EAT WITH AND COOK FOR FRIENDS
“WHEN WE FIRST opened Lantern, I had that feeling of, ‘Every plate of food represents you.’ I remember going into the dining room when someone didn’t like their chicken and asking, ‘What didn’t you like?’” recalls Andrea Reusing. “You want to please every person. When is the food exactly the way you want it? Never. You can always make it better, and finding the line is hard.”
This, essentially, is how I feel about hosting dinner parties. Of course, at home you don’t have the option of hiding in the kitchen; you have to sit down and eat with your guests. Despite their camaraderie, dinner parties are the closest most of us nonchefs will come to knowing what it is to cook for customers. That can be a lot of pressure. Particularly if you’re blessed to live in a city with more restaurants than a person could fully experience in a lifetime, can a compelling argument even be made for spending a free evening eating other people’s home cooking? Is there any culinary reason friends should come to your house?
Beyond the stress of contemplating those questions, cooking for friends is a subversive idea when you’re trying to keep your eating in check. Everyone knows you eat more when you’re around the table talking, laughing, and topping off one another’s wine glasses. And since you want guests to say, “This is delicious,” not, “This is pretty good for a low-fat dish,” there’s always the temptation to bring out the butter and go crazy—their diets are not your problem, right?
Plenty of chefs had suggestions for cooking for others at home without falling into that trap. Master a couple of them, and your take on dinner parties might change. “There is this natural joy and instant gratification that you get from making something with your hands and putting it together for somebody,” says Sue Torres. “It’s a very intimate and personal thing.”
Entertaining doesn’t have to upset your own healthy regimen—in fact, it can improve it. “I eat a lot better when I’m cooking for someone else,” says Rick Moonen. “If I’m alone, I have ramen once a week, because I’m not inspired to cook for myself.” By inviting company over, he says, “I keep protein in the house, not just ramen.” If you’ve been going through a cereal-for-dinner phase, or a Chinese takeout rut, inviting a few friends over for a real meal can break a bad-eating streak.
Lesson 88: Smart chefs cook the way they like to eat
“I love to have people over,” says Gregory Gourdet. But he is the first to say he doesn’t eat like a typical chef. When he goes out with friends, he admits, “It is kind of annoying to be with me, actually. In the chef world you’re supposed to eat everything, and I am sort of picky.” Not to worry. If you’ve taken up eating more healthfully, there’s no reason not to share your new enthusiasm with your friends. Assuming that you’re cooking and eating real food, it is bound to be good.
Since cutting most dairy, red meat, and refined carbohydrates from his diet, Gourdet has figured out how to prepare meals that don’t leave him or most guests missing those elements. “I feel empowered when I know I am making something as delicious and as healthy as possible. I feel like I am doing something amazing for my body and for my friends’ health when I cook for them as well.” The night before we spoke, Gourdet had just had some people over. On the menu: roast chicken (See? What did I tell you about roast chicken?) with chili flakes, lemon, and rosemary from his garden; a frittata; and roasted vegetables: sweet potatoes, onions, whole garlic cloves, and parsnips cooked with lots of chilies. Roasting vegetables until they are well caramelized is another way to boost flavor without much fat (just a drizzling of oil). Because Gourdet isn’t dogmatic about dessert, he served four different cakes from a bakery. Laughing, he tells me, “It’s good to keep a balance.”
At home, Marcus Samuelsson says, he has “a badass grill and a badass kitchen.” Professionally, he has cooked Scandinavian, Japanese, and regional American. His own home-cooking memories are of Swedish food, though he has also spent time exploring the cuisine of Ethiopia, where his roots are. So what does he most often prepare for guests? “Ethiopian food, because so many people haven’t had that outside of a restaurant setting,” he tells me. “But it is not the same in someone’s house.” He and his wife are often in the kitchen together, and for company, “We might do chicken stew, beef tartare, cottage cheese—you take buttermilk and bring it to a boil and let it break, strain it, add toasted mustard leaves for flavor, very simple. Then we’ll mix it up with gravlax and meatballs. There’s no other house in the world on that day that you can have that meal.”
