Dinner: A Love Story

by Jenny Rosenstrach

We are total suckers for pork, and so are the kids. This pomegranate braised loin is not as hard as it looks—and yet, even tastier than it looks.

  Braised Beef Short Ribs

  This dish—a simplified version of a Balthazar recipe—is a real showstopper in the winter, and the longer it sits in the oven, the meltier and tastier it becomes. A few years later, when we had kids, we’d give them a serving of these at seven o’clock, and two hours later, when they were in bed, we’d serve the rest to our guests. Total time: 3 hours 30 minutes (includes 3 hours hands-off braising time)

  5 pounds beef short ribs, cut crosswise into 2-inch pieces

  Salt and pepper

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  3 medium carrots, peeled and chopped

  2 stalks celery, chopped

  3 onions, chopped

  1 tablespoon tomato paste

  3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  1 bottle dry red wine

  Herbs: 2 sprigs fresh rosemary, 8 sprigs fresh parsley, and 6 sprigs fresh thyme tied with kitchen string

  1 head garlic, halved crosswise

  4 cups beef broth

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Season the short ribs with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat, and in batches, brown the short ribs 4 to 6 minutes each side. Remove the short ribs and add the carrots, celery, and onions. Cook until the onions are soft and golden, 5 to 10 minutes. Add the tomato paste and flour and cook 2 to 3 minutes.

  Whisk in the wine and then return short ribs to the pot. Bring to a boil and cook until the wine is reduced by about half. Add the herbs, garlic, and broth to the pot. Bring to a boil and cover. Transfer the pot to the oven and cook until the meat is falling apart, about 3 hours. (You might want to stir them around every hour or so.)

  When you are ready to eat, transfer the short ribs to a serving platter with a slotted spoon. Using a colander, strain the sauce into a medium saucepan. Cook the sauce over medium heat until it thickens, about 5 minutes. Adjust the seasoning to taste, spoon the sauce over the short ribs, and serve.

  Baked Ziti with Sausage and Vegetables

  You can prepare this in advance (and refrigerate) up until the final step, when you bake for 30 minutes. Just be sure to bring the dish to room temperature before you throw it in the oven. Total time: 1 hour

  ½ pound ziti

  1½ cups crushed tomatoes

  ½ cup shredded Italian fontina cheese

  ½ cup shredded ricotta salata

  1 cup baby spinach

  8 shakes oregano

  2 tablespoons butter

  2 garlic cloves, minced

  Shake of red pepper flakes

  3 cups mushrooms, sliced

  2 links sweet Italian sausage, casings removed

  Pinch of salt and pepper

  1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons tomato paste

  2 cups whole milk

  ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

  ½ cup plain bread crumbs

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  Preheat the oven to 400°F.

  In a large saucepan, bring 3 quarts of salted water to a boil, add the pasta, and cook for about 8 minutes. (The pasta will finish cooking during baking.) Drain the pasta well and rinse with cold water.

  In a deep baking dish, combine the pasta, tomatoes, cheeses, spinach, and oregano.

  In a large saucepan, melt the butter over low heat and add the garlic and pepper flakes; cook, stirring, for about 2 minutes. Add the mushrooms and sausage (breaking up the links with a fork) and the salt and pepper. Cook until the mushrooms are tender, about 5 minutes.

  Add the flour to the mushroom—sausage mixture and cook, stirring continually for 1 minute. Add the tomato paste, milk, and nutmeg. Bring to a boil, whisking, and simmer for 30 seconds. Pour the sauce over the pasta in the baking dish. In a separate bowl, combine the bread crumbs and oil. Sprinkle over the pasta and bake for 30 minutes.

