There comes a point in every local food-loving New Englander’s life when, during the dark snowy days of mid-winter, she puts her hands on her hips, stamps her feet, and says If I eat one more freaking turnip, I’m going to throw up. 

I am officially at that point.

This generally happens to me towards the end of January, so it’s not like I should be surprised or anything. Still, as someone who believes in local, seasonal eating (as much as I can, living in western Connecticut), I wind up feeling guilty for even thinking about my favorite wintertime flavor — lemon — when by the fact of my geography, I should be hunkered down over my seven quart Creuset while it burbles away on the back of the stove, filled with the brownish, earthy murkiness of the season.

“It’s Meyer Lemon season here!” my California friends wrote to me the other day. “We have so many of them, we just don’t know what to do with them all!”

I know what you can do with them all, I thought, gazing virtuously out the window at our stone garden Buddha, buried under eight inches of snow.

“Well,” I wrote back to her, “if you have to live every day with the knowledge that your city might slip into the bay at any moment, you might as well have the best Meyer Lemons in the world. After all, you have to have something.”

And suddenly, just like that — just like it was God’s little joke — they started showing up everywhere I looked: shrink-wrapped in my supermarket. (I will not buy shrink-wrapped produce. Not. Not. Not.) In the San Francisco Chronicle (which I read on line every day, so I can feel like I’m right there even if I’m on the other side of the country). All over the bloody blogosphere. All over the little food television I actually watch. I finally threw in the towel when I clicked over to 101Cookbooks.com and found Heidi Swanson in the throes of a citrus takeover of her kitchen.

“I’m not kidding when I tell you it looks like a citrus orchard shook out its limbs in my kitchen,” she wrote in her most recent post.

I’m stuck here in root vegetable hell, so just shut up, Heidi, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I really like Heidi. I took it as a sign: I needed to give myself a break. In the depths of winter, I needed to be kind to myself. So I drove to my local healthy foods market, bought myself some Meyer Lemons that had been shipped over from the other side of the country, and smugly drove home. Between the .75 metric tons of carbon dioxide it took to fly the damned things here and the gallon and a half of gas it took my Subaru to get to the store and home again, I was feeling fairly guilty. The small package of mint and bag of frozen organic peas I bought to go with them didn’t help.

But when it gets to be this time of year and you don’t live anywhere near Berkeley and you’re drowning in turnips and rutabagas and those cute little acorn squash you managed to grow last summer before the hurricane wiped out your garden, and it’s freezing and snowing and the days are short and all you can think about is spring, you need a little brightness and spark and zip in your culinary life. At least I do. A few hours after coming home from my shopping trip, I was standing in the kitchen making barley risotto with a significant splash of the sweet lemon juice, a good amount of zest, chopped fresh mint, a handful of peas, and a crumbling of good sheep’s milk feta.

And just for a little while, it felt ever so slightly like spring.

 Barley Risotto with Meyer Lemon, Peas, and Feta

Adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

I don’t know why it took me so long, but it wasn’t until years ago, when I came upon Amanda Hesser’s sloshy pappardelle with lemon, ricotta salata, and herbs in Cooking with Mr. Latte that I really fell in love with the idea of combining pasta with lemon, cheese, and herbs. Oddly enough, I’d been making an unofficial version of it for years in my tiny Manhattan apartment kitchen — it almost always involved bare cupboards and the kind of after-midnight, carb-laden cooking necessitated by too much youthful imbibing — but I wouldn’t have dared make it for anyone else. Fast forward twelve years, and the combination is one of my favorites: Meyer lemon, because of its sweetness, works beautifully with so many herbs and types of cheese — thyme, rosemary, mint, marjoram, pecorino, feta, Parmigiana Reggiano, chevre — that the possibilities are endless. In this version, I’ve married the flavors to Deborah Madison‘s wonderfully earthy barley risotto; farro would work beautifully, too. (Note: Because of the salt in the stock and the salty feta, I’ve omitted any additional salt.)

Serves 4

4-1/2 cups vegetable stock (I prefer Rapunzel Vegetable Stock with Sea Salt)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup finely diced onion

1 garlic clove, minced

1 cup pearl barley

2 tablespoons fresh Meyer Lemon juice

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

3/4 cup frozen peas

1 tablespoon Meyer Lemon zest, minced

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh mint leaves

1/2 cup crumbled feta plus more for serving

In a medium saucepan, bring the stock to a slow simmer. Heat the oil in a large, straight-sided, deep saute pan set over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until barely translucent. Add the barley to the pan, stir well to coat the grains with oil.

