Dinner: A Love Story

by Jenny Rosenstrach

  The crumbly brown bits left in the pan after the meat or fish have cooked are the building blocks of sauce. Just deglaze by adding wine or broth and bringing to a boil while scraping the bits off the bottom of the pan. (But be warned: Deglazing can also mean “disappearing” if you’re not watching your sauce closely. Once it has thickened, remove from the heat immediately.)

  You cannot go wrong when you start and finish with butter. And also: Butter is much less likely to burn if you heat it in a pan with olive oil.

  Adding acid (a drizzle of vinegar, a spoonful of tangy buttermilk, or in the case of these scallops, a simple squeeze of lemon) will always add brightness to an otherwise boring and flat dish. I’ll never forget an interview I read with Mario Batali that reconfirmed this. He said the easiest way to pretend you know what you’re doing in the kitchen is to talk about the “acidity” level of a dish.

  The best recipes are usually the simplest. Look for recipes that call for a few high-quality fresh ingredients instead of a long list of sauces, spices, and pantry staples. They’ll taste fresher and you’ll be more likely to cook them.

  You might call this a birthday gift that kept on giving. I came home from the class and taught Andy everything I learned. And a dozen years later the scallop recipe remains a keeper.

  Pan-Seared Sea Scallops

  If I had been the one assigning names to shellfish, bay scallops would be the big scallops since they start with B and sea scallops would be the small ones since they start with S. But someone else decidedly less logical than me was given the task, so I have been forced to remember the difference by reminding myself that it’s the opposite of what it should be. Trust me, you will never forget this ridiculous, ass-backward trick now that you know it. Bay scallops = small ones; sea scallops = big ones. This recipe calls for the big ones. Total time: 15 minutes

  3 tablespoons unsalted butter

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  20–24 sea scallops, rinsed and patted dry, tough whitish muscle on the side peeled off with fingers, and salted and peppered

  2 garlic cloves, minced

  ½ cup dry white wine

  Juice from ½ lemon (about 1 tablespoon)

  Corn-Bacon Hash

  In a large skillet set over medium-high heat, add 1 tablespoon of the butter and the oil.

  When the pan is hot but not smoking, add as many scallops as you can without crowding the pan and cook for 1½ to 2 minutes per side. (When you flip them be sure to get your spatula or tongs all the way under the scallop so you don’t lose the brown crust. If using tongs, push scallops firmly from underneath before grabbing and flipping.) Remove from the pan and cook any remaining scallops.

  Once you have seared all the scallops, lower the heat to medium, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter, add the garlic, and cook for 30 seconds. (Do not let the garlic burn.)

  Add wine and lemon juice and crank the heat to high, scraping the fish bits as the liquid boils down. Watch the sauce vigilantly as it boils (you don’t want it to reduce to nothing). When it looks slightly syrupy, remove the pan from the heat and drizzle the sauce over the cooked scallops, reserving some if you are serving this with Corn-Bacon Hash (below). Which I definitely recommend, along with a fresh grape tomato salad that’s been tossed with olive oil, basil, salt, and pepper.

  Corn-Bacon Hash

  Total time: 10 minutes

  In a large skillet set over medium heat, cook 1 strip of bacon until crisp, about 2 minutes. Remove the bacon from the pan, blot with a paper towel, chop into pieces, and place in a large bowl. Add 1 minced small shallot to the bacon fat in the pan and stir until soft, about 1 minute. Add the kernels that have been cut from 4 ears of corn and cook for 2 minutes. Remove to the bowl. Add 5 or 6 chopped basil leaves, salt and pepper to taste, and, if you have it, whatever pan sauce is left from the scallops. Toss and serve.