  Okay, back to the rules. Even before I started keeping a dinner diary, I was recording comments next to recipes in cookbooks. Sometimes my scribbles were straight-up reviews about what I cooked for people (“Yum! Will make this again!”) or edits (“less salt than called for here”), but quite frequently they related to specific ingredients. The price of those ingredients was often an issue. (“Raspberries too expensive!” I wrote on a Silver Palate pie recipe.) My friend Kate keeps a mental list of ingredients she calls “page turners,” so when she sees things like cider vinegar or cream of tartar or cornstarch listed in a recipe, she immediately turns the page. She’s the first one to admit how irrational her fears are, but when I wrote about the topic on my blog, it turns out almost everyone has his or her own comprehensive list of page turners: puff pastry, marjoram, tarragon, fish sauce, fennel, caraway seeds. One reader even commented, “Mayo is my page turner. It freaks me out.”

  My advice is to break down your fears and force yourself to expand your horizons so that you may expand your pantry. The more I bit the bullet and just bought the expensive or scary-sounding ingredient, the more prepared I was when I was designing a menu for guests. I had things in my kitchen that were downright exotic by my 1998 standards: tarragon vinegar, Sriracha sauce, fleur de sel. And a few that should probably not have registered as exotic but did anyway: Worcestershire sauce, whole nutmeg, bay leaves. I found that as I built my pantry, it made entertaining easier, less overwhelming. If I had a stocked pantry, I wasn’t starting from zero every time, and this opened up doors to other exciting places. So, in summation, Rule #4: Don’t let unfamiliar ingredients scare you off. You will be amazed how much more frequently you will see that ingredient called for in recipes once it is in your pantry waiting to be used. (It’s like the SAT vocabulary list in eleventh grade: Remember how much more often you saw the word plethora after you learned what it meant?)

  Now for Rule #5 which has been laid down many times before (most notably by Julia Child) but, based on my experience as a host and a guest at many dinner parties, somehow still hasn’t sunk in: Don’t apologize if something goes wrong. Because nine times out of ten, that “something” has not gone wrong at all in anyone’s mind but the cook’s. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to my dinner host say something like “I’m sorry that the pasta is too mushy” or “This sauce was much lighter the last time I made it for Ted and Jane” or “Ach! This kale is too bland—I should’ve added more horseradish.” What ends up happening is that instead of thinking about how grateful I am that someone has cooked dinner for me, and instead of focusing on the very pleasant conversation around the table, I start analyzing the pasta and the kale in ways I never would have had she not mentioned them. Yeah, she’s right, it would taste better with more horseradish. There are exceptions, of course. Like when I was still honing my whole chicken roasting technique and ended up carving up a salmonella special to my sister and her fiancé. There were many sorrys dished up that night alongside the Middle Eastern food we ended up ordering for delivery.

  Now these rules are all fine and good when you’re making dinner for a few friends and neighbors, but what happens when it’s time for a bonafide party, the kind of event where you consider peeling the price tag off the bottom of your wedding registry stemware (but in our case, just consider)? We only had these kinds of affairs once a year—our annual holiday party—but, other than the plastic wine glasses, we got seriously into them, buying festive invitations at Kate’s Paperie and star garlands at Crate and Barrel; unearthing our Frank Sinatra and Phil Spector holiday albums; dog-earring dozens of Martha Stewart’s hors d’oeuvres recipes, and using the diary to record everything along the way. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Not just what I was going to buy and what I was going to make but also who showed up, who didn’t, what was left over, what went fast, what was a huge hit, what was a complete doozy. In addition to providing some very helpful hints—“Less food, more beer” or “People like sausage” or “Never again offer one hundred knish
es”—each postmortem gives me a snapshot of the year we were completing. The increase in size of our social network from new jobs didn’t necessarily correlate to an increase in real-estate square footage, so it was an annual struggle to make sure the guest list stayed manageable. Every year, on the day of the holiday party, Andy and I would look at the way-too-long list of names and the way-too-long to-do and to-cook lists and swear to each other that this was the last year we were going to do this party. Which brings me to my last rule, Rule #6: In spite of the pain, remember it’s worth it. Because then, every year, on the day after the holiday party—or the day after the dinner party or the bridal shower or the birthday celebration or whatever production we were going to the ends of the earth to coordinate—we would wake up, recount all the fun we had, then start planning the next one.

