cook pot stories

I recently wrote about how I am slowly developing a different relationship with cooking since Kevin died. Part of the challenge for me (and for many widowed people) has been giving myself permission to enjoy food and cooking since my spouse's death. I associate complex cooking with Kevin, so learning to relish it again is a whole new ballgame. This past weekend I decided to make lasagna. This was never a big favorite of Kevin's, but my new sweetheart, C, loves it. I wanted to make it as a love letter for him yet the idea of cooking something complex and with passion felt a bit daunting. It felt like more than I could easily manage, that I'd get lost in the details and memories. It felt like I was cheating on Kevin.  I know that's not true, that loving C doesn't mean I love Kevin any less. C understands this and accepts Kevin as part of the package; if he's involved with me then Kevin is part of our relationship. I often feel as though C has a better han...

As you know, I love cooking. A blindingly obvious statement, since this is a cooking blog, but it's worth reminding myself of this sometimes. Cooking is therapy, it's meditative, it's a chance to experiment, and it's a way I communicate my affection and esteem. I'm sure you cook for many of the same reasons. In the 2+ years since Kevin died, I've not been cooking much. When I do cook it's usually something simple, not the elaborate meals I made before he got sick. You can analyze this in many ways; his cancer took away his joy in food; it reminds me of what I've lost; I'm just too damned tired most days to deal with it; and so on. Certainly this is a part of how I'm experiencing grief. Analysis aside, I'm aware that I miss it, but I don't yet know how cooking fits into the after life. I've come to think of my life since Kevin's death, especially as more time passes, as living in the Twilight Zone, as the after life. I have a r...

So, it snowed last night in Kansas City. In May. It was actually quite beautiful, the new green leaves shaking off the rapidly accumulating snow. I thought the trees looked like teenagers, offended that they were cold but not quite willing to do anything about it. I know. these late snowfalls are harmful to the new growth, but really, I'm sure you can imagine what I mean. My response to unexpected cold weather is predictable. I make soup. I'd already been planning to make french onion soup last night, the snow just made it all the more appropriate. I love french onion soup, it's my go-to choice in many restaurants. I'd never made it before and decided this would be a good time, since soon it will be too warm for the long cooking process and, besides, I had some great beef stock in the freezer. I used the recipe in Julia Child's classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking . It's clear, simple and really, really good. Because this is a story blog as well ...

Our recent move to Kansas City means I've discovered some wonderful new foods. It's been great, exploring the local restaurants and markets. It also means a few of the things I am accustomed to just aren't available or have become prohibitively expensive.  Moving to KC also means developing new relationships. One way to do this is by mining your connections; work is the most obvious, so last week Kevin and I hosted a dinner party for some of his work colleagues. When he first arrived at his new job he was teasingly told that the new guy needs to feed all of his new work buddies. We asked what they wanted and they suggested something from New England.  Now, although I lived in New England for over 20 years, I never really took to the local cuisine. I loved the fresh seafood that is so abundant, but most of the New England food I experienced was  either fresh, simple and seasonal (yay!) or bland, solid and designed to get you through a long, cold winter (eh). Ye...

Okay, so I don't live in New England anymore. But in a burst of sympathy for my New England friends, and in celebration of the easily accessible Mexican ingredients here in Kansas City, I made pork posole for dinner tonight. Warm, spicy enough, fragrant, comforting... just the thing to eat while holed up from a blizzard. Or while thinking about people you love in a blizzard. Or, really, anytime you want something rich, comforting, and have lovely tomatillos on hand. I added olive oil to a large pot, then sautéed a chopped onion 6 cloves of garlic I sprinkled all of this with about a tablespoon of oregano a few shakes of cinnamon and clove about a teaspoon of cumin and a few bay leaves for good measure After a few minutes I added a seeded, chopped green pepper 2 jalapeño peppers, seeds in, roughly chopped And a few minutes later I added 12 husked, rinsed and roughly chopped tomatillos. These were what prompted me to make posole in the first plac...

I love my new kitchen. It's an efficient space, not too big but with adequate counters and storage. As we settle into our new home I am becoming more and more enamored with cooking in this space. I'm (finally) using my cookbooks again and taking advantage of the riches around me. Tonight I pulled out the old, deep frying pan used by my grandmother who gave to my mother who gave it to me. It's the first time I've used this pan. I wanted to honor our Hungarian and Russian heritage, so I made chicken paprika. I modified a recipe from The World's Finest Chicken by Sonia Slyer and Janice Metcalfe. It's a nice cookbook, with easy recipes using stuff you'd generally have on hand, making very tasty food. Being who I am (and really, any decent home cook does this) I tweaked the recipe. Saute one large, chopped onion in olive oil. As I poured the oil in I couldn't help but wonder if my grandmother used anything other than schmaltz and Crisco. As the o...