Add about a cup of the stock and continue to stir until it’s nearly absorbed. Continue to add about a half a cup of stock at a time, stirring constantly and waiting for each addition to be almost absorbed before adding more. The risotto is done when the barley is tender and the dish is creamy. Fold in the lemon juice and the butter, and then add the peas, stirring well to combine (the heat from the dish will cook the peas).

Stir in the zest, the mint, and the feta and let rest for five minutes before serving, topped with more crumbled feta.

(For Christina Choi, 1977-2011)

My grandmother was the primary cook in my house when I was growing up, and much of what she made had a sort of Mitteleuropan bent to it: veal breast was stuffed with dried fruit, strudel was laden with cabbage, roast chicken was redolent of paprika, beef was braised with caraway and sour cream, and tea was drunk from a glass. Her preferred side dish always seemed to be potatoes and onions that had been haphazardly sliced and tossed into the bottom of the roasting pan, where they would soften and then caramelize alongside whatever else was cooking. She sometimes made egg noodles. She sometimes made rice. And on the most special of occasions, when she was really reaching back into her Austro-Hungarian genetic memory, I’d find her standing in the kitchen with an enormous, enameled, white colander through which she’d press a thinnish batter into the pot of rapidly boiling water beneath it. Minutes later, I was presented with a bowl of misshapen, butter-soaked knoepfli — what she called sometimes called spaetzle and other times, Little Rags — and a spoon.

There was nothing I loved more, and  even now, I’ve been known to order whole dishes just because they come with a side order of this stuff of my dreams, which otherwise manages to get lodged in the recesses of my culinary brain alongside grape jam and latkes, and the other things I really like and have mostly forgotten about until formally presented with them.

A few months ago, I flew to Seattle for a few days to have a short meet up with my friend Molly. It was a totally miserable flight. Weather forced me to lay over in Chicago, and this was no Bourdain layover: it was the kind of layover where you find yourself sleeping in your clothes in a Motel 6 situated alongside a gun/pawnshop, and trying to not hear what’s going on in the room next to you just beyond the adjoining door. By the time I reached Seattle the next day, I was just this side of comatose. I mostly remember the dukkah that came sprinkled on the feta we ate at Sitka & Spruce the day I arrived, and how good the bread was. I can’t help but remember how incredible the pizza was that night at Brandon Pettit’s Delancey. Molly and I worked a little bit and talked an enormous amount, and the next day she took me to a tiny place called Nettletown in Eastlake, for lunch.

“It’s Christina Choi’s restaurant. The food is simple and lovely,” Molly said, as we drove over.

I was still a little catatonic, but my interest was piqued as I learned that Christina was half Swiss and half Chinese. And that you could get noodles and tea eggs and scallion fried tofu.

And knoepfli, for which, Molly said, Christina was known.

Nobody is ever known for their knoepfli. 

We sat down — the only people in the restaurant that afternoon — and at Molly’s suggestion, I ordered a bowl, and the knoepfli arrived, pan-fried to a lovely dark caramel, and laden with herbs, leeks, cabbage, and bacon. I think there was a poached egg involved. There might have been a drop of soy or shoyu, but I’m not positive. [Post pub note: A friend of Christina's who posted a reply below pointed out that it was Maggi seasoning that I was likely tasting. Maggi is a umami-explosive Swiss condiment used heavily in Asian cooking--a lovely nod to Christina's heritage. Thanks to Tea Austen.] Molly ordered something involving local, Rain Shadow bratwurst. I don’t remember anything else at that restaurant because I sat there, head down, indelicately shoveling enormous amounts of the tender, chewy, remarkable dumplings into my mouth. I don’t believe my eyes were closed, but they might as well have been, for the bliss I was experiencing.

Who was this Christina Choi person that she, at such a young age (34), could marry one side of her culinary heritage so seamlessly to the other? Why hadn’t I, on the other side of the country but still (jealously and vicariously) clued in to the gastronomical happenings in the northwest, heard about Nettletown, and about Christina Choi? Because, I guess, I wasn’t a member of the community.

