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In The Night Kitchen

January 19, 2016
Ruth Reichl's cider-braised pork shoulder recipe

Two of my favorite things: puzzles + cooking memoirs

I remember the first book of Ruth Reichl's I ever read - it was Tender at the Bone, in theory a memoir but really an expression of her passionate belief that your meals (and the making of them) shape who you are in a very tangible way, starting even in the earliest parts of childhood. I loved it so much that I read her other books as soon as they came out: first Comfort Me With Apples, then Garlic and Sapphires, about her stint as the New York Times' food critic and all the subterfuge and drama (really) that job entails. Now I'm on to her latest, My Kitchen Year, about the shuttering of Gourmet when she was the magazine's editor-in-chief and her subsequent depression.

I don't always love Ruth Reichl - she can get a little treacly - but I can't stop reading her. And the biggest reason why I go back to her, over and over again, is the recipes; she essentially pioneered the memoir-peppered-with-recipe format that's so popular today. Granted, the recipes I've made from these books haven't always been the best ones on the planet - the matzoh brei was, in a word, a disaster - but when I'm reading her descriptions of how a dish didn't just exist in her life, but explained it somehow, giving her something that she hadn't even known she needed, I'm always desperate to try it for myself.

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Recipes

The Most Un-Me Thing I Have Ever Written

January 12, 2016

Presenting: my grocery list for yesterday's trip to Whole Foods.

What. Is going. On.

I mean, kale? Almond milk? HEMP SEEDS? Who is this person, and what has she done with the cheese-puff-loving me I have come to know and tolerate? (Nothing, actually; I just eat organic Trader Joe's cheese puffs now. And I eat them for breakfast, so there.)

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Smashed Potatoes with Sour Cream and Caviar

January 5, 2016

Discovery: I really, really like caviar. But I do not like very much of it, because as delicious as it is, it's also fish eggs, and my psyche can only handle eating so many unhatched fish babies. So when we opened our little tin of caviar on New Year's Eve, despite the fact that there were only maybe two big tablespoons' worth of eggs in it, we only ended up eating about half.

I figured that was fine; we'd just eat the rest later, but then Francesca and I were talking about caviar on the phone while I was driving around running errands (we don't usually talk about things like caviar, I promise; I'm not quite sure how this happened) and she googled "how long does caviar last" for me, and it turns out it's fine when it's all sealed away in a jar, but once you open it you better get on it.

So I went home and got on it.

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Kids In The Kitchen

December 22, 2015
the new york times perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe

On the menu for today: we're making cookies for Santa. And when I say "we," I don't mean "I'm making them while the kids watch Bubble Guppies and I yell from the kitchen 'COME HELP YOUR MOTHER'"; I really do mean that we're making them together.

Indy is really into cooking - he has announced that his plans for when he grows up are "to cook and to work at eBay" - which is ridiculously exciting for me. I remember a couple of years ago I posted a photo to Instagram of him standing next to the stove, helping me stir some pasta sauce, and got a bunch of blowback for it (THERE IS FIRE NEAR YOUR CHILD AND KNIVES ALSO, both of which were true). And while I do of course believe in making sure that children are safe when they're in or near a kitchen, my feeling has always been that the safest thing I can do for them is to let them participate in something that they're obviously going to be interested in, if only because it's so clearly a big part of their mother's life. To me, it's always seemed like telling them to stay out of the kitchen ("DON'T TOUCH THAT!") would be equivalent to transforming the room in our house where I spend the most time into an exciting mystery house of stuff they're not allowed to touch but desperately want to. It seems more reasonable to me to open the doors and not just "tell" them, but actually show them how a kitchen can be both safe and fun, so long as you're careful.

But the biggest reason why I encouraged my son to get into cooking from a (to some) bizarrely young age: it's our special time together, standing there side by side and talking about flavors and the difference between penne and rigatoni and what, exactly, happens when water comes to a boil. Indy knows how to measure, how to mix, how to put walnuts into a ziploc bag and whack them with a rolling pin to break them into smaller pieces. We taste sauces together and decide if they need more seasoning; he's responsible for doing virtually all of the pouring. I love that when he's older he'll have so many memories of sitting on the countertop in a warm kitchen, dipping measuring spoons into flour and breaking eggs while his mom chatters away about stuff he doesn't quite understand, but will one day.

It makes me something way beyond "happy."

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