Starters – Orangette

From now on

Molly — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 04:35:00 +0000

Our friend Ben was here last week. He arrived on Thursday, just in time for lunch, and flew out early Tuesday morning. Even June misses him, I think. She got into the habit of standing at the top of the basement stairs – our guest room is down there, a dungeon with red deep-pile carpet and faux wood paneling and an enormous oil furnace that’s as loud as a train – and yelling, Beh! Beh! Beh! until he came upstairs. We all agree that his trip was too short, but he did stay long enough to play a ukulele duet with Brandon, to get a kiss from June, to make me a Boulevardier and a great steak, to help us host a…

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But the soup

Molly — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 22:39:00 +0000

Would you look at that! While trying, and failing, to start this post about squash soup, I accidentally ate an entire chocolate chip cookie dough ball from the Delancey walk-in! Let’s get right to it. I’ve been wanting to tell you about this soup for more than a week now, but a certain crazy-haired dancing maniac of a young person is getting a molar, or something, and has been waking up veeeerrrrrry early and then spending a large portion of the day crawl-running around the house/park/bathtub/Delancey, panting, grunting, and generally looking and acting a lot like Animal. After she goes to bed, I make myself a drink, warm up some soup, open a book, close the book, and sleep like a dead person.…

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Such is the power

Molly — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:49:00 +0000

Let the record show that, I, Molly Wizenberg, have, in this lifetime, made some ugly deviled eggs. Maybe this picture is the better approach. I seem to have come down with some sort of virus, the kind of thing that feels totally out of place in the month of June, that keeps you in your bathrobe, eating mostly toast and canned peaches, for the better part of five days. To be perfectly honest, I can’t say that I feel like eating a deviled egg right now. But I did manage to eat a bowl of cereal this morning, and that is a great improvement. I even felt well enough for a cup of coffee! Maybe, by the time you…

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Easy enough

Molly — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:41:00 +0000

We moved last Tuesday. I’m going to repeat that, because it sounds so unlikely, so inadvisable, that I know you might not believe me. I hardly believe me. But we did. We moved. Brandon is starting a second business, and I’m trying to start a second book, so, you know, la la la, let’s move. We’ve had worse ideas, but I can’t think of them right now. This is the last picture taken in our old kitchen. Our old kitchen, our old place, our old duplex, where we lived for almost five years, on a noisy street with the nocturnal neighbor who does outdoor home improvement projects by flashlight. I will miss that place, but only a little, and never…

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Drop everything

Molly — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 01:25:00 +0000

A year or so ago, when we opened Delancey, I thought our lives were over and we would never see our friends again. Now that I type that out, it sounds like I was channeling Chicken Little, but my thinking wasn’t without reason: in the restaurant business, you work when other people play, and that complicates almost everything. But as it turns out, our friends are more flexible than I had given them credit for, and like us, a lot of them work odd hours. So over the past several months, we’ve begun to tweak our collective habits. I didn’t know this, but dinner parties don’t have to take place at dinnertime. You can also have them in the daytime.…

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Before you know it

Molly — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:12:00 +0000

Somewhere, a woman named Corentine is serving leeks vinaigrette for dinner. It’s been ten years, but I know it. Corentine was my host mother in Paris, the year that I was 21 and studying abroad. She had the most magnificent name I had ever heard and something a little Jane Birkin, just a little, about her looks. Whenever someone asks me how I learned to cook or how I got into food, I usually credit my parents, but I should also credit Corentine. She and I didn’t have a lot in common, but food was enough, and we seized it. I ate at her table for six months, and she taught me what she thought I should know. She taught…

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Now you know

Molly — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:46:00 +0000

I have a confession to make. It probably seems like I live and breathe to cook, right? It probably seems like I never get tired of stirring and whisking and chopping, like I go to sleep at night spooning the refrigerator and wake up each morning to find a skillet under my pillow and a rainbow arcing gently, benevolently, over the stove. But the truth is, there are many days when I would rather do anything than cook. ANYTHING. Like, hit-myself-over-the-head-with-the-aforementioned-skillet anything. Anything. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of those days. At first, I thought it was because of my recent run of bad recipes. It’s hard to feel terribly excited about spending time in the kitchen after you’ve…

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