Main Dish – Orangette

June 30

Molly — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 04:08:18 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, while researching rhubarb crumble recipes for the Crisps and Crumbles episode of Spilled Milk (still going strong, 52 weeks a year! and still featuring impromptu hair-metal duets!), I pulled down an old copy of Canal House Cooking, and it fell open to page 57, “Cutlets Smothered in Peas.” That’s when it dawned on me that I had somehow made it to age almost-39 without ever cooking a chicken cutlet, and that my child had somehow made it to age almost-five without ever eating a chicken cutlet. I understand this makes one subject to ridicule and rebuke not only in America, but also in many other parts of the world, including Japan, where panko-breaded, pan-fried chicken…

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October 3

Molly — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 17:06:20 +0000

I started my Monday by listening to Blood Orange until my ears fell off, which was nice. Then my friend Jenny told me to watch this (old-news) video (that I somehow had never seen before), and with that, my week is off and running. Hi to you. Now, business: 1. The Guardian kindly invited me to write about a food that evokes home, and I wrote about a dead-simple, bare-cupboard soup that was first made for me by my aunt Tina. That’s her below, on the right, living the early-eighties hot tub life with me and my cousins. Most people thinks that June gets her hair color and texture from Brandon, but world, let it be known that I think she’s got my texture…

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It doesn’t look like much

Molly — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 22:23:12 +0000

Helloooooooooooooooo. I didn’t mean to be gone for so long. I know what some of you were thinking, and I am delighted to report that I did not give up on blogging. I also did not die. But it’s been a long, hard, dizzying summer, I will say that, with, among other things, Herculean staffing woes at Delancey, Essex, and Dino’s. (Did you know there’s currently a shortage of restaurant cooks in a lot of cities, including Seattle? I could tell you stories.) But now that June is in school again, I’ve been able to tiptoe my way back to writing, and that’s a relief. I turned 38 last week, and that too feels good. I’ve also been cooking again, after the lazy, happy ease…

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No one awake but us

Molly — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 22:19:50 +0000

On the night we got there, when we checked in, the lady at the front desk wrote out the wifi network and password on the corner of a pad of paper, ripped it free, and handed it to me. I slid it into my phone case, so that I wouldn’t lose it, and last week, three months later, I noticed it still wedged there. “How’s that Rancho Pescadero wifi working for you?” Brandon says, peering over my shoulder. “Little slow, from 2,000 miles away?” I roll my eyes, yank out the scrap of paper, and crumple it up. But when he looks away, I press it flat again and slip it back in. I first heard about Rancho Pescadero was from a couple of Delancey neighbors and longtime…

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Doop dee doo

Molly — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 18:53:00 +0000

A couple of years ago, late one winter morning, we were out running errands in the neighborhood, and we stopped into La Carta de Oaxaca, on Ballard Avenue, for an early lunch. June was still in a high chair and not yet fully proficient at chewing anything with crunch, so we ordered their sopa de pollo for her, a rich, brothy chicken soup served in a bowl big enough for mixing cake batter, with the meat still on the bone and big hunks of zucchini, carrot, and chayote. I shredded the meat onto a plate and chopped up the vegetables with the side of my spoon. She ate with her hands, the juices running fast down her forearms, which were then still…

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On short notice

Molly — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 19:38:00 +0000

It’s hard to start a post when I’m bored with the photograph(s) I have for it. The alternate title for this post is “A Life Fraught with Difficulty, by Molly Wizenberg.” But I am never bored with beans. I don’t remember how I first learned of Molly Stevens and her classic All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking, but if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you will know that it is a longtime favorite. I bought it shortly after it came out, sometime in 2004. I was in graduate school then, planning to become Michel Foucault, albeit with more hair, fewer turtlenecks, and a vastly inferior command of the French language. Like anyone who has tried to read…

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While you’re not looking

Molly — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 15:59:00 +0000

I went through a period a few years ago when I couldn’t cook a pot of dried beans worth a damn. Every bean came out waterlogged and falling apart, like a rained-on newspaper, and on the rare occasion when every bean wasn’t waterlogged and falling apart, it was only because a few holdouts had a mouthfeel closer to gravel. I did everything I was supposed to do: I soaked them, brined them, cooked them without salt, cooked them with salt, cooked them at a simmer, cooked them so a bubble only rarely broke the surface. Every way, the window of time in which they were just right, tender but not yet reduced to mush, was narrow at best. Occasionally I hit it, but…

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One Tuesday, late-morning

Molly — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 00:30:00 +0000

I come to you today, June 13th, a fine summer’s day on which you probably have no desire to turn on the oven, to talk about roasted chicken. More specifically, I want to talk about Thomas Keller’s Favorite Simple Roast Chicken, which I prefer to call TK’s Hot Buttered Chicken. I have long been a devotee of the Zuni Cafe recipe for roasted chicken. I imagine many of you feel the same way. Zuni’s recipe, which Judy Rodgers wrote with a rare and reverential thoroughness – may she rest in peace, and may more cookbooks be written like hers – relies on three things: using a small-ish bird, salting it a day ahead, and cooking in a crackling hot oven,…

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The bean doctor

Molly — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 07:59:00 +0000

I believe everyone should know how to doctor a can of beans. I also believe that, having said this, I have become my father. I also believe I would do anything, anything, absolutely anything to get R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” which lodged itself in my head as I was typing those first two sentences, back out of my head again. Spread my wings and fly awaaaaaaaaaay I come from a family of bean doctors. The beans we ate most often were baked beans – Bush’s brand, I think – to which my dad added brown sugar and Worchestershire sauce. We ate them whenever my mom was out for the evening, usually with boiled hot dogs. It felt…

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She knows

Molly — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 11:38:00 +0000

I first met Lecia a handful of years ago, and I tyan’t remember how. We saw each other around, and then one year, maybe 2011, she took a leap and invited us to her family’s New Year’s Day party. We stood on the deck and talked, and the sunlight was warm enough that I didn’t wear a coat. I guess that was the start of something, but for me, our friendship got its footing while I was pregnant and she, a former nurse, cheerfully withstood my cross-examinations about epidurals and other hot topics of the day, and it has grown in the months and years since, over many meals that June and I have eaten at her table. Lecia is…

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