Kate Christensen quotes

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.

My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

If there's a rift in the marriage - if someone feels neglected, frustrated, tempted by others, or unsure - then trouble can easily arise.

After my experiences with the 5:2 diet, I wasn't interested in a short-term fix that would fail later. I wanted a way of eating that made me lose weight without feeling deprived.

Reminded of what a diet really is, I began eating more slowly, being more conscious of when I was full. I started to enjoy my buckwheat bread with goat cheese and pureed butternut-squash soup as a response to real hunger.

Famously cancer fighting, laden with vitamins, minerals, soluble fiber, and phytonutrients, broccoli and its relatives are among the healthiest ingredients of the human diet.

I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast.

The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat.

Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days.

I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.