I came home and told Susan what I’d had on my visit to Seattle. There were the Hama Hama oysters that smelled, sweetly, of the ocean, that we had at The Walrus and The Carpenter. There was that dukkah and the local feta at Sitka & Spruce. There were the small plates that everyone out there seemed to be comfortable eating as a matter of course. And then there was Nettletown’s knoepfli. I went on and on about it, like a lunatic.

“It was the very best thing,” I said to Susan, who, many years and another relationship ago, spent a lot of time in Seattle, and grew to love it. “—the very best. I can’t wait to go back, and to take you for the knoepfli.”

Every once in a while, in the middle of my working day, I’d peruse the Nettletown website, just to remember how great and interesting the menu was. And then, one day, out of the clear blue sky, my friend and colleague, Edible Seattle’s editor, Jill Lightner, emailed to say that the place was closing. They were successful, but I guess that Christina Choi wanted to do other things —- she was young, so why shouldn’t she? Still, I felt a sharp pang, knowing that I’d never again have her simple, sophisticated, rustic, Swiss Chinese riff on a dish of my childhood, for which I was willing to fly to the other side of the country to eat. There was something about the simplicity of it, its elegance, and its earthiness, and how near it was to my heart; it had captivated me as only truly simple, kind food can, and in the weirdest of ways, it wouldn’t let me go.

I never knew Christina Choi — I never knew that she had launched Foraged and Found Edibles with Jeremy Faber way back in 2001, and supplied the Seattle community with wild foods like morels, nettles, fiddleheads, and miner’s lettuce. I never knew anything about her, really — not about how much of a fixture she was in the very tight, very loving Seattle food world, or how big her family was, or how many friends she had. But when I heard that, on December 28th, after being diagnosed weeks earlier with a brain aneurysm, and having repeated surgeries, she died, I felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I spent hours reading the blog that her family created,  Honey from a Weed — based on Christina’s favorite book that has long been one of mine — tracing her steps from diagnosis until the day that her family and friends had to say goodbye.

I don’t know what it is about food that forces connections like this. But I loved what Christina Choi crafted and the very personal, quiet gift that she gave to me — a stranger way over on the other coast — in a simple, delicious bowl of rags.

Pan-Fried Knoepfli with Cabbage, Leeks, and Bacon

Call it what you will — knoepfli, spaetzle, knopfle, spatzle — but at the end of the day, all these babies are are tiny dumplings made from a batter consisting of flour, egg, milk, and sometimes water, which gets pressed either through a colander or a special potato ricer-like contraption into a stockpot of boiling water, and when they float to the top, they’re done. It takes virtually no time for this to happen — maybe four or five minutes, tops — making the dish not only incredibly cheap (and a perfect foil for anything you’d otherwise toss with noodles), but really fast. I initially made my version of this dish with 2 eggs, which yielded a batter that was not unlike wallpaper paste; use 3 instead, and if you still cannot force the stuff through the holes in your colander, I give you permission to very gently drop strings of the batter directly off the tines of a fork into the boiling water while cursing like a longshoreman. But a colander is preferable.

Serves 3 as a side dish

For the knoepfli:

1 cup unbleached, all purpose f lour

1 teaspoon salt

3 eggs

1/4 cup milk

For the cabbage:

1/4 cup diced bacon

1 large leek, white part only, roughly chopped

3 loosely packed cups thinly sliced green cabbage

1 tablespoon fresh snipped chives

1/2 tablespoon thyme leaves

salt and pepper, to taste

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 scallion, slivered

Optional: Fried eggs, slices of extra firm, fried tofu, Sriracha

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs together with the milk. Fold the egg mixture into the flour and stir well until the combination has the consistency of a thick batter. Cover and let rest while you bring a large stockpot filled with lightly salted water to a boil.

Meanwhile, in a large, straight-sided saute pan, cook the bacon until light brown and crispy, about 6 minutes, and wipe out all but a tablespoon of the remaining fat. Add the leeks to the pan and cook until soft, about 5 minutes; add the cabbage, chives, and thyme, and stir to combine. Cook until the mixture is a soft, wilted mess, about 12 minutes, and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Remove to a bowl, and set aside.

When the water comes to a boil, carefully nestle the colander over the top of the stockpot, and using a wooden spoon or a silicone bench scraper, force the batter through the holes and into the water; they”ll resemble little rags. When they float to the surface, strain them and add them to the saute pan along with the olive oil. Cook until they begin to turn a light golden brown, and then add the bacon, cabbage, and leek mixture back to the pan. Cook together for another five minutes, and then serve hot, topped with a fried egg, or slices of tofu, or nothing at all beyond a squirt of Sriracha, a drizzle of Maggi, [Post pub note: Thanks to Tea Austen for the hint!] and a handful of slivered scallion.