I was greatly inspired by this story in two ways: first to make that chicken stew, called doro we’t. (The recipe follows.) Second, I think Marcus makes a good point: Everyone should cook the specialties of his house, whatever they are, even if they don’t typically appear together on a menu.
Lesson 89: They take guests’ dietary concerns into consideration
Marc Murphy loves cooking for guests at his family’s beach house; for much of the season all the guest bedrooms are filled. When he’s planning dinners there, his first consideration is usually his wife, Pamela. “I have a wife who doesn’t like me cooking much with butter. She doesn’t like butter. And I have what I call my ‘second wife,’ her best friend, and they’re both always there. She claims to not like butter either.”
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like butter. But Marc knows two people; what are the odds? Nonetheless, he is thoughtful about cooking when Pamela and her friend are his target audience. He’ll prepare some of his favorites, but adapt them. For instance, at his restaurant Landmarc, he might serve a pork-chop dish with caramelized apples and onions, sautéed spinach, and a bordelaise sauce (red wine, butter, etc.). “At the beach, I’ll do that same dish with the apples, onions, and spinach, but I do a sauce of herbs, olive oil, and splash of vinegar on the pork.”
When in doubt, go lighter: Use vegetable stock if you have vegetarians among your crowd. Don’t offer up obvious diet-busters, or so few options that people might find themselves in a bind over eating what you’re serving. Even if you know your audience, it’s great to give options. Nancy Silverton often entertains a friendly pack of carnivores around her backyard grill. “I’ll do hamburgers, steaks, sausages, or lamb chops, anything really easy. I always like to accompany any of those with condiments that are wonderful spooned on: a romesco or a pesto or a tapenade. I always serve colorful bowls of condiments. I can sort of personalize the food. It adds flavor. I enjoy eating that way,” she says. That’s important too: Serve food you love.
Lesson 90: They think about the rhythm of a meal
As much as you want to get that “yum” from your friends, cooking for guests doesn’t have to be an orgy of slick, buttery, love-me foods. “Don’t choose all showstoppers,” says Rick Bayless, who cooked for the nation’s ultimate dinner party, a White House state dinner, when the guest of honor was Mexican president Felipe Calderón.
“Start with simpler flavors; then go to the boldest stuff at the end,” he advises. And think about texture: “You don’t want to have two things in a row with a creamy texture—pair something creamy with something that has a crunch. I want the first flavors to be bright, with pizzazz to them, something exciting. At the White House we started out with a very simple dish: a jicama-and-orange salad—no meat or fish on it. Light, bright flavors, crunch, cilantro on there, a little bit of red chili that whets your appetite. Then we went to a ceviche dish, again bright, but that had some roasted garlic and roasted green chili, so that gave it a more savory, rounded quality. The main course was a beef dish with a grand mole from Oaxaca. Then dessert, a rich but small tart of Mexican chocolate and goat-milk caramel called cajeta. It wasn’t overwhelming.”
Translated: a little crispy salad, a virtually uncooked fish dish (a recipe for ceviche by Laurent Gras follows), a one-pot dish of which you’re proud, and a little dessert. Done—a meal good enough to serve at the White House, or your own.
Lesson 91: They cook casually off duty
Sang Yoon, who wants nothing more than to cook for you at his restaurants, loathes entertaining at home. “I rarely have people over. Maybe once a year. I’m not a party guy,” says Yoon. “And I hate the holidays. I usually hide during the holidays. I used to have something called ‘Sangsgiving,’ because I hate turkey. If I have a day off, I don’t want to eat dry poultry. It’s a punishment. Is this my day of atonement? I used to take matters into my own hands and make a big rib roast or roast a whole lobe of foie gras—now, this is a celebration! I did that a few years, but it became too much work, so now I go out for Chinese food.”
