The Yellow House

We headed to the mountains for Thanksgiving, holeing up in a cabin for the long weekend. A fire crackled every day, all day long. We ate. We tromped through the woods. Louise and I don’t get to see our dad as much as we’d like, but it’s nice to see how we’re still very much his daughters, despite the distance, despite growing older. The three of us took our cups of coffee—all black—for a morning hike. I don’t know many other people who’d set off to scramble up rocks and ford mountain streams with a porcelain coffee mug in one hand. But we all did, heading out the door without giving it a second thought. I reignited a long-standing love affair with the textures of moss and lichens, gathered up pinecones and acorns (to explain to my 3-year-old step-nephew: “These are oak tree seeds, and these are Christmas tree seeds…”), and read a ’90s essay by Joan Didion.And when I got bored with that, Louise entertained me with her newest tricks. Family, food, mountains, lichens, books, and the coolest little sister: I have a lot for which to be grateful. Hope you had a good holiday, too.

In the last months of my mom’s life, she spent a lot of time at home, unable to get around very easily. She watched a lot of TV. After she passed away, I found a notebook. The first twenty pages or so were filled with lists of ingredients and, sometimes, half-scribbled directions. It would seem that Mama had been watching some cooking shows.My mother was a great cook, but outside of a few indulgences—prosciutto comes to mind—she had a fairly straightforward, American-fare cooking style. The recipes in this notebook, though, were beautiful, celebration recipes. Roast chicken with morels and madeira, french bread pudding with sweet italian sausage, ragout with escarole and chardonnay. Recipes for big dinners or brunch, shared with other people. I wept over that notebook. What had my mom been planning when she wrote those recipes? With whom did she want to share them? They were just jotted-down recipes—but she was never able to make them. » Click to read more

The evenings stretch out ahead these days from such an early hour. By the time I leave the office, it’s already dark, and those wonderfully mammalian curl-up-in-your-house-and-eat-and-stay-warm instincts kick in pretty quickly.This three-grain chili fits the bill nicely on these evenings (I’m calling it three grain even though lentils are not a grain, technically. Oh well.) Chuck stirred it while it was on the stove and exclaimed, “There’s so much in there!” And there is. I find that a meatless chili needs a good variety of textures to reach that not-quite-soup, not-quite-stew grey area that chili must straddle. Millet in soups is a recent discovery and is fantastic; but with all these liquid-sucking grains, beware that upon reheating, you might need to add a bit more liquid to reconstitute it. It’s also a great canvas for any mixture of your favorite beans; here, I threw some adzuki beans in with pinto. » Click to read more

Mollie Katzen’s “gypsy soup” caught my eye for its name and name alone. The word gypsy is so evocative of something rustic, hearty, romantic and a bit tragic. I didn’t even look at the ingredients list before I decided I would make it. (This impulsiveness will likely get me into trouble someday.) According to the recipe, gypsy soup can be varied by subbing in various green and orange vegetables for the ones listed. (Incidentally, if anyone knows why this is, let me know. I became really curious about gypsy soup and did some research, and can’t find anything.) I decided on an autumnal riff on gypsy soup: acorn squash provided the orange, and some great kales and mustards that are happily growing in the cool November weather brought the green. » Click to read more

Ben and I have recently been toying with the idea of scrounging up an enormous, cast-iron kettle that can hang over a fire (think pioneer-era Americana). We’ve somehow latched onto this notion of a vessel in which we could simmer and ladle out a bottomless supply of good soup for a crowd of friends. The autumn air, especially, has us dreaming of a “BYOB” lunch or dinner—“bring your own bowl.” Is it weird to admit that you and your significant other want to buy primitive cooking paraphernalia for your next dinner party? The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to appropriately embody the reason soups are so great. There are few dishes that come together as gracefully, with such simple ingredients and easy effort, as soups. Soups and stews exemplify my favorite kind of cooking: deeply sensory, as minimal or dressed up as you like, and most importantly, easy to share (en masse, if necessary). Moreover, everyone equates soup with comfort. I like that. One of my resolutions this year was that I’d start making more foods to freeze. I am not the kind of girl who has trouble finding the energy or making the time to cook for herself, but cooking-for-later is a bit addicting. It may seem like work with no gratification when you make something to put away, untouched—-until the day when you reap the benefits. The first forkful of whatever you made for yourself ahead of time is a little pat on the back. It’s kind of like magic! Good job, self, you think, grateful to the past-you for having the foresight to store away. In that vein, I’ve been planning to take a few days to make a lot of soups to keep through the winter. » Click to read more