About twelve years ago, my father and stepmother took a trip with some friends to Tuscany. These friends, who happen to be vegetarian — not interesting vegetarian, but sprouts-and-a-plate-of-mashed-yeast vegetarian — insisted that my father and stepmother eat the same way. It wasn’t hard for Shirley, who is as near to a vegetarian as one might get without actually being one; put a plate of steamed vegetables and re-heated brown rice in front of her and she swoons with delight. But my father spent the entire trip sulking; they ate plain steamed fennel and peppers (to avoid any additional fat despite the glorious dark green Tuscan olive oil they had at their disposal) and broccoli and cauliflower (also steamed to death) while Dad dreamed of visiting Dario Cecchini, the Dante-spouting butcher of Panzano, and having a real bistecca.

“But you ate the vegetables anyway, Cy,” my stepmother said, when he related the story to me over dinner on their return.

“I did,” my father responded. “But I never said I liked them….”

And there’s the green elephant in the room, and possibly the biggest stumbling block to eating a plant-based diet that we have in this country…and the one that nobody ever talks about: We think of eating vegetables as a chore. We’ll eat them if we absolutely have to, but we won’t necessarily like them. We won’t automatically gravitate to them. And until we do — until vegetables enter our culinary lexicon without having to be manipulated into analogous foods like tofu dogs and veggie burgers imprinted with faux grill hatch marks — we are destined to remain, hopelessly, a nation of meat eaters living with a steak knife in one hand, and a bottle of Lipitor in the other.

It doesn’t matter that we know, intellectually, how good vegetables are for us; it doesn’t even matter how politically-motivated, or anti-CAFO we may be. So what if Mark Bittman whacks us over the head with more and more colorful vegan-till-six recipes, imploring us ever-so-apologetically to go on and give it a try because, after all, even PB&Js are vegan (which is a little bit like saying that Mussolini was a fascist, but boy, he certainly got the trains to run on time). It doesn’t matter if you’re a  local food lover with a die-hard belief in sustainability, or you have a $600 CSA share, or you can proudly claim that your seven-year-old gardens a small plot attached to his Montessori school, and knows, roughly speaking, the pH of the soil. That’s all nice stuff, but if someone offers you a slice of thin-crust pizza or a pile of fresh vegetables for lunch, you’ll probably have to think about it for a second. Ultimately, I know which one you’ll be more likely to choose, and so do you. Because, most Americans are lukewarm on vegetables. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly become a vegetarian after a lifetime of burying your peas in your mashed potatoes, and anyone who claims that they’ve suddenly seen the light and gone totally plant-based after years of eating meat is probably sneaking takeout Hong Shao Rao in the closet at 3 a.m. Guilty as charged.

I’ll never call myself a vegetarian, but I do what I can. Moving to a mostly plant-based diet, for me, is plenty political: I believe that CAFOs are hell-on-earth, I think that GMOs exist to line the pockets of big Ag. But it’s also health-related. I come from a long line of cardiac patients. My skinny-minnie mother is a borderline diabetic. I sit on my ass for a living. I’ve lived in the suburbs since 2001, when I left Manhattan. I drive everywhere. Not a processed bit of food passes these lips, yet I’ve recently become glucose intolerant and for the last four years, I’ve taken a small handful — yes, a handful — of pills for my blood pressure and cholesterol. I’d like to not have the pharmaceutical industry own quite so much real estate in my medicine cabinet.  I’d like to not have to worry about being pre-diabetic, or, should the rules surrounding my health insurance change, wonder how I’ll afford the pills I might need. So eating a plant-based diet makes a lot of sense for me. Woo-hoo.

If only I liked it as much as, say, a braised pork shoulder-based diet.