But I found that Yoon is singular among chefs in this regard—most love to cook for their friends and family. Among the most impassioned is Michael Psilakis, who routinely has an informal collection of ten or twelve people over on his days off. “I don’t see life being worth living if you don’t have that. Why just go home and . . . what, eat? Then sit in front of the TV? Why not say every night you’re going to have someone come over and spend time with them? Think about the memories that you have in life—the good ones—and then think about how many of those you could probably associate with what you were eating.”
“I love cooking at home,” says Sue Torres. “I wish someone would clean up after me, because I can make a mess. But I’m a big fan of using the grill in the summer, spring, fall, for vegetables, meat, chicken, fish. In the winter and the fall, it’s more like ‘one-pot wonders.’ I’ll make lentil chili, or beef stew.”
Three different chefs (none with Spanish restaurants) mentioned that they like making paella for guests—it’s showy without being impossible, and there’s only one big pan to clean when you’re done. “I made one recently and everyone ate it again for breakfast the next morning,” says Cat Cora.
Jacques Torres spends the warmer months living on a boat in a slip on the Hudson River. Without having seen your kitchen, I can guarantee that a boat galley is smaller. With a one-dish meal, he says, “I’m set up on the boat to cook for the whole dock, for twenty people. I have a huge pan to make paella. Every Sunday in the summer my family used to eat outside, a big party. I miss that. If friends are on the dock, I’ll make lunch: one brings wine; one brings fruit; one brings a salad.” Torres is a casual-dining proponent, but only to a point: “We use those disposable plates. Well, except for me. I don’t eat on a disposable dish. I’m not a snob; I just hate how the cardboard flops, and the Styrofoam doesn’t sound right. I’m the only person who has glass on a boat—usually you don’t, in case you take a big wave. You know what? I’ll buy a new glass. I don’t want to drink my wine in a plastic container; it’s disgusting. My friends laugh at me, but that’s the way I like to do it.”
Hear, hear!
Lesson 92: Okay, smart chefs employ a few restaurant tricks at home
A pause for a true-life fable.
One of the most peculiar and most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever conducted was with the pioneering avant-garde Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, when he was visiting New York on the occasion of the U.S. release of his book A Day at El Bulli. I arrived to find another chef joining us, José Andrés, who had been mentored by Adrià, and now is famed in his own right for his five restaurants in Washington, D.C., and the Bazaar in L.A. I hadn’t come prepared to interview them both, and was thinking about how to wing this when Andrés greeted me and said that he was here only as a translator for Adrià. This is like showing up to interview Balanchine to find that Baryshnikov is there to interpret. (Yes, I realize Balanchine is dead; work with me.) It was extraordinary. But both chefs were game and friendly, despite the fact that Adrià (whose usual interpreter, Lucy, was on a break) had already endured several journalists, one of whom insisted on taking him to the Lower East Side for pastrami and egg creams. How was he holding up? I asked. “Interviews,” he told me, “are a good way to save money, not having to go to the psychotherapist.”
Our conversation didn’t immediately dig that deep into his psyche—what I was mainly interested in was whether any of the techniques he pioneered at El Bulli could be adapted for regular folk to attempt. How could I impress some dinner party guests without access to a nitrogen tank? Of the more than five hundred pages in his book, did none of them have something practical to say to the home cook? Here, he got politely agitated. After I had asked the question a few ways, Andrés at last told me: “He says: When he buys a book about architecture, he doesn’t build a house.”
The moral? You are not a restaurant chef. When your friends come over they want to eat well, but they don’t expect plates to be Jackson Pollocked with coulis from a squeeze bottle or precious, precarious towers of what Art Smith calls “tepee food.” Still, there are a few tricks to borrow from restaurant chefs from their cook-at-home playbooks.
