“We never erow til
O
ircd of p ure seasonal flavors.
They inspire and beckon us to experience them anew.
—CHEF SCOTT PEACOCK
tenderloin. A little local goat cheese and fresh
herbs from the garden finish the dish.
They’re a nice start to a meal that might
include a simple grilled flank steak from
grass-fed Colorado beef or chicken kabobs,
along with a salad of mixed local greens.
“My wife and I were talking about it this
week,” Kutcher says. “It’s getting back to what
tastes good. Vegetables that are in season and
good meat with salt and pepper and garlic is
sometimes all you need. The taste is there.”
But it’s also about something
more than taste.
“From a family
standpoint, making dinner is a bonding
moment,” Kutcher says. “My 2-year-old has
her little stool in the kitchen, and she’s in
there starting to fool around with us.”
I often argue that running an efficient
kitchen and cooking delicious but not fussy
meals are so rewarding because they are
tangible tasks in an intangible world. We spend
our days tapping on keyboards, processing
information, and communicating on e-mail and
Facebook. A natural reaction is to turn to the
pleasure that comes from roasting a chicken or
making a pie.
ER HOMES AND GARDIE N fijj
That’s not to say the digital world is an
enemy of the cook. Recipes, cooking communi-
ties, and all kinds of great ingredients can easily
be found with a quick search of the Web.
Amanda Hesser, the food writer who has
just published
The New York Times Cookbook,
runs a website called Food52 that has evolved
into something that feels like a gathering of
smart cooks and good friends.
People share recipes, watch Amanda and
her co-founder, Merrill Stubbs, test them, and
then vote on favorites. It works because our
love of cooking transcends the digital divide.
“Cooking is gratifying on an individual level,
but it can be a bit isolating,” Amanda told me
recently. “It’s not like we are all at home all the
time anymore and our family is sitting around
the hearth. People want to connect about the
specifics of cooking.”
My friend Samin Nosrat, a cook in the San
Francisco Bay Area who just turned 30,
organizes bake sales and teaches cooking-
classes to people who want to learn how to use
different cuts of meat and coax the best out of
vegetables like fennel and squash.
She still talks about a dinner she was at last
spring. Everyone helped make fresh pasta
sheets and wrap them around morel mush-
rooms and peas. They butterflied whole
chickens and grilled them. Then guests took
turns cranking an ice cream maker for dessert.
“We were sitting at the table and everyone
was like, ‘wow this is one of the best meals I
have ever had,’ ” she says. The ingredients and
the recipes were great. But there was some-
thing else that made that dinner memorable.
“When people come together, I don’t care
what it is that I am eating as long it was grown
with care and cooked with care,” she says. “It’s
sitting together at the table that I want.”
It’s what we all want and what we are doing,
more than ever.
Recipes begin on page 2 0 0