Recently, though, I made a small discovery about vegetarian food that I’d never really hit on before, and it’s been a game-changer: Americans are used to vegetarian food (think the ubiquitous steamed vegetables and rice) having no textural or taste contrast — no bright flavor highs, and no earthy flavor lows. We think of them as one-note, boring, and perhaps just a bit slippery. Conversely, we all know to put ketchup on our burgers: the brightness of the “tomato” flavor adds a spark to the earthy rich fattiness of the meat. It cuts through it, and so all your taste buds are happy. We all know that the gorgeous, caramelized crunchy bits on top of baked macaroni and cheese add another dimension to a dish that is otherwise dense, creamy, rich, and totally one-note. It’s the reason why we all fight over the corner brownie, and why we loved fried chicken, and oatmeal raisin cookies, and bacon with our eggs, and chewy, meaty, salty pork tucked into a tender, sweet, pillowy Chinese bun. It’s about flavor, sure, but it’s also about high notes and low, sweetness against richness, suppleness and density and crispiness and crunch. It’s about texture and contrast, and when it’s missing from vegetarian food, we know it immediately, because the result can be vile.

So, with this knowledge, I’m slowly re-learning how to cook: my cupboards are filled with jars of things — pepitas, pine nuts, slivered almonds — that, when toasted, lend earthy crunch to a dish. Instead of splashing vinegar into cooked-down rabe to give it a little sweetness (and a whole lot more sogginess), I’m adding a sprinkling of currants, and some lightly-toasted sunflower seeds. Actually taking the time to think about the vegetables I’m eating — what their flavor and texture profiles are, and what would contrast against those profiles — has made a very big difference. Admittedly, I wouldn’t have come to this by myself — I have people like Deborah Madison, Heidi Swanson, Yotam Ottolenghi, Kim O’Donnel, and Sara Forte to thank. In all the years I’ve cooked, I’ve never considered texture to be as important as flavor. Most of us don’t; but in plant-based cooking, it’s imperative.

I don’t know if my father ever would have learned to like vegetarian food; his memories of boiled Brussels sprouts, boiled carrots, and boiled green beans ran very deep, and not in a good way. Still, I wish I’d had the chance to share with him what I’ve learned. I’d like to think he’d have enjoyed it, even without the pork.

Crispy Cabbage Salad

(Adapted from Balaboosta, NYC)

Recently, Susan and I had lunch at the glorious Balaboosta with Grace Young, author of Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge and Breath of a Wok. It was Grace’s suggestion; she’d been wanting to try Einat Admony‘s refined Middle Eastern food, and to say that we were delighted with what we ate would be an understatement. But of everything on the table that day, I fell head-over-heels in love with a simple, shredded cabbage salad tossed with a minty cumin vinaigrette,  toasted almonds and — wonderfully — a handful of what appeared to be Chinese chow mein noodles. It was tender, creamy, pungent, sour, sweet, earthy, and crispy all at once, and everything that a good vegetable dish should be. Here’s my spin on it; the vinaigrette may seem very spice-forward. It is.

Serves 3 as a main dish

For the vinaigrette:

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons mild extra virgin olive oil

1-2 tablespoons fromage blanc (or plain yogurt)

1 heaping tablespoon chopped fresh mint leaves

Agave, to taste

1 tablespoon toasted, ground cumin

1/4 teaspoon sumac

For the salad:

1-1/2 cups romaine lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces

2 cups shredded Savoy cabbage, loosely packed

1/3 cup unsalted sliced almonds, lightly toasted in a dry skillet until barely golden

1/2 cup crispy chow mein noodles

Make the vinaigrette:

Place the mustard in a medium bowl and whisk in the olive oil until emulsified. Whisk in the fromage blanc or yogurt until blended; thin out slightly with water if necessary (the consistency should be like a creamy, loose batter). Fold in the mint, and add the agave, a quarter teaspoon at a time, and combine well, tasting for sweetness. Fold in the toasted cumin and whisk vigorously. Set aside at room temperature while you assemble the salad.

Assemble the salad:

Using your hands, in a large wooden bowl toss together the romaine and the cabbage until evenly distributed. Add the almonds and toss again. Dress the salad with the vinaigrette — it should be a wet salad — and then add the crispy noodles. Toss well to combine, and serve immediately.

I’ve been laughing all day.

Really.

We’re three days past Christmas, and last night was the very last candle of Hanukkah. It’s been a holiday season that’s been both blessed and difficult (as holiday seasons usually are. This is a universal truth).

The house this year was gorgeous. The tree was perfect. The menorah — we eschewed the tiny silver one and instead pulled out the big recycled metal one I bought for a dollar at my local Waldorf School’s holiday sale a few years ago — and filled it with stunning white tapers that we wound up not lighting, mostly because things just got away from us.

