gruyere – The Kitchen Illiterate

We spent Thanksgiving weekend with my family in San Diego, and although I had some kind of notion that I would have something to share with you all here, I slipped firmly into vacation mode when I got down there, and barely even touched my laptop the whole weekend. I was far to busy being entertained by my favorite little person. I did cook Thanksgiving dinner with my brothers, as usual (they smoked a turkey this year!), but I didn’t get as intense about the meal as I have in the past. I didn’t come up with a cooking schedule, I didn’t try to manage every corner of the kitchen, I didn’t even have recipes for some of the side dishes we made. And while things might not have come out to the table as perfect as a Martha Stewart photo shoot, I was considerably more relaxed than usual. And that was definitely something to be grateful for (so was that smoked turkey; it was incredible).

We drove back on Saturday, and the drive was not so much something to be grateful for. I think in the future I’ll be much more willing to fly home for Thanksgiving; the traffic could have been worse, certainly. But my back still hurts from 10 hours in the car. And as soon as we got home, we were thrown into a very busy week. I’m just glad my mom sent me home with leftovers, because otherwise we wouldn’t really have anything to eat.
Continue reading Squash and Swiss Chard Pasta Bake

I’m a recipe person. I love to read cookbooks and cooking magazines, and I love to read recipes. I like the lists of ingredients, the step-by-step instructions, and the implicit promise that if you follow the directions, you’ll have something to show for it. Of course, I rarely follow recipes exactly as written, but more often than not, when I’m cooking there is a magazine (or a laptop) open on the kitchen table for reference. Some people are not like this: They make things up as they go along, working largely from instinct, and they aren’t interested in collecting page upon page of cooking instruction. I’d like to think the process of learning to cook, at least for me, is largely about working toward some place in the middle.

As I learn, and gather experience under my apron strings (if I ever remembered to wear an apron), I get more comfortable leaving the recipes on the shelf. And I find some of my favorite times in the kitchen come when I read a handful of recipes and use them as inspiration, cobbling them together in my mind into a single, successful dish. Unfortunately, sometimes the results of these attempts are something less than successful. Sometimes improvisation results in stress, in burned things, under-seasoned things, uninteresting things. I try to remind myself that these flops are just part of the learning process.
Continue reading Squash and Broccoli Pasta