• Customize your space. A miniature home kitchen is no excuse for not cooking big. Tom Colicchio is used to working in the roomy and well-laid-out Craft space. But his apartment kitchen is no larger than mine (he can’t open his refrigerator all the way, because it hits the oven). And counter space in New York City? Fugetaboutit. My own first New York apartment had its “kitchen” in a converted closet, with about two feet of counter space, most of that taken up by a small microwave (a dinner plate wouldn’t fit inside) and a single-burner hot plate. Reader, I cooked.
To overcome the space issues, before prepping a big meal, Colicchio says, “I take out things like the toaster, the dish rack. It all goes into the other room.” I am embarrassed to admit that it took Colicchio pointing out that I could unplug and move appliances I’m not using. But, voilà, more counter space.
• Mise en place—French for having your merde together. Essential when cooking with vegetables that need peeling, dicing, and so on. “Organization is it: Once you get to the stove, you’re not chopping anymore; that all happens early on,” instructs Colicchio. “Get small plastic containers; put your mise en place in there; get it all organized.”
• Use all your senses—and trust them more than whatever cookbook you’ve got open. Does the food smell done? Does it look done? Does it crunch, crackle, sizzle? Does it spring back or sag when you poke it? Even if you are using a recipe, trust yourself. (The Marx Brothers’ rule: “Who you gonna believe: me or your own eyes?”) Don’t leave something on the stove because a recipe told you to cook it for ten minutes; your nose, eyes, ears, and fingers might tell you different. Finally, taste what you’re making. That’s what the instruction “season to taste” in a recipe means—you have to taste your food and decide whether it needs more salt, a splash more acid, something herbal, or the bite of peppers. Trust that you aren’t going to be “wrong” about this—if it tastes good to you, it tastes good. Need more convincing? If you’ve ever watched a TV cooking competition, you know people get sent home for putting out food they haven’t tasted. Don’t have your guests conspiring to vote you off—taste before you serve.
But remember that when you’re watching what you eat, you need to watch all those bites in the kitchen too. If you’re conscious of it, you might find that you’ve eaten the equivalent of a small meal during the preparation. “If I’m in my house cooking for people, I’m tasting all the time,” says Marc Murphy. “By the time I sit down, I’m ready for my glass of wine, but I’ll just watch everybody else. I’ll serve myself, but it’s hard to sit down and eat.”
• Enjoy the process. For Christmas Eve, Colicchio has his family over, a dozen or so guests, and prepares a traditional Italian feast of thirteen fishes. “My grandmother used to do it, and I took it over. It’s not thirteen dishes, just thirteen fish. I do fritto misto, little whitebait and Nantucket bay scallops; sole with lemon, fennel, parsley, capers, red onion sliced really thin; then a crudo of tuna with a truffle vinaigrette and lardo; grilled sardines with a sweet-sour onion-and-raisin relish; a raw hamachi with a preserved lemon vinaigrette; salt cod, steamed and flaked, with olive oil, parsley, garlic; a beet salad with anchovies and artichokes and celery, hot cherry peppers, olive oil, parsley, garlic; then we do cacciucco [an Italian fish stew; he uses squid, clams, tomatoes], roast cod with preserved lemon and olives, and pasta.”
Phew. If you’re planning to cook that much, you had better have a good time doing it, and Colicchio does. “I do it all myself. Well, I cheat a little: I have the fish filleted at the restaurant.” (Note: This is not cheating; you do not have to fillet your own fish.) “I wake up in the morning, get a pot of coffee going, put music on. I start cooking at ten in the morning and don’t stop until the guests walk in. I don’t rush. I enjoy it.”
This is welcome advice: Enjoy wonderful food, including the process of putting it together, especially for loved ones.