  September 1999

  Starter Cookbooks

  My mother-in-law’s handwritten recipes were special for obvious reasons, but there was also something special about the new recipes we were discovering on our own. This effort involved regular scouring of Gourmet, the New York Times Living section, and the cookbooks that were starting to populate our shelves. By 1998, we had amassed a nice little library in our kitchen—surely owing, in part, to my cookbook-of-the-month membership. (To join, This Exciting Offer: ten cookbooks for only $1!) We had my mom’s copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a newly revised and updated Joy of Cooking, a bunch of Emeril books, and of course, The Silver Palate Cookbook. Almost anything I make from this last book, even today, qualifies as special.

  I’ll never forget the day I got it. It was 1992. I was wrapping up my summer job teaching tennis before heading off to my senior year in college, when one of my “students” (a mom of three young kids) handed me a paperback copy as an end-of-summer thank-you gift. In my memory of this moment, there’s organ music, and a beam of sunlight lasers like a spotlight on the cover. The inscription on the first page was Good luck with your cooking endeavors! Love, Dyane.

  Dyane told me that The Silver Palate cookbook had changed her life and that if I was going to learn anything about cooking (I guess I had expressed some vague interest in between overhead drills), I needed to study this book for the aspiring gourmet. Different from Julia, different from Joy, this one was revolutionary, with recipes calling for fancy ingredients like arugula and gorgonzola.

  I filed the book away and didn’t reach for it again until the following summer after I had graduated and spent a few weeks in Florence visiting my new boyfriend, Andy, who was “studying art.” Like every other person who visits Italy for the first time, I returned to New York determined to teach myself how to cook, especially since I was now going to be on my own. I was planning to move out when summer was over. No more dining hall. No more Mom.

  The Silver Palate was already a raging success—it had been published more than a decade earlier and had sold millions of copies—but the typical owner of it was more like Dyane (someone who could make use of, say, the “Bridge and Poker Sandwiches” sidebar) than like me (someone who didn’t realize that chicken stock and chicken broth were the same thing).

  So I spent the summer stumbling through a few of the recipes that seemed unintimidating (or, at bare minimum, recognizable) to a girl who ordered sweetbreads once, thinking they were glazed pastries. When Andy came back from Italy, I made him Tortellini with Gorgonzola Cream Sauce to celebrate our reunion. The recipe called for the sauce—a mix of vermouth, cream, and stock—to be “reduced” by a third, which I took to mean “pour a third of the sauce down the drain.” For Thanksgiving that year, I baked the Cracklin’ Corn Bread (with bacon, oh man) but somehow forgot the butter, prompting my mom to remind me for the fifteen subsequent Thanksgiving corn breads, “Did you remember the butter?”

  But as I cooked and dined out and got married to the guy who liked (or pretended to like?) my tortellini, more of the fancy-sounding recipes (escabeche, taramasalata, chicken dijonnaise) seemed less like dishes served at garden parties I’d never be invited to and more like things I could try out on a few friends. I started using the book less as a cookbook and more as a culinary literacy test, flipping through the pages every few months to quiz myself on recipes. Had I heard of all the ingredients? Could I figure out how to make it just using the ingredient list and not the instructions? Even now, two decades later, I still go back to my Silver Palate all the time—for the gazpacho, the zucchini bread, the butternut squash and apple soup—and more often than not, I manage to get it right.

  What’s Held Up from My Kitchen Library, ca. 1998

  The Silver Palate Cookbook, by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. See previous page.

  Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child, Louise Bertholle, and Simone Beck. Even if you only ever end up making her beef bourguignon and coq au vin, it will be worth it.

  Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook, by Martha Stewart. During this period of our lives we had lots of time to make homemade crackers and experiment with savory bread pudding bites. Later, it was all about the no-cook spread of dried sausages, which Martha suggests one serves with “a bounty of mustards.”

  The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, by Ina Garten. I now own all her books, but this first one in the series is the one I still use most. I would guess her turkey meat loaf shows up in my dinner diary at least a dozen times in 1999, the year this book came out.

