Cookbook Season
How we find our recipes.
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Hello!
Hey folks, it’s Kelly here. This newsletter has been an evolving creature, which is good because honestly, it started off a little stiff. I’ve never enjoyed the professional tenor.
We’ve been writing this newsletter in the first person plural, but today, I’ll be in the singular. Less stuffy, more human. I hope you enjoy it.
The Bookish Kitchen
“How do you come up with the recipes for your CSA?”
We get this question a lot, which is always flattering because I assume it means we look like we know what we’re doing.
The answer is simple: we read. A lot.
We have an entire bookshelf in our cottage dedicated to cookbooks. There’s additional book spillage beyond the balance of the shelves that’s slowly making its way across the living room. Those volumes are usually our most-loved, living on end tables and armchairs, always ready to be picked up and enjoyed.
We have books on food and culture, food and philosophy, food and politics, food and…you name it. There are multiple digital cooking subscriptions (because the poor shelves can’t possibly accommodate an influx of magazines) and don’t even get us started on our podcast and social media followings.
Spoiler: they’re all food.
When we need a recipe, we summon up this exploding culinary library and sift through it until inspiration strikes. Then, we take what we find and make it our own.
This winter, we unknowingly entered peak cookbook season. Andrew and I have reached a point where if no one knows what to gift us for the holidays, they default to some sort of food content. Even between us, this is true.
Andrew and I have fallen into a sort of benign deception when it comes to holiday gifting. Each year, we proclaim no gifts! Yet, as if by magic, gifts continue to appear.
This year, we celebrated the holidays early, just the two of us. There were gifts.
Andrew gave me Derek Brown’s Mindful Mixology. Despite making vino amaro for a living, I’m a complete lightweight when it comes to drinking. For this reason, I’m very much into low/no-ABV cocktails. I also have a decent palate, which means whenever I encounter a bittered lemonade or Shirley Temple, my faith in humanity dies a little. This is when a good book (like Brown’s) comes in handy.
I gave Andrew a copy of Micah Mahon’s Ounces, Drops, & Dashes. Micah is the bar manager at Charlottesville’s The Alley Light. He first published the book under a different title years ago, and it quickly sold out. For whatever reason, the publisher chose not to print another run. It took Micah four years and lots of legal footwork to regain the rights to his book. He recently republished it through Amazon.
Shortly after this pre-holiday definitely-not-a-gift-exchange, we packed up our cars and drove thirteen hours north to Portland, Maine for a long overdue visit with family. It was also a time for us to have some rest after what has been an awfully long year.
As you might imagine, we filled this open time with food and drink. And books.
Down East
We pulled into Portland around 7:30 pm. By 8:00 pm, we’d unpacked into our cozy loft Airbnb, with parking pass in hand. We were ravenously hungry after hours of car snacks. The only open restaurant on our hit list was Friends & Family. So, there we went.
Imagine a cozy nighttime pizzeria, boutique wine shop, and cocktail bar all seamlessly smashed together. This is Friends & Family. As we sidled up to the bar to place our order, I noticed a miniature crockpot simmering away beside the checkout. Shouldering the pot was a tiny chalkboard sign encouraging customers to “warm up with a glass of amaro hot chocolate.” This is when I knew I would love the place.
We split the honeynut squash and pepita pizza and a side mysteriously named “Beans.” The latter ended up being a fabulously simple bowl of Rancho Gordo Royal Corona beans. For the uninitiated, Royal Corona beans are massive, white runner beans that, when cooked, are over an inch long. They are so large, that one is forced to eat them bean-by-bean. They’re also extraordinarily delicious. This may or may not appear in our CSA recipe lineup later this winter.
To drink, I got a tannic Lambrusco and Andrew got an Alsatian white blend. We spent the evening taking notes on the layout of the joint: preparation for our one-day-someday tasting room. Some couples plan out nurseries. We sketch out bar schematics.
The following morning, we stopped at Nom Café for breakfast. Their heating system was on the fritz and the latte machine (no frother in sight) was completely broken. In apology, they offered us a free round of Turkish cheese donuts, steaming hot from the fryer. We devoured them instantly because it was fifteen degrees outside (making it maybe fifty degrees inside) and we were both freezing.