I take that sentiment to heart on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, as I start to assemble dinner for seven. I head to the grocery store with a plan in my head, and a shopping list based around a couple of recipes. Though I’ve never tried it before, I decide I’m going to roast a duck with lots of root vegetables (carrots, parsnips—whatever looks good at the store) and apples. Because it is a holiday, this once-in-a-while treat seems in order. I know it isn’t wise to cook a high-bar dish like duck for company when you’ve never attempted it, but I’ve roasted a lot of chickens in the past year, and I’m feeling up to it. Also, I won’t lie: I think it will impress my friends.
I improvise a salad of mixed greens, pear, toasted walnuts, and mustard-agave vinaigrette. It is meant to be mustard-and-honey dressing, but alas, I forget to put honey on my list and don’t want to go out again with the duck already blasting away in the oven. For a side dish I make spaghetti with chopped egg, scallions, butter, and salmon roe, a variation on a long-ago New York Times recipe that calls for ossetra—an unfunded mandate, if there ever was one. I won’t try to fool you that the fat orange eggs can pass as the black seed-pearl delight that is real caviar, although this was not only cheaper, but sustainably raised, so I felt fine with the substitution. Because no one (until now, I suppose) knew how the recipe was written, they thought this was how it was meant to be eaten, with briny, squishy dots mingling with the chopped hard-boiled egg.
Our neighbors bring sardines grilled with thyme for a first course, and a lemon-coconut cake for dessert. My kid digs into the pungent, oily fish, and encourages his friend to do the same, first telling him, “It’s good,” and then extolling the sardine’s true appeal to a grade-schooler: “Look, it still has an eyeball!”
I hope you don’t find it immodest of me to report that the duck comes out phenomenally. Crispy, fatty, skin as brown as a berry, and, as I had hoped, received with great enthusiasm and kudos by my friends as I carry it to the table on a turquoise Fiesta-ware platter that had been waiting for such an occasion. Then I realize I haven’t any idea how to carve a duck, never having done it before. The legs are short and the body is long, almost rectangular, with few of the signposts of a chicken or a turkey. Fortunately, another friend has some experience with this, and I hand over the knife, slip into my seat, and become a guest at my own table.
We’re fed, happy, some of us giddy with wine, and we talk and laugh over the annual tradition of watching a Marx Brothers movie. At midnight, the kids are still up, and we all gather around the television like it’s a hearth to watch the ball drop over Times Square, asking, as we do every year, Who would be crazy enough to stand in that crowd in the cold? The countdown begins and I dash back to the kitchen for a big bowl of red grapes, so that after all the kissing and good wishes we can share in the Spanish custom of eating twelve grapes in the first minute of the New Year. It’s a gesture to bring good luck. Reviving and wholesome, it also feels like the best first thing to eat as the calendar turns to a new page and a fresh start.
Laurent Gras’s Halibut Ceviche with Jalapeño and Parsley
serves 4 as an appetizer
Zest of 1 lime
1 large jalapeño, cut in half lengthwise, stem and seeds removed
⅓ cup fresh orange juice
1½ tablespoons fresh lime juice
8 ounces halibut fillet, skin removed, and trimmed of any dark spots
Sea salt to taste
2 tablespoons minced flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
Extra-virgin olive oil for serving
1. Chill 4 small bowls in the refrigerator.
2. Zest the lime before juicing it. Set the lime zest aside.
3. Thinly slice one jalapeño half and place in a small bowl with the orange juice and lime juice. Let sit for 30 minutes. In the meantime, dice the remaining jalapeño half to a fine dice. Cut the halibut into ¼-inch pieces and place in a small bowl, set into a larger bowl filled with ice.
4. Strain the jalapeños from the juice through a fine mesh strainer and discard the jalapeño. Lightly season the halibut with sea salt. Add half the citrus juice to the halibut; stir well to combine. Let sit (still resting in bowl of ice) for 5 minutes. Drain the halibut from the citrus juice.
5. Divide the halibut among the chilled bowls. Divide the rest of the citrus juice over each portion of the fish; sprinkle each with the jalapeño, parsley, a little sea salt. Pour a few drops of olive oil and sprinkle a little lime zest over each serving. Serve immediately.
