Claire Saffitz Quotes

My life at home gives me absolute joy. There are some days when, as soon as you've finished cooking breakfast and cleaning up the kitchen, it's time to start lunch, and by the time you've done that, you're doing dinner and thinking, 'There has to be a menu we can order from.'

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

I like to cook good meals, especially when I have a lot of time.

Cooking involves a deadline and hungry people and ingredients that expire in a week. It's stressful. Cooking happens on the stove and on the clock. Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking is slow and leisurely.

I do probably 80 or 90 per cent of the cooking at home.

Cooking for six people every day is like having a cafe.

I love simple foods as well as grand. Dinners that take a half-hour from skillet to plate are as important as a five-course dinner. A meal that can materialize in an hour and be presented with care, love and pride is something every busy person longs to be able to do.

People are in a hurry. They don't want to look at a long list of ingredients. Cooking is terribly hard work.

I love to cook a meal for the so-called holidays. You always need the turkey. I like making a good BBQ brisket as well.

I'm not the number-one fan of the heavy holiday meal. And also, I didn't grow up eating them, the traditional Western holiday meals, so it's just not something I have a nostalgic relationship to.

For a two-job working family, a pressure cooker gets a meal on the table in seven to 15 minutes, start to finish.

I think that there's some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don't have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television-we've turned cooking into a spectator sport. ...My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table.

I like baked potatoes. I don't have a microwave oven, and it takes forever to bake a potato in a conventional oven. Sometimes I'll just throw one in there, even if I don't want one, because by the time it's done, who knows?

I can actually cook one meal now, as opposed to before, when I could cook nothing. My family are very excited.

The planning is everything. Deciding which dishes you're going to prepare can turn into the make-or-break decision five days later, when you actually serve the meal.

If you're preparing a dinner for friends or a holiday dinner, make sure to only prepare recipes you are comfortable with and have cooked before. Cooking for others is not the time to try out a recipe for the first time. You end up spending all your time in the kitchen instead of enjoying your company.

I hate cooking. But I do make the candied yams every year at Thanksgiving. And they're awesome! You could definitely get diabetes and cavities from them, but they're delicious!

You shouldn't be eating anything that takes six minutes to microwave.

My daughter Alexandra once told me, "Mother, you're a pioneer. Now, hardly anybody cooks, but you were one of the first to stop." After 20 years of cooking, I started to appreciate the value of other people's work. So I would, say, go get a duck in Chinatown. I always had the salad and set the table, but I didn't have to clean the pots.

A balanced guest list of mixed elements is to a successful party what the seasoning is to a culinary triumph.

I don't like to leave what I'm going to eat in other people's hands, so I'll pack my own lunch. I chop up a salad with lots of greens - everything from spinach, baby spinach, arugula, cucumber, avocado, radish, cauliflower, and green olives to parsley and cilantro, all chopped really fine - with a piece of wild salmon. I even bring my own tea in a Thermos.

To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.

People want honest, flavourful food, not some show-off meal that takes days to prepare.

Getting last-minute cancellations can put a black cloud over an event before it has even started. If it's a large, casual cocktail party, then I'll often not say anything until the next day. But if you're not able to make it to a small, seated dinner, you have to call the host - there's nothing worse than an empty chair at a table.

We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.