  January 1999

  Loserati Special: Chicken Pot Pie

  I first reunited with my childhood friend Laurie at a midtown Così on a snowy day in 1999. We had lost touch after high school—she went to college in the Midwest, then traveled to Israel and Japan (where, among other things, she took a job in a strip bar), while I was struggling to figure out a career in New York City, twenty miles from where I grew up. Laurie was voted “Most Likely to Be a Starving Writer” in the superlative section of our high-school yearbook. As early as fourth grade her papier-mâché fruits in art class looked like they belonged next to Brancusis rather than gold spray-painted macaroni art. We sat with each other in Hebrew school, where Laurie would sketch cartoons of friends and enemies, and then I had to guess who they were by writing it in the blank line she’d draw under each caricature. She called this game “Famous Faces,” and we got in big trouble, to my goody two-shoed horror, when our teacher confiscated the sheet on which the teacher herself was depicted covered in warts and wearing a witch’s hat. There was my handwriting right below the cartoon: Ms. Batia.

  We were always different, but our relationship was the kind that could be picked up right where we left off, even after a six-year hiatus. And that’s what we did on that snowy day at Così, eating smoked turkey and honey mustard sandwiches. We both wanted to be writers and confessed that we’d give just about anything to write a book that would land on Oprah or, at the very least, in the Westchester Gazette. We got so caught up in our dreaming and scheming that we didn’t realize we had been there for nearly three hours. We made a date to continue the conversation on a Friday after work and pretty soon we were official writing partners with a standing date that I looked forward to all week long.

  We kept this up for almost three years, meeting every Friday at a coffee shop on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place. The goal was to think of story ideas we could pitch to magazine and book editors, even though we didn’t know any editors besides Andy, who was still at Esquire, and Laurie’s friend Ariel, who had an entry-level job at a new celebrity magazine called InStyle. Of course we hardly ever talked about ideas during our Idea Meetings. We talked about her dates—What kind of doctor was he? I asked. “Jewish!” she replied; about what we would say if Ben Stiller were sitting next to us (we were both in love with him); about her father, who she was only now learning was a con artist with multiple identities; about how I thought I might have a shot at being a better, darker writer if I had a father who was a con artist with multiple identities; about how badly we wanted to be respected novelists like Ellen Gilchrist, the author of our favorite book Net of Jewels; about how one day, “years from now,” when we both had Pulitzers and Vanity Fair contracts, we’d return to this cafe and admire the plaque above “our” table that read LAURIE’S AND JENNY’S WORLD DOMINATION STARTED HERE.

  Turns out that our world domination began with two short assignments for InStyle. (Ariel came through for us!) I was assigned a 250-word luxury hotel roundup, and for the same issue, Laurie had to report a trend piece on some breath tablets, which were apparently turning up in all the Birkin bags of the Hollywood ingenues. Since our literary debuts would be in the same issue, we decided it called for not just a party, but a proper reading, like the kind we’d seen in Page Six of the New York Post items that usually contained the word literati. (“All the literati showed up at Half King last night for Candace Bushnell’s latest book party.”) Our reading, though, was to be attended by the self-proclaimed loserati—the two of us, of course, plus Andy and the Jewish Doctor—and I would bake us all a chicken pot pie. Judging by Laurie’s reaction to this menu suggestion, you might have thought I had invented the dish myself.

  “That is genius, Jenny!” she said. “How do you think of these things?”

  So on the night of the reading, we crowded into her tiny East Village apartment. I simmered some vegetables in broth and chopped up some chicken while Laurie set up a few folding chairs and fashioned a lectern out of an IKEA stool, on top of which she placed a glass of water. When it was time for the reading, Andy introduced us as the world’s “next Matt Damon and Be
n Affleck.”

  I went first. “As many of the new breed of fashion-turned hotel designers well know, whether it’s a suite or a suit, the materials make all the difference . . .”

  Laurie closed with her story titled something like “What’s Hot Right Now.”