Adapted from Laurent Gras.
Marcus Samuelsson’s Doro We’t
Two things: First, when I made this I couldn’t believe how much chopped onion it called for—it really seemed like a lot. After I had diced up a huge pile (but before I started cooking), I thought, Next time, I will certainly use less onion. In fact, the onions cook for more than ninety minutes and melt into a much more reasonable portion of sweet, glazy deliciousness. Second, this recipe calls for berbere, an Ethiopian spice blend that is essential to its character. Jarred is absolutely fine: You can find it at some markets and specialty stores, or online (zamourispices.com). If you don’t feel like hunting for it, make your own (Marcus’s recipe follows). While berbere has several components, none of them are, individually, hard to find, and you may have some in your drawer already.
Whether you buy or blend, please don’t wait until the next time you make this chicken stew to use your berbere again. Its complex mix of peppery heat and sweet notes like cinnamon is great on vegetables or proteins that you are cooking fast on a weeknight. Treat yourself as well as you do your guests! In fact, make extra stew—it freezes well. When I made it for my husband we skipped the cheese and eggs and still had a feast of the aromatic chicken and greens; he liked it even more the next day.
¼ cup olive oil
5 garlic cloves, minced
5 small red onions, finely chopped
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
3 tablespoons berbere
8 chicken legs, skin removed
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 tablespoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
3 cups chicken stock
1 cup dry red wine
1 pound collard greens
4 eggs, hard-boiled and peeled
½ cup cottage cheese (not nonfat)
1. Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven over low heat. Add the garlic, onions, and ginger and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 30 minutes. Add the tomato paste and berbere and cook for another 15 minutes.
2. Season the chicken legs with the cardamom and salt. Add the chicken to the sauce, along with the butter, stock, and wine. Bring to a simmer and cook until the chicken is cooked through, about 1 hour.
3. In a separate pot, bring salted water to a boil. Add the collard greens and cook until tender, about 15 minutes. Remove the greens with a slotted spoon and transfer to the chicken stew. Serve the stew with hard-boiled eggs and cottage cheese on the side.
Adapted from New American Table by Marcus Samuelsson. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
½ cup ground dried chilies
½ cup ground paprika
2 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons onion powder
1 teaspoon ground cardamom, preferably freshly ground
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon garlic powder
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
1. Finely grind the fenugreek seeds with a spice or coffee grinder, or mortar and pestle (you can also start with ground fenugreek and skip this step).
2. Stir together with remaining ingredients in a small bowl. Will keep in a spice jar or tin for months.
Adapted from Soul of a New Cuisine by Marcus Samuelsson. John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
The summer that Murphy bought a paella pan, he used it often for cooking on the grill at the beach. I made this for friends on my apartment stove, using two smaller pans. It made a whole lot, and I was thrilled when our guests readily accepted my offer to take leftovers home and e-mailed me the next day to say they had eaten it for lunch.
serves 6
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (5 to 6 ounces each)
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 large white onion, diced
1 red bell pepper or 6 piquillo peppers, seeded and diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
16 ounces (1 pound) short-grain rice, such as Calasparra, bomba, or arborio
1 large pinch saffron
1 cup canned, crushed tomato
5 to 6 cups chicken or seafood broth, plus more as needed
12 littleneck clams, scrubbed
12 mussels, scrubbed
12 medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 cup frozen peas
Lemon wedges for serving
1. In a large paella pan or skillet over medium-high heat, warm the olive oil. Season the chicken thighs on both sides with salt and pepper. Cook the chicken skin-side down until browned and crispy, about 5 minutes. Turn over and cook until lightly browned, about 3 to 4 minutes. Remove the chicken to a plate.
2. Reduce the heat to medium and add the onion, peppers, and garlic. Cook until softened and the onions are beginning to turn translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the rice, stir to coat the rice with the oil, and cook until the grains are lightly toasted, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add the saffron and tomato, and cook until the tomatoes have reduced, about 1 minute.