I was in the market today and came across a little container of peeled garlic for 78 cents. Now, I use a lot of garlic in my kitchen. I keep a garlic jar, purchased in Italy and made for this purpose, full of the papery bulbs. I enjoy breaking them apart and peeling each clove, seeing its imperfections and individual shape. I even enjoy the stickiness the comes to my fingers when I've peeled enough cloves that I know the scent won't go away with a quick wash at the sink. I like keeping the whole bulbs handy because they last longer. They don't lose their sting. Because I can touch each clove as I prepare a meal. But this little container was alluring, the ivory cloves looking up at me. What would I do with 35 or so peeled cloves of garlic all at once? I didn't want to roast a 40 clove chicken tonight... Ah. Roasted garlic, so simple and with such benefit. I scooped up the container and spent my 78 cents. I had a plan. Once home I pre-heated the oven to 350, poure...

I love winter squash. I love the determination of the shell, the clever slippery seeds, the surprising variety in its taste and texture. It is one of my favorite winter comfort foods. Late in autumn go to the farm stand. If you can’t get there, go to the supermarket, but be prepared to lie and tell everyone you went miles out of your way to find these lovely, eccentric squash. Pick out a few beauties. Butternut , with its smooth, sultry skin. Acorn , with its seductive ridges. Dumpling , small and endearing. There are so many to choose from. Don’t let your squash lust run away with you. And only buy a hubbard if you have a good, sharp ax. Cradle them like children in the back seat of your car. If you have a spare baby seat you may want to buckle the larger ones in. Bring them home. Store them in a cool, dry, dark place. They will wait for you. When you’re ready to cook one, try this. Pick your sharpest knife, for both safety and mercy. With as much s...

I love spring cooking. My garden is sending up fresh shoots, the things I forgot about from last winter are surprising and delighting me. One of those is sorrel. I had no idea, when I planted it last year, that it would come back this year with such a vengeance. I've been at something of a loss as to what to do with it - I feel like a fool saying I have too much sorrel, when it's one of those things that is fleeting and delicate, but there you have it, more sorrel than I really can eat. Then I remembered. Sorrel has a tart, fresh taste. Fish is complemented by tart things. Scallops, with their sweetness, benefit from tart accompaniments. And a dish was born. My ingredients were: butter (not shown) about a pound of fresh, creamy sea scallops. If you've not cooked scallops before, or are worried about it,  this video  has good tips on selecting and preparing them garlic scallions, fresh from the garden - another spring surprise 6 or 7 big sorrel leaves pepper to t...

My friend Ilene hosts an Oscars' party every year. It's a lot of fun - witty people commenting on clothing, presenters and award winners. There are two contests at this party. You can win a cash prize (everyone chips in) if you guess the most Oscar winners. Or you can win the dubious Urn of Shame for your pot luck contribution. Everyone brings a dish related somehow to one of the films or people nominated. I am both proud and dismayed to report that my partner Kevin Brooks and I won this year. We brought (may I have the envelope please) Natalie Port-man in Black Flan, a pun on Black Swan . A bottle of port wearing a tutu and tiara carefully nestled in cocoa dusted flan. You can see it for yourself. I had feared flan would be really hard to make, but to my delight it was actually easy. I also think I'll continue dusting it with cocoa - the bitterness balances the sweetness quite nicely. The recipe I used included cream cheese, which makes it a bit more stable (appropri...

A few days ago I picked up some lovely bay scallops at Whole Foods. I wanted to honor their loveliness, all creamy smooth and shining, and I had lemongrass in the fridge, so I did some digging for some kind of recipe that combined scallops and lemongrass. I found a recipe from Caprial and John's Kitchen , a cooking school and catering firm in Oregon, but I didn't have quite the right ingredients in the house. I improvised. Boy, did it turn out well. I am grateful to Caprial and John for sharing the recipe that inspired me. If you've not used lemongrass before, try this tip. Bend the entire stalk. Cut it at the point where it bends, the same way you would asparagus. Cur off the botton quarter inch or so and peel off the outer layer. Smell it, close your eyes and savor the incongruity of the finest lemon you've ever sniffed from a woody stalk. Imagine it growing. Be grateful. Now take the flat of your knife and whack the stalk a few times until it cracks a bit; this so...

Some time ago I posted about my problem with cookbooks. I have too many of them I don't use often enough. In that post I said I would try to use them more often and would blog about the results. Well, it's been awhile, but finally I have something to report - an exciting failure. I think we need to talk more about our failures because we learn as much from experimentation and failure (stretching our boundaries) as we do from our successes. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. And where my cake went. I needed to make a dessert for dinner with friends. Rather than go to any of my tried and true recipes or the store, I decided to try something from one of my old cookbooks. After some pleasant reading I settled on this one, The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book by Ruth Hutchinson, (c) 1948 and 1958. Each chapter begins with some homely advice, the recipes themselves are straightforward and largely attributed to various wives - Mrs. Donald Hellferich, Mrs. Thomas B. Keck - w...