To further self-soothe from the refrigerated breakfast experience, we shopped. First stop: books.
We ducked into Longfellow Books for a quick thaw. I spent most of my time drooling over Clarice Lam’s Breaking Bao book, eventually accepting that it was over my head. Maybe I’ll come back to it.
After we were sufficiently reheated, we continued our journey, stopping by Maine & Loire (Maine’s starlet wine shop), Sissle & Daughters (a small cheese monger and gourmet shop), Strata (knife-sharpener and purveyor of high-end kitchenware), and Onggi (fermentation market and café.)
Our spoils included numerous bottles of wine, delightful snacks, a very nice pair of culinary tweezers, and, of course, books. For me, Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails, by Shannon Mustipher. For Andrew, Fadi Kattan’s Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food.
By then, we were hungry again, so we stopped by Bar Futo for something called Tanuki Hour. Tanuki refers to the Japanese raccoon dog, which in lore is sometimes depicted as a playful trickster and shapeshifter. The most Tanuki action we saw were some reasonably priced bar snacks and drinks.
Andrew got the fluke and Asian pear crudo. I got the chilled tofu with almond chili crisp and spiced schmaltz. We took notes on plate composition: color, contrast, and texture. To learn, we had to eat.
We spent the holidays first with my family and then with Andrew’s. During this time, more books made themselves known.
We received, in no particular order:
The Noma Guide to Fermentation: a modern bible of recipes and techniques from Denmark’s Noma “fermentation lab.” I’m pretty sure I have one of those in my laundry room.
Maydān: Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond: a collection of recipes by Rose Previte, creator of D.C.’s Maydān and Compass Rose. Before becoming a restaurateur, Previte traveled along old global spice trade routes, learning authentic recipes and techniques from home cooks. This is what she brought back to the capitol and to her cookbook.
Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking: authored by the late British restaurateur and chef, Russell Norman. Norman co-founded Polpo, a Venetian-style tapas restaurant in London, as well as authoring a book by the same name.
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: a collection of stories and recipes interwoven by author and Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson. A tale of Appalachian black identity as felt through food.
We now have so many new cookbooks that we’re going to need another dedicated cookbook shelf. We were already planning on getting one because the inevitable was obvious. We are addicts.
I should add, for good measure, that my birthday falls squarely between Christmas and New Year’s. My adult experience of this situation is one long celebratory haze of indulgent food and drink.
In an eleventh-hour effort to culturally fortify ourselves before returning to the mountains, we had a birthday intermezzo at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, followed by dinner at Gypsy Kitchen.
We shared the crispy cauliflower with lemon tahina and dried fruit relish, the cobia crudo (we really like crudo) with sweet potato and grapes, and the honeynut squash with salsa verde and urfa vinaigrette. To drink, I had a Greek Assyrtiko and Andrew had a Lebanese Garnacha.
More notetaking: garnishes, flavor pairing, approachability. A crudo recipe isn’t something I would throw at most of our CSA members, but it’s always good to have a curveball up your sleeve.
Over dinner, we talked about business, which for us means we talked about food and drink and culture, and all the things wrong with our society and how, according to us, most of them can be fixed with a well-laid table.
We were, in many ways, recovered from the hardships of this past year. It was medicine in three plates and two glasses.
This sense of recovery, of deep nourishment, is what we’re looking for when we cook for our CSA. We seek out beauty. When we find it, we try to make it approachable for the weekday kitchen. I like to think of us as the neighborhood recipe curators. Daytime rough-and-tumble farmers, nighttime closet gourmands. Our CSA gets the best of both.
That’s the long and short of it, folks. Stories, travel, life. That’s where recipes come from.
Did I mention that our winter CSA is up and running? You can sign up anytime from now until spring. Maybe we’ll see you there. If not, we’ll write again soon.
Till next time,
Kelly & Andrew
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As a fellow cookbook nerd, I really enjoyed this article! Russell Norman’s cookbooks are wonderful. Happy New Year to both of you!
A delicious and enjoyable read. I will check out the cookbook recommendations and hope to see your CSA expand to the Richmond/Midlothian area. Abundant Blessings in this New Year!