ALONE IN THE KITCHEN

I'm so thrilled to have my own column over at Food52 called Cooking What I Want. Here are excerpts from my first three posts. Click recipe links for the complete stories.

"I wake up to my six-year-old son painfully yanking tearing braiding my hair. I carefully lift his hands from my head and place them on my back and beg for a back massage. No way mom. So I sit up and say, dude, we have five days together just the two of us so what are we going to do? He says, pancakes please, I want to eat lots of pancakes. I say, as long as we eat white bean salad with avocados, please, lots of it. Deal, he says." 

Avocado Bowls With Citrus Herb White Bean Salad

"They line the streets, their sprays of blossoms lighting up the nighttime sky for a few weeks in early spring.

Children shake their trunks, covering heads and shoulders and wet March sidewalks with a neon-pink petal rain.

And then it’s business as usual. They seem like any old tree. We forget what’s coming.

Until one morning, splat splat splat, their plums start hitting our windshields." 

Grilled Plum and Lemon Ricotta Toasts

"I always cook what I want. But I don’t mean that in a snarky or selfish or overbearing way: the bottom line is that I don’t let my kids’ whims run the kitchen. Often their enthusiastic desire to help me plan, shop, and cook results in a dreamy, perfect dinner hour. But more often than I’d like to admit, at the end of a long day, my kids arrive at the table all crabby and tired and desperately wanting a cheeseburger and instead of that, an enormous cruciferous mash-up slaw made from every single vegetable in the CSA box sits right in front of their faces." 

Anchovy, Creamy Havarti, and Pesto Panini