Building Blocks and Baby Steps

On Sunday afternoon, Sebastian and I took a walk through Prospect Park and saw a father playing badminton with his daughter. Her serves kept going straight into the ground, and as we passed, he marched up to her. “If what you keep doing isn’t working, trying something different.” He was kind of a jerk about it, but his message was sound. I mean, he was paraphrasing Einstein, after all.
So I tried something different this week. Instead of looking for increasingly shortened recipes––dinner in 20, 15, 5 minutes!––I tried a chef’s approach of mise en place, thanks to a an article in Whole Living. After our walk, I came back to the kitchen (where the lightbulb burned out as I flipped it on––isn’t that always the way?) and turned on the oven for the first time in I-can’t-remember-how-long. It felt good to settle into an unhurried kitchen rhythm: stirring a pot, reducing a sauce, seasoning a chicken. I had forgotten about the quiet hum of productivity that can happen in while you’re cooking, how the busy work with your hands can help your mind be quiet for a bit.
This summer, I traded in my chef’s knife for a swimming cap. Fluttering kicks and land breathing hard at the end of the lane became another way to escape all the chattery thoughts of the day. But with the light changing, the kitchen feels like a welcome place to be again.
It felt good to chop, wipe down the kitchen counter, and set water to boiling. And the results? A roasted chicken, cut into pieces; a huge tray of chopped eggplant, tomatoes, and thyme roasted alongside the bird; a crazy good raisin vinaigrette, cauliflower purée, and figs in balsamic glaze (fancy!).
These pieces all came together in different ways: a lunch of quinoa, roasted vegetables, and a bit of feta tossed in the golden raisin vinaigrette; a dinner of roast chicken, polenta and balsamic-glazed figs; an autumn salad of chopped kale, shredded chicken, and more of that crazy good vinaigrette. All week, there was something so satisfying about knowing those bits and bobs were in there, like the assurance of having a wardrobe of really solid, stylish basics, and realizing they can be combined in near-infinite ways. (At least that’s what the magazines tell me.)

































