Hello and welcome to Cooking Without a Net, the newsletter in which I write about making food and making do. Some of you liked Magically Delicious and I did too, so here’s part deux.1
Cooking Without A Net is the name of my imaginary cooking show. Its genesis was in a rental kitchen probably on Martha’s Vineyard, certainly many vacations ago, and definitely involved a wine bottle as a rolling pin and at least one McCormick pepper tube2 of indeterminate but definitely not young age.
You know the rental kitchen I’m talking about: it may or may not have paper napkins, fossilized powdered garlic, several boxes of stale teabags, rice, and some birthday candles. Also maybe some “lite” olive oil, which we all know is completely useless or an equally pointless plastic bottle of Log Cabin “maple syrup.” Half a sleeve of red Solo cups and a giant pile of straws. A hundred placemats, one dish towel, and don’t get me started on the knives although to be fair I wouldn’t leave good knives in a rental, either.
Peter is likely the one who quipped that I should start a youtube cooking show on the topic of vacation cooking because I was probably trying to make something and simultaneously swearing about the crappy kitchen layout but also determined to zhuzh up some sow’s ear of a meal because I have a reputation for chrissake. And if we’re somewhere like the Vineyard, the local ingredients are gorgeous and basically begging me to cook them. So the idea3 of MacGyvering a meal, or cooking without the safety net of my kitchen and tools and decent knives is ultimately appealing in a sick kind of way.
But speaking of that net . . . right now I am missing my own kitchen since we are doing a complete rehab of the space. What I found when I came home:
It is going to be great when it is done but for now the “kitchen” is the dining room with the fridge moved in, some cutting boards, and an induction burner. The living room is stuffed with stacks of shelves and humidity-sogged cardboard boxes where all the actual kitchen stuff has gone.4
Outside - pray for a warm dry autumn please - there is the grill, and some buckets to wash dishes in which involves turning the hose on and off which involves stepping over the too-high threshold to the greenhouse which feels like an accident waiting to happen. All of which makes cooking at home right now extremely net-less, requiring jury-rigging of the highest order.
Another net that I’ve gotten used to recently is what we might call the Ballymaloe Way, which will catch you when you fall and then boost you up with instruction and guidance and a Gusteau-vian belief that anyone can cook!5 I came back from Ireland with so much focus and excitement and energy around food and cooking and I don’t want to lose that but jesusmaryandjoseph when you’re firing on one plug-in burner it is a lot easier to make a packet of ramen for dinner than to go all homemade.
I would be remiss in not mentioning another net that has . . . changed, at any rate. Some of you are familiar with my cooking teacher/cookbook author/cook extraordinaire mother, whom I could always call with some random cooking question that she could either answer or have an opinion on (as often the latter as the former TBH). My brother Peter fills that space sometimes now,6 and now that his son Sam has graduated from ICE’s Pastry and Baking Arts program,7 I guess that the in-house advisory service is in pretty good shape. Still, we all know who actually invented the lobster so follow us Lauterbachs for more culinary commandments!8
One of the many things I learned in Ireland was that I like writing these newsletters and they serve multiple functions including chronicle and therapy. So this one here is also a way for me to not look down at the lack of nets but just keep my tits up as Mrs. Maisel would say and keep cooking.
So CWAN is a kind of world-according-to-me, post-Ballymaloe, food and cooking newsletter that some of you asked about.9 Feel free to follow along, participate, ask questions, propose topics, and generally kibbitz however you like! This newsletter will NOT be like Magically Delicious. For one thing, that was such a unique subject with an endless variety of topics and people and gorgeous sights to share, the likes of which I wonder if I will ever see again. Also, I can’t keep up that volume of writing because unlike in Ireland here I am supposed to go to work and stuff.
Are we happy with that?
Of course the footnotes are back. This one is to tell you that if you’d like to receive notifications about posts in your email inbox, just subscribe - it’s free!
I can’t even bring myself to use the word “challenge” because that is loaded with expectations, kind of like “goal-setting” which is a practice I avoid at all costs.
Bill packed it all up while I was away. King.
CHPL provided critical support on the Pennywort party pork so you know he’s solid.
An actual serious culinary training program, this is a big deal!
I so wanted to say something when we did lobsters at Ballymaloe but held my tongue since they actually know a thing or two about shellfish there in Ireland . But here’s the story: when we lived in Cincinnati many years ago, our church would have an annual lobster sale as a fund-raiser. I guess there were always lobster dinner parties popping up around that, and at one of them, my mother (a Massachusetts native, so had her bona fides when it came to lobster) was, shall we say, holding forth on how to eat the creature. Some guy at the table finally turned to her and said “Lady, do you think you invented the lobster?” And that, friends, is the origin story of the lobster.
And if you didn’t ask, why are you still reading?
Looking forward to more tales like these! Also, my underutilized but well-appointed kitchen is here for you any time!!
YAY