Crescent Dragonwagon quotes:

Cooking and eating are among the most important ways we weave days into lives.

I tend to be a person who, when I get interested in something, I get obsessed by it... What happens to me is that I will fall in love with a particular ingredient or a particular dish... Once I make the decision that something has intrigued me enough to draw me in, there is no end to it.

Writing is how I metabolize life and how I give and receive.

One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.

There is a water soluble sugar that is in beans called oligosaccharides, and they are indigestible by human beings. They ferment during the digestion process, and hence, you have gas.

[it's about] being bitter but patient with your own bitterness so you could learn to be wise and be kind of returned to whatever innocence you might have once had before you became bitter ...

First of all, you want to do the soaking with almost all of the larger beans because that will take care of the gas, and second of all... they want to be seasoned and flavored.

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities.

All the time we wondered and wondered, who is this person coming/growing/turning/floating/swimming deep, deep inside.

I always have this sense of food as triangular, in that one point is nourishment, one point is connection, and one point is pleasure, and I always come at it from the pleasure and connection points, and the nourishment follows.

To hunger is to be alive and to hope.

I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.