  And then we ate our chicken pot pie. It was so good that Laurie demanded I teach her how to do it, then proceeded to serve the dish to every dinner guest she hosted for the next decade. “Chicken pot pie is perfect for every occasion,” she emailed me years later, after her first book came out—a graphic memoir about her father. “The reason I love it so much,” she continued, “is because it can have as much or as little irony as it needs to have, depending on who I’m serving it to.” And she was right. When comfort food became all the rage, we made it almost every weekend for friends who were up on these kinds of rages. And a decade later, when our kids were old enough to hold forks, I added little pastry-monograms to their own personal pies and they loved the dinner simply and unironically. And, of course, no matter when Laurie comes over for dinner (even these days, miles away from our downtown cafe, which is now a lame-o singles bar), pot pie is the first recipe I think of making, before realizing that maybe someone who has now actually been in Page Six and on the Today Show and so much more might be ready to move on to something bigger.

  Chicken Pot Pie with Sweet Potatoes

  This recipe taught me a trick that I use all the time in other recipes: If you whisk flour into milk, it prevents the milk from curdling when you add it to hot liquids. This comes in handy any time you want to replace cream in a recipe with skim or 1% milk. Also, feel free to replace the sweet potatoes with red or Yukon Gold potatoes. Total time: 60 minutes

  1 cup chicken broth

  1 small sweet potato or yam, peeled and diced (or red or Yukon Gold potato)

  1 medium carrot, peeled and chopped

  ½ medium onion, chopped

  Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme

  Salt and pepper to taste

  ½ cup milk (any kind)

  2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  2 cups cooked chicken, shredded with two forks (store-bought rotisserie-style is ideal)

  1/3 cup frozen peas

  1 store-bought 9-inch pie crust

  1 egg, lightly beaten

  Preheat the oven to 425°F.

  In a medium saucepan, bring the broth to a boil. Add the sweet potato, carrot, onion, thyme, and salt and pepper. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.

  While the vegetables are simmering, in a measuring cup or small bowl, whisk together the milk and flour.

  Once veggies are soft, slowly add the flour–milk mixture, stirring until the filling has thickened. (That’s the flour working.) Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the chicken and peas.

  Add the pot pie filling to a 9-inch pie plate. Cover with the pie crust and cut a few slits on the top to allow the steam to escape while baking. Using a pastry brush, paint with the egg wash, which will result in a nice golden sheen.

  Bake the pie for 25 to 30 minutes, until filling looks bubbly inside.

  April 1999

  Entertaining, Part 1

  Laurie was impressed with nearly everything I cooked, but the reality is, I had very little sense of what I was doing when it came to cooking for other people—a concept most grown-ups know as “entertaining”—even though I supposedly “entertained” all the time. I knew that I wanted to cook for other people and that I liked to cook for other people but found out pretty quickly that execution was trickier than my Martha Stewart books had led me to believe. (From where exactly does one procure silver candelabras and silky, bow-tied blouses with shoulder pads that seemed to be the required uniform of the Westport, Connecticut, hostess?)

  The good news, though, was that cooking for people came with no pressure at this stage in our lives—mostly because we seemed to be the only ones in our social circle who could actually dream up something other than pasta or, more to the point, recognize if there was enough Parmesan in the risotto or salt in the marinade. I was not yet plagued by the anxieties that would come later as I started befriending food writers and editors. (Is the beef grass fed? Is asparagus in season? Is Humboldt Fog cliché? Is risotto—how could you not know this Jenny?—too 1997? See Part 3.) Most of our guests were not yet discerning types—they were hungry types. They were just grateful to eat a meal that was free and didn’t arrive by messenger bike.

  I had so much to learn when it came to entertaining—but thankfully, I didn’t know that then. For starters, no one had told me the rule that I would subsequently read and edit seventeen thousand times in the course of my food editing career: Never make something for company that you haven’t made before. I should back up and say that labeling our regular crew of guests “company” makes me laugh. There was Evan who lived around the corner from us and whom we nicknamed Kramer because he liked to buzz himself in to see what was up—invariably on a Sunday night while a stew simmered on the stovetop. There were the college roommates who seemed much more concerned about the supply of beer than how badly we overcooked the pork loin. And there was, of course, Laurie, who would stand there in disbelief at any meal before her, even if it was as quotidian as spaghetti and meatballs, impressed by the fact that I had somehow strategically mixed together a few ingredients procured at Key Food to form something edible.

