delancey – Orangette

We’ll go from left to right

Molly — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 02:33:00 +0000

I promised cookbooks, and I shall deliver cookbooks. No more nostalgia! No more old photographs! No more zoning out with Danzig videos on YouTube because a man in a Danzig t-shirt just walked into the coffee shop where I am writing and reminded me of the song “Mother ’93“! I will be useful. Four years ago, when we moved into the house where we now live, I started keeping a small collection of cookbooks on top of the refrigerator. Most of our books live in June’s room, on the wall of shelves there, but that’s down the hall from the kitchen, and I wanted to have my most-used, best-loved, most-consulted books within reach. I rotate them as new books come…

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May 22

Molly — Fri, 22 May 2015 22:55:00 +0000

About eight months after we opened Delancey, a customer named Eric Peterson sent an e-mail to Brandon, and the subject line read, I want to make pizza at Delancey! Eric was working at a local pizza place, but he wanted to learn another approach – to learn the chemistry behind good dough, how to make sauce from scratch, how to manage a wood-burning oven. His five-year plan was to open a small wood-fired pizza restaurant in Leavenworth, a mountain town roughly two hours east of Seattle, and he was ready to put in the time to learn what he needed to know. I called his references and wound up talking to an older guy with whom Eric had once worked…

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August 18

Molly — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 00:51:00 +0000

A couple of weekends ago, we packed up the better part of the restaurant kitchen, crammed it in the back of a pick-up, and drove two and a half hours east to cook an all-day anniversary party for a pair of longtime Delancey regulars. We rented a big house along the Wenatchee River, about ten minutes from the property where the party was held, and we brought as many people as we could fit inside, including a set of 8-month-old twins and one almost-two-year-old June. If you’ve ever been to Leavenworth in the summertime, you will remember how hot it gets. It hit 100 that weekend, and no one had air conditioning. The flies were out and biting. But the…

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Nine

Molly — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 05:31:00 +0000

I am typing this post from the back office at Delancey, where I’m holed up, working on a deadline, while Brandon and Co. prepare a five-course meal for forty-five in celebration of a gorgeous new book. Deadline: I will destroy you. In more ways than one. But I had to take a break to pop into this space, and to send up a cheer – if you can, in fact, hear me from back here behind the Essex walk-in – that it has been nine years today since this site was born. Nine! I was a delinquent graduate student then, giddy to be creating a space to write about things other than Michel Foucault and discourse analysis and anything described…

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Eureka

Molly — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:04:00 +0000

You women who manage to keep up smart, articulate blogs while raising young children? You women who manage to keep up smart, articulate blogs while working and raising young children and doing all that household stuff that most of us wind up doing? I throw myself at your feet. I don’t have anything remotely original or insightful to say on the subject; I just think you’re remarkable. I have childcare twelve hours a week, jobs with flexible hours, a supportive spouse, and a kid who (usually) sleeps well (please don’t let this jinx me, please don’t let this jinx me), and yet I fight to get to this space. Of course, part of the problem could be that, each night,…

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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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August 12

Molly — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:51:00 +0000

Delancey is one year old today. I took that picture, the one above, 16 months ago. Brandon had bought a 30-quart Hobart mixer a few months earlier, and we’d been storing it in our friend Carla’s basement. Our friend Sam named it Sir Mix-a-Lot. That morning, the morning that I took the picture, we had rented a big truck, wrestled Sir Mix-a-Lot into the back, strapped him in, and hauled him to the restaurant. The thing was so heavy, such a mess to move, and I had no idea how to operate it, and I was excited and intimidated and borderline terrified, and mostly, more than anything, I had no clue how we were ever going to get this restaurant…

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I am not kidding around

Molly — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:53:00 +0000

Well. It’s hard to know where to start. I’m tempted to jump right in, to say that you should hurry up and put a pot on the stove and make the pasta recipe below and let’s get back to business, shall we?, but that doesn’t seem right. First, I need to thank you. I had no idea that Delancey would swallow me up like that, and I need to thank you for being so patient, so supportive, so good to me. This restaurant is up and running today because of you. I am not kidding around about that. I am also not kidding around when I say this: I’m ready to get back to writing. I can’t imagine not having…

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Where I’ve been

Molly — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:49:00 +0000

This morning, someone pointed out to me that it has been a month, exactly a month, a whole month, since I last posted here. I nearly choked. The truth is, I’ve been having a hard time. Nothing around here looks the same as it did, pre-restaurant, and to be perfectly honest, though I like this new life, I also miss the old one. There’s no point in trying to hide it. I’ve been dealing with a lot of exhaustion, and it’s been difficult to feel creative, eager to cook and write here – or do pretty much anything except watch Battlestar Galactica on Netflix. It’s a dire situation when you go to the dentist, as I did this morning, and…

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What I do now

Molly — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:37:00 +0000

So, I wasn’t kidding about the black hole. But I’m sorry to have been gone from here for so long. I’ve missed you. Delancey is getting easier. As of two weeks ago, we now have a prep cook to work in the mornings, which means that instead of going in at 9 am to receive the first deliveries, Brandon can now go in around 11 am, and I go in sometime between noon and 2 pm, depending on the day’s prep list. We still get home around midnight, but it feels a lot easier than it did a couple of weeks ago. We’re getting more sleep, for one thing, but even more importantly, we know what to expect now. That’s…

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