For dinner tonight I made a quick pesto for boneless chicken thighs on the grill. I used to be afraid of pesto, always measuring out all the ingredients, but have finally realized it's just a matter of throwing a green herb, garlic and olive oil into the processor.The photos are terrible, so you just get the recipe. I expect the pesto would be great on potatoes too. In a food processor or mortar and pestle smush together: a lot of garlic (I used an entire head of cloves) at least 10 good sized sage leaves, fresh from the garden enough olive oil to encourage emulsion salt and pepper to taste Smear it on your chicken, potatoes, whatever and grill. Don't breath on anyone afterwards, this is a lot of garlic. Enjoy! (c) 2010 Laura S. Packer

Some ingredients seem magical and unreachable. Their very names, even in translation, evoke distance, time, an immigrant's longing for home, the stories we tell to remind ourselves we are not lost to those we love. My list is undoubtedly different than yours (these may be everyday ingredients to you!) but here are a scant few: Szechuan peppercorn Black mustard seed Durian fruit Cashew fruit Zahtar Dried limes Now, I've used or eaten most of the things on this list at one time or another. I fell in love with cashew fruit in Brazil, I love the pop of black mustard seed when I make Indian food, szechuan peppercorn thrills and then numbs my taste buds (though I don't cook well with it) and I've gotten past the initial shock of durian fruit to taste its subtle sweetness. But dried limes have long eluded me. I could see them in Middle Eastern grocery stores and wonder how on earth would I use them? Then I'd be distracted by the halvah and olives, forgetting to get drie...

Happy New Year! I know I'm almost two weeks late with the wish, but it's still kindly meant, so please accept it in the spirit intended. The New Year is a (somewhat arbitrary) time to look at our lives, evaluate and decide what we want to work on in the coming year. For example, I want to post in this blog more often. It's a time full of cultural tradition too, from the ball dropping in Times Square to fireworks to more personal traditions. In my family, I was allowed to stay up to midnight, watch Guy Lombardo and eat smoked oysters. A big treat, really. This year I decided to see in the new year with a broader cultural tradition, enacted late because I rarely pull these things off on time. I made Hoppin' John. This is a southern dish (though I was introduced to it by a Rhode Islander) made of black-eyed peas and ham hocks. It's said if you eat Hoppin' John and corn bread on New Year's Day you'll be prosperous throughout the year - eat poor on New Y...

There is a popular fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm that tells of a soldier, on his way home from war, who stops in a village and asks the townspeople for a bite to eat. They all refuse to share anything with him though they clearly have plenty. He is a wily man, so in his desperation he finds an old pot, builds a fire in the middle of the town square and heats the pot filled only with water and a stone. One by one the townspeople who had refused him come by to see what he’s doing; he tells them he’s making stone soup, the most delicious soup in the world. None of them want to admit they’ve never heard of it so all agree that yes, stone soup is exquisite. For every visitor who agrees with him he then sighs and says that his stone soup would be better still if only he had some carrots. Or cabbage. Or onions. Or… And one by one each of the villagers says that they have carrots. Or cabbage. Or onions. Or… They run back to home to fetch their ingredients for the pot. By the end the whole...

Before I go any further in this post, I need to tell you that the name is borrowed from a wonderful creative space in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Spontaneous Celebrations is a multicultural home for art and creativity. Check it out. My own spontaneous celebration happened this weekend. I believe it's important to live big, but know it's hard to do so; this weekend was a good example of the weekend conspiring to help me. I've blogged about the weekend as a whole in True Stories, Honest Lies . On Saturday my friend Serene called and asked if we would like to have dinner with her husband and herself. For once we could easily say yes and invited them for dinner. My initial thought was to order something in, but it's hard to eat healthy food when it's delivered. It is, at best, quick food . So I decided to cook. I wanted to use what I had in the house as much as possible, and I admit, I got a little excited. The first course: - dried apricots with a dab of chevre and ...

I should have taken a picture, but I didn't, so you'll just have to take my word for it. I made the best pork roast last night. It looked as good as it tasted. And I used herbs from the garden! I don't know how much the roast weighed, so you'll have to improvise. Take 1 boneless pork roast, the kind that's tied with string. It should have some fat on at least one side. Rub the inside (between the two halves) with a mixture of salt, pepper and a little sugar. Peel and roughly slice an entire head of garlic. If your fingers are garlicky afterwards you can always rinse them in lemon juice, that helps. Tuck maybe 12 pieces of garlic, four rosemary sprigs and at least four sage leaves into the roast, between the two halves. It will look nice if a little of the rosemary is sticking out. Preheat the oven to 450. Poke at least 15 holes in the less fatty side of the roast. Shove a garlic slice into each hole. Rub this side with the salt, pepper and sugar blend. Pull a rosema...