Kate Christensen

“It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?”

“The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration?”

“My youngest sister belonged to a group called the Twelve Tribes for many years. She recently left, with her husband and four children. Talking to her about her experiences in the group is fascinating, moving, and enlightening.”

“My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.”

“In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless.”

“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 wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.”

“It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.”

“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.”

“I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.”

“I left New York in 2009 when I fell in love with someone who had a farmhouse in New Hampshire... Portland, Maine, felt like the inevitable place for us.”

“Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.”

“Broccoli, when overboiled, produces a sulfuric stench that causes children to gag the instant they enter the house.”

“With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.”