There was roasted, herb-crusted fillet. Oven-blasted root vegetables and potatoes tossed with rosemary and whole garlic cloves. There were Brussels sprouts and tiny lardons cubed from the bacon that my friend Steve-the-Butcher makes. I ate virtually none of it during Christmas dinner, instead tasting very tentatively as I cooked. I avoided the sourdough boule. I had one chunk of a crispy, golden-roasted potato. I had a Brussels sprout and one lardon. Un lardon. I set the Christmas pudding ablaze despite a debilitating fear of fire and drizzled it with hard sauce which I scraped off my hummingbird-sized portion. I ate not one Christmas cookie, and drank not one cup of eggnog. I ate one tiny latke bound together with rice flour instead of wheat — it performed as I’d hoped, and crisped up much more enthusiastically than when I make it with its white whole wheat flour cousin — and topped it with a tiny slice of smoked salmon from the Gaspe peninsula, and a petite dot of black tobiko, which I dolloped, ceremoniously, off the end of an antique silver salt spoon.

It was all very nice.

But today, with the holiday pretty much being over — trees are starting to appear piled up at the dump and in the streets next to city garbage cans; the torturous, endless loops of sterile Mitch Miller carols are growing mercifully fainter — I’ve been laughing.

Not a good laugh, but a nervous, embarrassed tic. Because every single year around this time, I’m in the exact same place both gastronomically and healthfully: I visit the doctor on the 23rd, as my health insurance year draws to a close and the news — just as we’re about to fling ourselves into the land of trifles and game birds, sufganiyot and latkes, standing rib, vintage port and aged burgundy — isn’t wonderful. This happened last year, the year before, and the year before that. Without getting into specifics, the instructions are always the same: Cut this. Cut that. Cut the other stuff. Your numbers are off the scale. 

I’m a food writer, I tell my doctor.

That’s your problem, she says, staring at me over her glasses.

It’s the holidays, I say.

Tough, she answers. Be creative. 

And every year, I am.

Until I’m not.

“I’ll change the New Years’ menu,” my dear friend Lisa says, when I tell her what’s going on. “We don’t have to have a rib roast. Or any wine.”

Sure. No wine. 

“Absolutely not,” I tell her, refusing to drag her and her partner into the milquetoasty world of health-related culinary blandness, where conviviality gets bogged down by worry, like an immovable anchor on a party ship.

But this year, two days before Christmas, when every wealthy holiday table in America sits creaking under the weight of the extravagant excess that we seem to believe is our right, I learned that I am one of the others.

I am not obese. I have been athletic my entire life. I don’t eat sweets. I don’t like chocolate. I don’t eat anything white, or any baked goods, cakes, candies, or pies. I eat meat once or twice a month, and pasta a bit more than that. I love rice and Asian food and whole grains and towering piles of sauteed kale with tons of garlic and hot red pepper, and I can eat an entire bucket of heavily-spiced chole in one sitting.

I don’t live in a food desert. Very far from it.

But as a comparatively monied American who grew up in 1970s semi-suburbia, I also love pizza, and cheese, and sausage, and good wine, and hand-crafted ale, and barbecue, and the very occasional grass-fed hot dog. I am kept in local, organic eggs by chickens who live next door, and I eat those eggs poached and served on whole grain toast, or fried and tucked into a griddled roll with a tissue-thin slice of ham, or fried and perched atop a tangle of soba noodles heavily doused with Sriracha sauce. My idea of a swell Sunday night is roasting a local chicken (not a neighbor) surrounded, as Laurie Colwin once described it, like a tugboat in a sea of olive oil-slicked vegetables glimmering under a snowy shower of salt crystals.

In my home, the pizza is produced from organic, local ingredients. The cheese comes from a cow whose name I know, and the sausage is house-made by Steve-the-Butcher. The salt crystals are hand-harvested. The chicken has a grassy, earthy taste, from noshing on the slugs in the fields where it has spent its chickeny life gleefully roaming around. It’s all, generally speaking, pretty healthy stuff. And expensive. It’s what food professionals like me rave about. It’s the way we want to eat — the way we want everyone to eat; folks would be a lot healthier if they did  — and we’re very lucky if we can.

But we shouldn’t. Not all the time.

Not in the quantities that we, in this country — that I, in my home — have come to know as normal. It doesn’t matter if it’s locally sourced or hand-crafted or made from a cow named Ernestine who lives on the north side of a pasture in Vermont. I am proof positive that, however spectacular the ingredients, too much is just too much. Whatever it is. As I once said here, grass-fed beef is lovely. But it’s not a vegetable. Not. A. Vegetable. 