3. Add 5 cups broth. Cook (without stirring) until rice starts to soften, about 10 minutes. Add more broth as needed if the rice is drying out too quickly. Nestle the clams in the rice and, once they begin to open, after about 10 minutes, add the mussels, shrimp, and peas. Cook until the mussels have opened, the shrimp turn pink, and the peas are warmed through, about 5 minutes. Let stand for 15 minutes. Garnish with lemon wedges and serve.
Adapted from Marc Murphy.
Gregory Gourdet’s Roasted Vegetables with Olive Oil, Ginger, and Chili
From Gregory: “This is my go-to vegetable dish. I change the vegetables sometimes, based on the season. Squash in the fall, with apples or pears. Maybe asparagus during spring. Use whatever looks good. Stick to dark vegetables and fruits with high nutritional content. Leave the skin on the vegetables. The ginger and chili add some punch and antioxidants.”
serves 6
3 large yams, skin on, washed, cut into ¾-inch spears (use a mix of garnet yam and jewel yam)
4 slender carrots, tops trimmed, skin on, scrubbed
1 bunch broccolini, bottoms trimmed
2 parsnips, skin on, washed, sliced into wedges
1 medium red onion, peeled, sliced ½-inch thick
1 heads garlic, peeled, whole cloves
1 bunch scallions, trimmed, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 small knob ginger, peeled and minced
1 small red jalapeño, washed, sliced (use whole for spicy, half for medium heat)
Sea salt
Olive oil
Cilantro sprigs to garnish
1. Preheat oven to 450ºF.
2. In a large bowl toss all ingredients up to the jalapeños with a light coating of olive oil. Season with sea salt. Spread vegetables out on 2 sheet trays, making sure they are in a single layer. This will ensure proper roasting and caramelization and prevent steaming. Roast vegetables 10-15 minutes; the broccolini will be finished cooking first, check it after about 9 minutes; use tongs to remove it to a plate and continue roasting the roots.
3. Toss to ensure even cooking. Roast 15-25 minutes more or until just cooked firm, but you can pierce the yams with a fork, and their edges are a bit crispy. Let cool 5 minutes, then transfer to a bowl; toss gently with cilantro sprigs.
Adapted from Gregory Gourdet.
Me
I was nearly finished writing this book. It was a beautiful Sunday in New York City, the sky as bright and clear as I remembered it being a decade prior. The calendar called for quiet reflection, but the weather called for brunch. Mourners were gathered at the newly opened memorial pools where the Twin Towers once stood. For many of us, it was a day for gathering friends around a generous breadbasket and pots of coffee with cream, as a balm to soothe our more generalized sadness and the anxiety that came with the city’s heightened state of alert. It was a day for sharing memories, and I was struck by how prominently food figured into many of them, well beyond that childhood dinner of clams and duck on the hundred-and-seventh floor.
In the months after my arrival from California, when I was barely making rent on a MacDougal Street walk-up, I ate an awful lot of Ray’s pizza by the slice, cold sesame noodles from Empire Szechuan, and Macoun apples, which I’d never seen on the West Coast. I started dating a writer I had met while we were both working at Life magazine, and as the relationship turned more serious, we pooled our resources to celebrate birthdays at stellar restaurants like Gramercy Tavern (with a pre–Top Chef Tom Colicchio at the helm). After we had been together for seven (seven!) years, generous friends cheered our engagement with an absurdly luxe caviar-studded dinner at Petrossian on Fifty-Eighth Street. My last supper before becoming a mother was udon-and-tempura-shrimp soup from the Japanese noodle place around the corner from us, and eight days after my son’s birth we showed him off to family and friends over bagels and smoked Gaspe salmon from the Lower East Side’s Russ & Daughters.
Life is meals.
