A bowl of diligence and perseverance, a cup of faith and a pinch of inspiration mixed with a spoon of contentment are the ingredients of a delicious success. Cook yours well.

— Joe Mari Fadrigalan

Anything good on the trucks?"" Some beautiful lake salmon, fresh asparagus, and new potatoes."" New enough their skin is peeling?"" Yes."" I know what we're going to do today!" Lou felt the excitement surge. This was why she loved cooking: getting amazing fresh ingredients and making something extraordinary. Luella's traditional French menu didn't leave much room for creativity, so the daily special had become Lou's canvas, where she was limited only by her imagination and whims." We'll keep it a simple spring dinner. Roast the potatoes in butter, salt, and pepper. Maybe some thyme or tarragon, too. We'll top the salmon fillets with hollandaise and roast the asparagus.

— Amy E. Reichert

But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greene, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greene clarify butter, wash rice, Devlin shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.

— Julia Glass

Cooking is not a science but an art, mistakes are okay, messes are fine—the pleasure is in the creating and the sharing of the result.

— Lori Pollan

French toast? Frittata? Definitely frittata. Leaving the table again, she transferred a small packet from freezer to fridge. It was salmon, home-smoked on the island and more delicious than any she had ever found elsewhere. Smoked salmon wasn't Cecily's doing, but the dried basil and thyme she took from the herb rack were. Taking a vacuum-sealed package of sun-dried tomatoes from the cupboard, she set it on the counter beside the herbs. Frittata, hot biscuits, and fruit salad. With mimosas. And coffee. That sounded right. Eaten out on the deck maybe? No, not on the deck, unless the prevailing winds turned suddenly warm. They would eat here in the kitchen, with whatever flowers the morning produced. Surely more lavender. A woman could never have enough lavender- or day lilies or Castile, neither of which should bloom this early, but both of which had looked further along than the lavender, yesterday morning, so you never knew.

— Barbara Delinsky

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy.

— Nicole Sager

I bit into the chocolate chip. Slowed myself down. By then, almost a week in, I could sort through the assault of layers a little more quickly. The chocolate chips were from a factory, so they had that same slight metallic, absent taste to them, and the butter had been pulled from cows in pens, so the richness was not as full. The eggs were tinged with a hint of far away and plastic. All of those parts hummed in the distance, and then the baker, who'd mixed the batter and formed the dough, was angry. A tight anger, in the cookie itself.

— Aimee Bender

Ingredients to success: know what you do well, know what to do well, and know someone who's swell.

— Criss Jami

I still have my little red hardcover notebook—spine now held in place by packing tape, pages dotted with cooking stains—filled with her loving instructions for Mandelbrot, nut cake, and strudel.

— Lori Pollan

I would follow my mother around the kitchen watching and trying to find any way to help. One of the first dishes my mother taught me to make was hollandaise sauce. Though she always served it with broccoli, I soon realized it was equally delicious with asparagus, artichokes, or any other vegetable.

— Tracy Pollan