Given the quality of the food that I eat and the way that I cook it, I really shouldn’t have this issue with triglycerides and the beginnings of glucose intolerance. But I do. And knowing this fact — finding out about it just as 2011 is poised to leave — is the greatest gift that anyone’s ever given me. Despite the tears.

I am representative of those of us who run screaming from fast food, who don’t eat anything processed, who rarely eat anything cured, who are members of $70-per-month gyms, who take their two dogs on long walks every day in their nice, tidy towns, who drink small-batch bourbons procured at high-end liquor stores, who shop mostly at organic cooperatives and CSAs and farmer’s markets and who know the names of the people who grow the corn that we eat with our veggie burgers. I ostensibly do all the right things; I can afford to. Many can’t.

But I now understand that sometimes, it’s not only what we eat, but how we eat it, how often we eat it, and in what quantity. Repeat: Too much is just too much.

So now, with a new year ahead, I’ll be thinking about food very differently. There will be a lot more vegetarian and vegan dishes showing up here, despite the little piggy who lives up top. The ingredients will still be the local, organic, natural, and freshest I can find. There will be far more single-plate dishes, and those plates, physically, will be smaller.

This is my New Year’s gift to myself and my partner.

This is my fork in the road. I can go one way, or the other.

I'd like an electric menorah, please.

We never celebrated Christmas when I was child.

I grew up in a Jewish home — well, sort of; I didn’t go to Hebrew school and we never kept kosher and my maternal grandmother had just the tiniest obsession with dragging me off to see the life size Baby Jesus at St Patrick’s Cathedral every Shabbes before Christmas Eve — and while we were surrounded by the trappings of the holiday, we never actually initiated any Christmas activities. We had no tree, no stockings, no eggnog, and no Yule log, except for the one that burned for twenty four hours on Channel 11. Every Christmas, I would watch it in a catatonic stupor and invariably drift off, imagining that those were the peals of the non-existent churches in my Queens neighborhood instead of car alarms.

Still, every family has their own ways of marking the holiday season, and we were no different. Over Christmas, my best friends down the street filled stockings and went ice skating at Skyrink or Rockefeller Center, and came home to hot chocolate laced with tiny, industrially-fabricated marshmallows, and plates of golden, broiled, buttered toast sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. One year, we spent the holiday with friends who lived a few floors up from us in our apartment building. I don’t know what is more vivid: the memory of my friend’s big brother — a large child — getting his head stuck for hours in a cherry red football helmet that my father had bought him, or the half pound of sugar that their mother had decided would make a flavorful addition to the pork meatballs that were a regular part of their Feast of the Seven Fishes.

When they were very young, my friends were taken to sit on Santa’s lap at Macy’s; one year, my mother and grandmother turned the thumbscrews until my father relented and plunked me down on the lap of the truly fabulous 1970 Santa who asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

An electric menorah, I said happily, meaning the kind with the orange bulbs that you turn a little bit to ignite. They flicker constantly no matter what you do, like a sort of Judaic disco ball.

As I got older, my holiday desires and needs changed fairly radically: I began playing the guitar when I was very young, and by the time I was eight, I was fanatical about it, always hoping that my holiday would involve strings or picks or capos or that 1939 Martin D-28 I coveted. A few years later, when I started taking piano lessons, I infuriated my teacher, a short French man with a red combover; he was incensed that I could play as well as I could by ear, and proceeded to torture me with technique and theory. He eventually quit when he walked in for my lesson one pre-Christmas afternoon and found me staring at the ceiling and playing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by heart, using both hands.

“Your daughter ees petulant,” he said to my father, who just smiled, handed him a five dollar bill and wished him a happy holiday. He never returned.

That Saturday, my father announced that we would be spending the day together while my mother was working part-time in Manhattan as a fur model.

“We’re going to the mall,” he said, as we drove out along Grand Central Parkway and then south, on the Cross Island. I assumed it was to do some shopping, but he had other plans, and as we ambled through the glittering corridors of 1970s consumerism — there was a store called Magik Candle that sold black light posters and spewed bilious clouds of incense into the air, and tee shirt shops where you could choose iron-on appliques featuring everyone from Loggins & Messina to the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter — he steered me along until we got to an enormous, carpeted showroom lined with pedal organs. And it was there that we began a special holiday tradition all our own.

