![]() One year and three days ago, at 3:30 in the afternoon on 11/11/11, I was eating lentil soup. I am able to tell you exactly that, as it was the meal I finished just as my water broke for the birth of my son. Truthfully, it was lentil soup followed by a scoop of my husband’s homemade vanilla bean ice cream, topped with a generous drizzle of David Lebovitz’s perfect hot fudge recipe Standing at the edge of the new parent cliff, really having no idea what the next many weeks would hold for us, I had been furiously putting meals away for days and days. I don’t know what I expected, but my level of anxiety was fairly appropriate. And when I get anxious, I cook. When someone is struggling, I cook. When things seem grim and I have no idea what to do, out come the cookbooks. And so for the very expectant weeks prior, I had been cooking and cooking. Our chest freezer in the basement was a culinary tetris, packed tightly with calories to keep us going in the 3ams of the coming weeks. Quart container after quart container of warming stews, gumbos, and soups were obsessively stacked alongside a half dozen bags containing fifty frozen dumplings each, devotedly hauled home from Chinatown in the city. I may have been facing a month without leaving the house or having both hands free at once, but I was not going down on an empty stomach. I didn’t know who I’d be on the other side of all of this, but I knew I’d still demand great food. Lentil soup has been a comfort food staple for me through most of the very varied episodes of my life. Cheap, simple, high in protein, and even vegetarian—for that twenty-year phase I went through—its sum is definitely more than its parts. And this will always be the last thing I cooked as a person who wasn’t someone’s mom. As soon as it gets dark before quitting time and a tiny chill shimmies under the door, I crave this recipe. And eating it again this year, days before I became a person who is the mom of a one year old, I am brought right back to a year ago, or my lunch break room in graduate school, or the kitchen in my first apartment in New York, and also my tiny dark brown dorm fridge. I look at the photo we snapped just before walking out the door to drive to the hospital, and am astounded by how I feel like I don’t even know those people. But it is indeed me, as is the girl hosting her first dinner party in a studio apartment, or the girl with the giant mug in her window seat in college, all recognizing each other by the smells and tastes of the recipes that make up my life’s cookbook. Happy first birthday darling boy.
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![]() Sweet, elegant, rosy, and full of the ocean, homemade lobster stock grabs my attention like little else. Having a few quarts of this on hand in my freezer has allowed me, on more than one occasion, to pull a seafood risotto out of thin air for unexpected dinner guests. I'll repeat that--pull seafood risotto out of thin air. Like last week's tutorial on making chicken stock, I think it is incredibly important to make a point to use every part of an animal and take nothing for granted. Particularly with pricy lobsters, not wasting any of their precious flavor or nutrients seems paramount. The shells and body have loads of luscious lobster essence, and tossing that out feels criminal. (more…) | ||||||||||||||||
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