Cooking Techniques and Kitchen Gadgets

I hate 3:00 p.m. on a school day. It means I’m a failure. Once again, I’ve failed to come up with a “healthy snack” for my ravenous Varsity Cheerleader.  Our routine was to just go over to Chipotle which wasn’t really great because those burritos, even though they were pretty clean, would stuff her until around 5:30, at which time, I’ve lost the will to live because I’m tired and I don’t want to come up with any kind of dinner, so she’s left to forage which makes me feel like an even worse failure.

And, for the record, all those parenting books that suggest those ‘healthy snacks’ are full of it. No kid I’ve ever known, except maybe one that grew up on a commune, would ever think that shit is good.  “Oh yummy, celery with peanut butter and raisins! Ants on a log! Thanks mommy!” There’s also Amir. He’s the Fox that led Pinocchio to the world of the Lost Boys, otherwise known as the guy with the snack truck parked outside the gym. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter has come to the car with a piece of cellophane wrapped cake bigger than her face along with a jug of orange Gatorade. Jesus!

It’s a landmine of insulin torment out there. BUT…there are flashes of genius.

The best way to enjoy summer is to set goals for yourself.  The best summer I ever had was when my friend Becky and I set a goal to eat at every single restaurant on the 25 best cheap eats from Los Angeles magazine.  We failed to accomplish the goal, but is failure really such a bad thing when you’re eating well on the way there? 

This summer, I’ve come up with my first goal: learn how to successfully brew iced coffee, in other words, cold brew it. The first time I ever even heard about the concept was last year.  A new coffee shop opened in the NYU hood called Think Coffee.  I looked at the barista after my first sip and told him, “This is really amazing.”  He looked me dead in the eye and said “That’s because we cold brew it for 24 hours.  The way iced coffee should be made.”  I’m not going to lie, I kind of have a thing for pretentious baristas.  And I developed a major thing for Think iced coffee.  But then Think got popular, and popularity to me means only one thing: crowded. 

I had the world's strangest roommate. We were best friends in college and she seemed like  the perfect person to live with. She was a great listener, she was obsessed with Clive Owen and her purse was always stocked with remedies to just about anything – creams, lotions, pills, even powders. Everything was going great, until one day, it just wasn't. Her once mild room-dancing had started to rival the sound of a herd of elephants, her attempts to match our outfits had turned from sort of cute to sort of single-white-female (except that she's five feet tall and Asian) and she had invited her new best friend to come live with us for a month, without consulting me. She finally decided to move out, taking her friend with her. And they went amicably enough.

I came home with my friend Amanda that night to cook dinner, so excited to have the place to ourselves. We skipped around the apartment, lay down on the floor of the now empty second room and made our way into the kitchen to create a culinary masterpiece to celebrate our freedom. That's when we found out that she'd decided to take all of our utensils with her. Every last one, except . . . my dainty, little, silver cake knife.

Four years ago, Roy and I (newly besotted), rented a little plot of land on a Vineyard farm. We grew vegetables and sold them at the farm’s roadside stand. Living in a tiny apartment over a general store, we shuttled back and forth to tend our plot.

That fall, our friend Joannie tracked us down one day, took us by the hand, and led us to a little farm house on two acres of land. Right on the spot, she introduced us to the owners and insisted that they rent the farm house to us. I’m not sure if the owners knew what hit them, but in about an hour, we had all shaken hands and Roy and I were packing up the apartment. Our new landlords said, “Sure, grow whatever you want here.”

We moved into the little (uninsulated) 1895 farm house a few weeks later, and by spring we were turning over the soil and putting up the fences for our first vegetable plot. Roy built a little farm stand, and we stuck a sign out by the road. One summer, then two summers went by.

We got 8 laying hens, and then 50 more. The garden doubled in size, and we built a hoop house. We made a tiny bit of money off our tiny farmette, keeping the farm stand open almost every day while writing books and building houses (our real jobs), too.