About
Who is cooking, and why there is always a jar of lentils open
Hello, I'm the one holding the wooden spoon
I did not grow up in a restaurant kitchen and I have no formal training. What I have is about fifteen years of cooking dinner almost every night, a stubborn curiosity about why things work, and a kitchen that is too small for the number of pots in it.
I started writing recipes down because friends kept asking for them over text, and answering "how much garlic exactly?" at eleven at night got old. The blog grew out of those messages, and it still sounds like them: practical, a bit opinionated, occasionally funny about how the third attempt went.
A fairly typical day
7:00 — Coffee, ground too coarse because I am impatient. Fifteen minutes of reading other people's recipes, which is the cook's equivalent of scales.
8:30 — Market, twice a week. I go with a list and come home with something that was not on it. In March that means the first forced rhubarb; in October it means far too many beets.
10:00 — Testing. A recipe gets cooked three times before it goes online: once to find out whether the idea works, once to fix the quantities, once to check that someone who is not me can follow the instructions. Version two is usually the disaster.
13:00 — Lunch is whatever version two produced, eaten standing up, notebook next to the plate. The notebook is covered in oil and this is fine.
14:00 — Photographs, chasing the light across the kitchen table. Food styling here means: wipe the rim of the bowl, move the ugly cloth, take forty pictures, keep one.
16:00 — Writing. The cooking is the easy part. Explaining exactly how dark "golden" means is the hard part.
19:00 — Dinner, cooked for other people, from a recipe I already know. No notebook. This is the meal that reminds me why any of the rest of it happens.
22:00 — Something is soaking. Beans, grains, a jar of something on the counter with a cloth over it. There is always a project in progress.
What I believe about food
- Vegetables deserve the good pan. Not the sad steamer in the back of the cupboard.
- Salt early, acid late. Almost every flat dish is missing one of the two.
- Healthy is not the same as joyless. Olive oil, cheese and bread all live here.
- Buy fewer, better ingredients. A good tin of tomatoes will do more for you than any gadget.
- Leftovers are a feature. Half of what I cook is designed to be better the next day.
Cooking well is mostly paying attention. Everything else is shopping.
Me, to anyone who will listen
The pantry I cannot cook without
Puy lentils, chickpeas, tahini, a block of good parmesan or its vegetarian equivalent, tinned tomatoes, flaky salt, two kinds of olive oil (one for cooking, one for finishing), lemons, and more garlic than any household of this size can reasonably justify.