I’ve never looked back at a milestone and thought about how little I ate at the time. Good food is important to me, and more so to chefs. If you’re going to reconsider how you eat, chefs will join that conversation with enthusiasm. After nearly a year of listening to dozens of chefs discuss their feelings about food, I had not only learned a lot about how to live a life in healthy balance with what I wanted to eat, but had internalized some very simple and valuable truths:
Enjoy the food you love.
Cook most of your meals.
Eat all of your vegetables.
Lemon, salt, and olive oil are all you need to make almost any dish terrific.
Have some fennel.
Take the doggie bag.
End your day with a square of chocolate.
Friends (and sometimes strangers who learned about my project) wanted to know: Did I lose weight? Yes! I didn’t have loads of weight to lose, but I did shape up while eating and feeding my family really well. I ate out a fair amount, but also cooked more than ever. I even sometimes remembered to pack a lunch, owing in part to the fact that I stopped flailing around in the morning and settled on a rotation of plain Greek yogurt with fruit, oatmeal, or eggs—with or without spinach. Exercise was an important piece of the equation, and I found myself squarely in the camp of those who run the extra mile in order to eat the extra piece of especially great bread, but who practice yoga just because it feels good.
A little coda to my Ferran Adrià story. Two years after that first interview, when he told me you don’t read a book about architecture and try to build your own house (and you don’t read a book from the world’s foremost avant-garde chef and expect to cook like him), I saw the great man again. It was a party for his follow-up tome, which, to my surprise, was comprised of recipes for the home cook with step-by-step photographs and instruction so basic it reminded the reader to have a supply of paper towels in the kitchen. He now had an evangelical fervor to teach regular folk to feed themselves, to eat nourishing home-cooked food, and to enjoy a fruit-based dessert, “for a joyful ending to a meal,” most nights. “People have time to cook,” Adrià told me. “They spend four hours watching TV! So they have time. You can watch TV and cook!”
He’s right, of course. Though I still sometimes scramble to get dinner onto the table in the tiny window between the end of my workday and the hour in which I find my child hungry enough to eat his own hand, we sit down together often. My greatest triumph? Dinner is not always pasta. It might be Eric Ripert’s toaster-oven paillard or Naomi Pomeroy’s tomato soup, or Joe Bastianich’s white beans and chard. Or it is something of my own creation, a remix of leftovers and some oddball vegetable. Weekends are for more ambitious fare, or for roasting a chicken, which takes place largely unattended, so I can enjoy my life outside of the kitchen. Will any of these be the meals that my son someday recalls with fondness—our family’s future classics? Can anything in my new repertoire rise to the vaunted position of my father’s Turkish Pizza-pie Eggs?
So, for my final recipe, an offering from one nonchef. You don’t need the training of an architect to replicate it; yet it was an essential ingredient in making our house a home.
Morris Adato’s Turkish Pizza-pie Eggs
serves 4
2 tablespoons butter
10 mushrooms, sliced
1 large ripe tomato, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon oregano, or more to taste
9 large eggs, well beaten
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled (about ⅓ cup, loosely packed)
1 ounce Parmesan cheese, grated (about ½ cup, loosely packed)
2 ounces Kasseri (or Turkish Kasar) cheese, grated (may substitute provolone)
Salt and pepper to taste
1. Warm a large skillet over medium heat and melt a quarter of the butter. Add the sliced mushrooms and sauté until soft and slick. Remove from pan and keep handy.
2. Add remaining butter to pan and melt. Add chopped tomato and press the pieces with the flat of a fork until they break into a mostly liquid sauce, about 3 to 5 minutes. Season with oregano and add the beaten eggs, then the cheeses.
3. Reduce heat to low and stir constantly until eggs are nearly firm, but still moist. Season with salt and pepper to taste (Morris’s way: lots of pepper, not much salt—the cheeses are salty on their own.) Stir in sautéed mushrooms and serve at once with toasted onion bialys, brewed decaf, fresh orange juice, and the Sunday paper.