Every Wednesday, Bon Appétit food editor at large Carla Lalli Music takes over our newsletter with a sleeper-hit recipe from the Test Kitchen vault, a cooking technique she’s really into, or an ingredient she can’t stop thinking about. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
How many dinners is an amount of dinners to cook before the cook has had enough of making dinner? In my case I would say the fatigue kicked in around number 16, which is more dinners in a row than I have ever cooked in my natural-born life. Before all the stay-at-home orders and other life-altering events of the past month, my sons ate with their babysitter hours before I even got home from work, and my own weeknight dinners were pretty slap-dash, usually consumed at the kitchen counter, catching up with my husband and kids after a long day spent grazing on whatever was cooking in the Test Kitchen. I loved to make dinner on the weekends, but to be fair, at least one weekend night was spent at a restaurant, where some of our absolute favorite family meals have taken place. Ah, the memories. Now, I start thinking about what we’re going to eat around 4:30 p.m. every single day, and some meals are definitely more successful than others.
What I’ve learned about making our nightly meal is that my work day will be usurped a lot earlier than I want it to be. I’ve learned that the kitchen needs to be cleaned (again) before I can even start cooking, otherwise I feel chaotic and scattered. I’ve learned to suppress my cravings and use only what we have in the house, rather than making a quick market trip for a piece of fish when I’m in the mood for that, or to the corner store for eggs when I realize we only have one left. Those normal things that I used to do all the time now feel shrouded in Kryptonite; I am still disoriented by the thought that the bodega is a risky place, and saddened that all of my beloved restaurants have closed their dining rooms. But being forced to be resourceful has validated truths about home cooking I believed in since “before”: Any assortment of simple things that are cooked properly and seasoned well can be a perfectly acceptable meal. That is true even when the dinner menu consists of steamed sweet potatoes, a plate of bacon, and fried plantains with a side order of kimchi, which is a real thing we had one night.
Truly, though, most of our meals have gotten pretty loose. Breakfast is a rolling stop of smoothies and cereal, staggered to meet our varied waking hours. Lunch is leftovers, cut-up cucumbers, grilled cheeses, last night’s rice crisped-up with the beans that are always in the fridge. I think leaning into simple solutions, even if a bit boring, is just part of the evolution of this home-centric lifestyle.
Never not relying on pesto.
Photo by Alex Lau, Food Styling by Susie Theodorou, Prop Styling by Sophie Strangio
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