  The Classic Italian Cookbook, by Marcella Hazan. After visiting Andy in Italy, I stopped by my local bookstore on the way home from the airport and asked my friend Matt who was working there if he could recommend a good Italian cookbook that might offer even just a hint of what I had just experienced across the Atlantic. As far as I know, Matt never cooked a thing in his life, but he will forever hold a special place in my heart because he handed me this book and, with the understatement of the year, told me, “People seem to really like her.”

  What I’ve Added to My Kitchen Library, ca. 2011

  How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman. In my mind, a kitchen library without this all-purpose book is like having a wardrobe without a pair of jeans. Basic, useful, beloved, I hardly go a week without opening it up for inspiration and information.

  How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman. This was his answer to the conscious-cooking movement a decade later. It offers the same comprehensive repertoire of basic dishes but all of them plant-based.

  The Fine Art of Italian Cooking, by Giuliano Bugialli. This book is filled with authentic Italian dishes from a master, but I now mostly use it for one: the minestrone. My friend Pilar first pointed it out to me, and it’s one of those recipes that freezes guests midslurp. “What is this?” they all ask. It’s that good.

  The Gourmet Cookbook, by Ruth Reichl. If I use Bittman for everyday cooking, I use this classic for casual entertaining. The recipes manage to be just exotic enough without being intimidating.

  Great Food Fast, by the editors of Everyday Food. I think Martha Stewart deserves some kind of medal for inventing the magazine Everyday Food. With this book, a compilation of the best of the magazine, she was the first one to tell me elegant and easy were not mutually exclusive terms when it came to dinner. So far, there are three books in the series, and all are must-haves for a starter library.

  The Silver Spoon, by the editors at Phaidon Press. I don’t use this massive compilation of Italian recipes as frequently as the rest of my food-loving friends do. But I try to channel it every time I write a recipe on my website. It does a great job of making recipes sound conversational—as though you are just taking instructions from a friend—instead of the somewhat scientific way we are used to seeing them in most cookbooks.

  My Bread, by Jim Lahey. I was petrified of making my own bread before Jim Lahey came to town. His famous no-knead bread recipe is in here, as are dozens of others that will upgrade the most basic corners of your culinary life. The homemade pizza crust is worth the price of admission.

  Time for Dinner, by me, Pilar Guzman, and Alanna
Stang. It goes without saying I use the recipes from this book all the time. I cowrote it with Alanna and Pilar when I was an editor at Cookie. We directed it at parents who were cooking for young kids, but at the end of the day, the recipes are for everyone. That was the point. You don’t have to completely change the way you cook when you have kids. You just have to change your mind-set. And your expectations. And maybe your medications.

  May 2000

  You Make It, You Own It

  As we amassed a small collection of go-to recipes, Andy and I began settling into a regular weeknight cooking routine. But even though we always ate together, we didn’t necessarily always cook together. We favored the one-night-on, one-night-off schedule, though it wasn’t necessarily a policy that was set in stone. Often I would see a recipe in Gourmet and be so eager to get started on it that I couldn’t wait for him to come home from work to pitch in. Likewise, he’d scour our growing cookbook collection and select meals that I had no interest in making with him—meals, actually, that I wouldn’t have ever selected in the first place. A lot of keepers came out of this trial-and-error period, but more important, a dinner rule that is still in effect twelve years later took root: When one of us discovers a new recipe, cooks it for dinner, and it’s a success, it is the cook’s responsibility to prepare that dinner from that point forward. Forever. Ad infinitum. We have probably eaten chicken with soy-lime sauce from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything three dozen times since 1998, and Andy, who was the first to recognize its potential, has prepared it every single one of those times. Likewise, Andy has never made “my” minestrone or my fish cakes or the chicken, sausage, and corn stew I found in Gourmet and proceeded to make every Saturday night for two months. It has nothing to do with skills or technique. A meal breaks down along party lines purely by provenance . . . which can come in handy. Quite often I will respond, “How ’bout those black bean burritos” to Andy’s inquiry via email, “What should we have for dinner?” as much out of laziness as out of a craving for an easy vegetarian dinner. Because the recipe for “those black bean burritos” belongs to him.