“Beans are such a nice, neutral canvas, you can make a big, basic pot of them and then play around with them differently every day.”

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“To hunger is to be alive and to hope.”

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