Fall Cooking
- At October 12, 2012
- By nesthome
- In Blog
- 0
Suddenly it’s time to cook again. Of course, I’ve been cooking, and I’ve been eating. Yet summer food is different somehow – easier, lighter, faster. Tomatoes, cucumbers and garlic in the blender and in five minutes you have gazpacho. Pizza on the grill is fabulous in its own right, but it’s been a long time since the last oven pizza, and I’m starting to miss it.
Before the temperatures even start to drop, other clues tip me off to the transition into autumn. The sycamores, always the first to go, start browning and dropping their leaves. The cicadas get insanely noisy. Sweet potatoes and winter squash appear at the farmers market. And just like that, I’m longing for fall and its foods – soups, casseroles, and anything roasted in the oven.
Things change at Nest, too, just a few weeks ahead of the outside reality. In late August long sleeved shirts and fleece jackets make their appearance, and the wall of wool socks explodes with color and patterns. September brings cast-iron Dutch ovens and baking stoneware. Telling a customer recently about the non-stick surface that the stoneware develops with use, I remembered the one I have at home… lasagna sized… right, lasagna, I used to make that, back when turning on the oven wasn’t a sweat-inducing hideous thought. It’s time for lasagna again.
A few weeks ago Nest received a big stack of copies of Dinner: A Love Story. A copy went home with me soon after, and while I have used it as bedtime reading, I have the sense that this book is going to come alive in my kitchen now as we move into the cozy season.
The author of Dinner: A Love Story, Jenny Rosenstrach, believes in eating dinner together. She’s not at all judgy or bossy about it, but she does believe that, “it has done more to foster togetherness and impart meaning and joy into my family life on a daily basis than just about anything else I can think of.” Jenny understands that consistently making a remotely civilized dinner happen for a one, two, or four+ person family is not easy, but believes it’s definitely worth the effort. To that end, the book is full of amazing recipes, as well as family stories, inspirations and tactics for making good eating happen in your home.
Jenny and her husband Andy write a blog (also called Dinner: A Love Story) where several times a week they offer up more recipes and seasonal ideas. They’re starting to feel like friends, or at least friendly kitchen mentors who will guide me into this next season of cooking…and then gathering my people to eat at the dining room table. Because it’s worth it.
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