogger named Julie who challenged herself to cook all of Julia’s recipes in one year ) which says something along the lines of, think of every good thing you like to eat and it will taste of butter. I am not sure EVERY single thing I like tastes of butter but a most of it does. Whenever I used to diet or try to cut calories I would omit butter and sure enough the food tasted a lot blander. There are other ways to increase flavour without fat but I would rather use a little less butter than cut it completely. These last few months when I have not really cut out foods but rather cut down I have been far more successful in reaching my weight loss goals.

That is about it for this week, next week I will be sharing some more food thoughts and quotes inspired by Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit.