Hello, my friends! February is a pretty busy month around these parts; we have both mine and my husband’s birthdays, Valentine’s Day, and our wedding anniversary, all, might I add, just a month after Christmas and New Year’s. Not that we need an excuse to celebrate life, but I’m still catching my breath over here. And suddenly I blinked and we’re already a week into March. Ahem.
As is largely the case these days, I have trouble finding time to read thick, heavy novels as I did once upon a time. I do miss the days of lounging on the couch or outside on a reclined chair reading for an hour uninterrupted, but at the same time, I’m pretty big on adapting, and I know that my son won’t be this small forever, so those days will return. In the meantime, I read cookbooks the way I used to read novels; they’re easy for me to pick up and put down, and I can follow the narrative while being interrupted a hundred times during the course of one cup of coffee by a sweet little voice yelling, “Mamma, look!” :)
Below is a list of some of those books, as well as other things I’ve been reading, writing and listening to. Hope you enjoy!
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat—I’m finally getting around to reading this book, even though it was a smash hit some five years ago! When we joke that Italian mothers don’t use recipes, what we’re saying is that they trust their cooking instincts, so they don’t necessarily need recipes. They taste here, taste there, they know that a lot of butter needs a balance of salt, or vinegar can take the edge off sweetness. So they add a little of this and a little of that, a pinch here, a splash there, and the result is magic.
This cookbook teaches you to cook in such a way; to learn the rules so that you can break them, or make your own rules. As with the television show I mention below, I love the idea of teaching people to cook not by recipe, but by instinct, and I hope to personally do more teaching in this vein in the future. I want to inspire all of you to cook like your grandmothers and great-grandmothers did and to trust your own gut and palette.