  “How did you do this?” she’d ask.

  “It’s called cooking,” I’d say.

  But the point is, we would often wing it when we had friends for dinner—giving not nearly enough thought to the timing of a meal, the quantity of food as it related to number of guests, the degree of difficulty, how much hands-on time it required. I remember once leaving my midtown office at six o’clock even though guests were coming at seven and I hadn’t yet done the shopping for my menu: A Barbara Kafka roasted pork loin with apples with Emeril’s three-potato “lasagna,” which looked good in the book but which I would soon discover required a mandoline, a do-or-die demand to use whole nutmeg, not ground, plus, I think, that nearly extinct bird that François Mitterand requested for a last meal as he lay dying. To make matters worse, I was chained to the kitchen all night long instead of hanging in the living room with my guests as they shoveled cubes of yellow cheese into their mouths with toothpicks. All of which brings me to Rule #2: Always read a recipe through before you make it. You will avoid the above described agita and, God willing, never experience the unfortunate moment when you come across the directive “Refrigerate for 4 hours” in a recipe as you pour a second glass of Pinot Gris for your friend who expects to be sitting down at the (unset) table within the hour. Just saying.

  I did manage to do a few things right. For instance, I tried to (Rule #3) select menus and dishes that required no doneness assessment. That is, I never wanted to break out a meat thermometer or compare the “give” on a slab of beef to the palm of my hand to determine its medium rareness—not in public at least. Simple one-pound fillets of fish terrified me. A rib eye? Forget it. The pressure of overcooking or undercooking them was just too much for me to bear. So I mostly stuck with recipes that required minimal culinary instinct, or to be slightly more generous, dishes that had some built-in forgiveness in the technique. Like stews, braises, baked pastas, soups—in general, recipes with ingredients that get mixed together, dumped together, cooked down together. So that if there was a mistake—the wrong amount, the wrong chop, the wrong ingredient—it was much easier to keep it hidden. I found that these dishes were almost impossible to undercook or overcook. Plus, once they were in the oven, they allowed me to sit and eat yellow cheese cubes with my guests instead of slaving over a stove. I can’t recommend this strategy highly enough to fledgling entertainers (minus the cheese cubes).

  Three Make-Ahead Meals for Entertaining

  Pomegranate Pork Loin with Cabbage

  Pork loin is a lean cut of meat, so make sure you drizzle lots of pan sauce on the slices when you serve. And don
’t skimp on the cabbage either. Total time: 2 hours 30 minutes

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  1 boneless pork loin (2½ to 3 pounds), patted dry and salted and peppered

  1 large onion, chopped

  1 garlic clove, minced

  1 teaspoon Chinese Five Spice (optional)

  Salt and pepper

  Dash or two of soy sauce

  About 3 cups of any combination of red wine, pomegranate juice, and chicken broth (I usually do a third/a third/a third)

  ½ head red cabbage, shredded

  In a large Dutch oven set over medium-high heat, add the oil. Brown the pork loin on all sides so you get a nice golden crust, about 5 minutes per side. Remove to a plate. Add the onion, garlic, Chinese Five Spice (if using), and salt and pepper and cook until soft, about 5 minutes.

  Return the pork to the pot. Add the soy sauce and your combination of red wine, pomegranate juice, and broth to allow the liquid to come a third of the way up the loin. Bring to a boil and then cover and simmer for 2 to 3 hours, flipping once halfway through. (Monitor the liquid level to make sure a third of loin is always submerged—add more juice or wine if not.) The longer it simmers, the better.

  About 10 minutes before you serve, add the red cabbage to the pot. Remove the pork and slice. Bring the braising liquid to a boil and cook until it is slightly thickened, 2 to 3 minutes. (It won’t get syrupy because there is not enough fat in the meat.) Serve the pork with the braising liquid and cabbage spooned on top.