Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series is a national treasure, beloved by generations. But what I love most is the peek it provides into the planting, harvesting, hunting, and preparing of the foods that America's settler families ate in the late 1800s.

Isabel Gillies

I really think the human experience is very similar for everyone; we're all doing slightly different versions of the same thing.

Isabel Gillies

You find out what you are made of when you have a broken heart. If it happens early and often, all the better.

Isabel Gillies

No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.

Isabel Gillies

In New York, everybody looks great and is well dressed, but seeing someone in Ohio wearing Marc Jacobs is like spotting an owl in Central Park. Rare.

Isabel Gillies

I don't think anyone would bat an eye if I wrote a song.

Isabel Gillies

My mother worked full-time running a foundation, but she found all the time in the world to have supper ready every night, feed us shirred eggs on the weekends, and produce a leg of lamb for my fourth-grade Bedouin feast at school.

Isabel Gillies

Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.

Isabel Gillies

You see, I am friends with a lobsterman. Because we are friends, which feels lucky anyway, I get access to the most amazing fish. It's like having a backstage pass - a culinary jackpot that feels almost undeserved.

Isabel Gillies

Life is funny, at the same time being totally harsh.

Isabel Gillies

Sometimes it makes me sad that I didn't get to have one family for my entire life.

Isabel Gillies

There has never been a shrimp that I've eaten that I haven't been like, 'I am so lucky that I get to eat this.' I would eat a shrimp enchilada, shrimp burrito, shrimp cocktail, fried shrimp, shrimp po boy, shrimp gumbo.

Isabel Gillies

As moisturizers, oils rapidly penetrate the deeper layers of the skin, protecting against the breakdown of proteins in the cell wall with fatty and linoleic acids, mimicking what our bodies produce naturally. The oils also function as humectants, which help our skin retain moisture.

Isabel Gillies

When you work alone at home, time can become shapeless. There are no eleven o'clock meetings or afternoon coffee breaks. The light outside may clue me in to what part of the day it is, but if all is going well, the hours bleed together.

Isabel Gillies

Therapy is therapy. Writing is for writing.

Isabel Gillies

Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series is a national treasure, beloved by generations. But what I love most is the peek it provides into the planting, harvesting, hunting, and preparing of the foods that America's settler families ate in the late 1800s.

Isabel Gillies

Skeptical of strangers, lobstermen are keepers of secrets, working in the howling wind and hot sun, the icy snows, and bewildering fog. When I was growing up, the lore was that they had the right to shoot anyone who messed with their traps.

Isabel Gillies

I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.

Isabel Gillies

When I was growing up, my mother worked, and in the evenings, the whole family would sit around the dinner table and recount the day.

Isabel Gillies

When you have a traumatic event in your life, you change. You're not the same person you were, and you have to discover who you've become.

Isabel Gillies

Reading cookbooks will help with just about anything in your life, including heartbreak.

Isabel Gillies