While others gushed about family recipes, I was going through drive-throughs, chowing down at my neighborhood taqueria or frequenting the nearby Vietnamese restaurant. Don't get me wrong, those things are great but, well, I was getting tired of them.
I wasn't looking for a new hobby when I decided to learn to cook. In all actuality, I was probably looking for a new drive-through when the NPR interview with Amanda Hesser, author of The Essential New York Times Cookbook, came on the air. Hesser asked readers to send in their "most stained recipes" from the past 150 years of The New York Times and then spent six years cooking through them. Impressive in it's own right but not nearly as impressive to me as Hesser's description of the readers' most popular recipe submission, Purple Plum Torte:
One, it has Four steps. You look at it, you don't feel intimidated. Most of the ingredients, except for the plums, you probably have at home.... You can mix it up in any order and you can't screw it up. All you have to do is stir and you plop it into a pan and stick the plums on top and the plums sink into the batter and they look like these little inlaid jewels, so it's very beautiful when it comes out of the oven. So if you've never baked before, you think that you've done this masterful recipe.It was as though she were speaking directly to me. Four steps? You can't screw it up? You'll think you've created a masterpiece? Now we're cooking! Where do I sign up? I googled the recipe and made the torte. It came out just as delicious as promised. Gooey sweet bits of plum punctuating a light, buttery cake moistened by dripping plum juice. The recipe, originally published in 1983, had stood the test of time. It was so worth the tiny effort set forth, it set me on a quest for more quick, easy, delicious recipes, not all of which have been as successful.
One endeavor was Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread, a wildly popular foodie fad that completely passed me by in 2006. Although my first attempt failed to yield an adequately risen loaf, it did leave me with a treasured new addition to my kitchen: my Le Creuset pot. This 3.5 quart enamel-coated cast iron workhorse can go "from the stove to the oven to the table," as they say. I initially started using it as a way to justify the expense to myself (even in the discontinued forest green shade I settled for, it was a lot to spend). Since then I have been browning and braising meats, making gravy and generally preparing the kind of home cooked goodness that a trip through the drive-through could never yield.
We're talking about everything from Classic Pot Roast to Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic to Pork Roast with Peppers. So what if they're not considered gourmet? So what if you can pronounce all the ingredients? These meals make me want to cook more. So, dear readers, thus began my blog.
