What a Cook Wants, 20

The Way To Cook
I spent a summer on Nantucket as a personal chef for a grumpy, demanding woman named Mrs. Bingham who had a marvelous house~ with an untouched tricked-out kitchen!~ tucked deep into the sand dunes with its own private beach. Our neighbor was the Kennedy compound (if only they'd dropped by!), and my housemates were two very spoiled but sweet Scottish terriers.
The only problem? I didn't really know how to cook. Sure, I'd worked as a short order cook at college, waitressed at a place where we made Caesar salad tableside (I still make the best, baby!), and I'd nearly perfected the microwave Egg McMuffin, but it turned out this lady was able to get tables at NY's most luscious restaurants and loved poached salmon and crème brûlée.

I had no idea what crème brûlée was.

I had never poached a salmon.

After we discussed the first menu I stood in the kitchen alone, my heart clanging against my ribs. I knew I was a good cook, knew I could channel my Pop-Pop's palette and read a recipe as well as anyone else, but I was beyond my skills. I was screwed. My throat began to tighten, but then I noticed the shelf. There were books on it, and one of them was Julia Child's The Way to Cook. That title held promise, and Julia delivered. She was precisely what I needed, and as the summer continued I grew more ambitious with homemade tarragon mayonnaise (there's a reason the French call it a sauce!) and an apple crisp that made Mrs. Bingham the toast of the dinner party circuit.
Her style was so accessible and friendly, she was fearless as she dismantled raw ducks and shucked oysters; she wasn't intimidated by the thought of poaching a huge 4 pound salmon fillet. I borrowed her courage.
I suppose I borrowed it again when I started this blog. My title is an homage, even though no one gets it. I realized I could help people find the joy and fearless pleasure in eating, just like Julia did for me with cooking.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying this cookbook would make a great gift. For anyone.
$26 for this 512-page tome. It changed my life. How many books do that?

What a Cook Wants, VII

Real F***in' Vanilla
I am not a baker. Not even close. I can bake a chocolate cake with milk chocolate frosting for your birthday, the family brownie recipe, passable banana bread and this past Thanksgiving, God help us all, fancy pants biscuits that were nearly tender. But I am not a baker.
However there was a time in my life when I made crème brûlée once a week, during that Nantucket summer of love. I encountered a *real* vanilla bean during that first terrifying custard experience. It was weird. It looked like a shriveled up monkey finger a witch would throw into a smoky cauldron, but the scent! Totally different from my mom's small bottles of alcohol-drenched vanilla extract. The fragrance was creamy and rich, with a slight green vegetal note at the back and whispers of jasmine. I was shocked such a creepy object could smell suspiciously like the love of God. When I cut one open and scraped out the itsy bitsy flecks with the tip of a knife, I finally understood the value of the speckles in the "fancy" Breyer's French vanilla ice cream of my youth. Ahhhh.
So if you love a baker, spend the $7 for three beans at Penzeys (check out all their spices while you're there, they rock). Tahitian beans are on the fruity/spicy side, Madagasgar beans have creamy, orchid notes and Mexican vanilla beans are darker, woody and very mysterious. You really can't go wrong, and you might be rewarded with ambrosial delights!
$7 for 3 beans, or $27 for 15 beans. Be sure to take a sniff before you hand them over!