When we got to the Wurlitzer store that first year, the salesman — a thinnish guy with greasy dark hair, dressed in a russet brown polyester triple weave suit with a sprig of fake holly stuck in his lapel — stood loitering nervously around the entrance to the organ showroom, looking like Mr. Bean.

“Bet I can teach the little lady how to play in no time flat–” he gloated to my father, slapping him on the back and winking at my diminutive, snorkel parka-wearing self as we pretended to stroll past on our way to the mall steakhouse next door, for a frozen Beef Wellington and virgin eggnog snack.

“I guess,” my father replied, shrugging his shoulders while I stood there.

“Why don’t you give it a shot, honey,” the salesman beckoned. “Let your daddy hold your coat, and sit right down over here.”

I took my parka off and handed it to my father while the salesman pulled the bench away from an enormous, four foot-wide pedal organ that sat on a low riser near the entrance to the store, its red levers marked TUBA and SOUSAPHONE and BOSSA NOVA. He flipped the ON switch and the organ purred like a kitten.

“Let’s set the beat for you,” he said. And he pressed another button marked RHYTHM, and a muffled, electronic uptempo began, untethered to any music or melody, like an arrhythmia.

“The keys are marked with numbers, honey, so just press the ones that correspond to these—”

He propped the EASY ORGAN 1-2-3 sheet music for Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas in front of me and pointed to the color-coded, numbered notes.

“Think you can do it, sweetie?” my father asked, feigning sincerity.

“I’m just not sure, Daddy –” I whined, looking over my shoulder.

“Come on, honey–” the salesman implored, impatiently. “You’ve already got your rhythm section. Let’s give her a whirl—Go on and play some Christmas jingles!”

A small crowd gathered around behind me, laughing at the fact that my feet didn’t even reach the pedals. I  pushed up my sleeves, took a deep breath, flipped the BOSSA NOVA lever to the ON position, and played the single-note version of The Girl from Ipanema, which I’d picked up from recently listening to my parents’ new Astrud Gilberto album. In the years that followed, I’d go on to play Delilah, The Green Green Grass of Home, and eventually, the first four bars of Positively Fourth Street, just like Al Kooper.

“That’s not very Christmas-y,” the scowling salesman said through his teeth that first year. He was embarassed and confused and hopeful all at once, and as he stood next to me on the riser, sweating, his face flushed a deep, holiday red. The crowd applauded wildly as I climbed down and took my coat from my father.

“Wow–” my father said to the salesman. “I guess it really is a cinch!”

“She’s a natural,” the salesman admitted. “I can have this baby sitting in your living room in time for Christmas dinner —” he added, taking a cordovan leatherette pad out of his jacket pocket to write up the order.

“I don’t think so,” my father replied, handing me my parka and ushering me away as the salesman blanched. “But thanks all the same — and Merry Christmas.”

A few minutes later, my father and I were sitting in a booth at the steakhouse next door, listening to the Muzaq version of Ave Maria, and sharing a Beef Wellington before heading back to Manhattan to pick up my mother.

My father took thoughtful sips of his gin Gibson from a small martini glass.

“I think we really got him — didn’t we,” he mused, pulling the tiny onions off their little plastic sword one by one.

“I guess so,” I said, sucking up my fake eggnog through an unraveling paper straw. I felt badly that we’d just bilked this guy out of the hefty commission he was certain he’d made, while onlookers quietly ran silent computations, envisioning their children flipping a switch and suddenly being able to play Lady of Spain, right out of the gate.

“Maybe someone else will buy one,” I added brightly, silently wondering exactly how many Wurlitzers could possibly ever be sold in the course of one Christmas season.

“Could be,” my father said, slicing into the tufts of puff pastry wrapped around the meaty hockey puck. “Could be.”

We ate in silence that afternoon and during all the Christmas afternoons at the mall for years that followed, until I got too old, and too good at playing keyboards for it to be funny anymore. It was years before I understood that the holiday was not about the mall and the Christmas consumerism and taunting the poor shlub with the plastic holly in his lapel, who probably never unloaded one damn organ; even though we lived in the city, it seemed to me to be about peace and quiet, and coming in from the bitter cold, and powdered hot chocolate with marshmallows that tasted like styrofoam, and the burnt sugar rime on the cinnamon toast that my friend’s mother down the street made every single Christmas, and still does. Each year, she eats it quietly before her adult children arrive, sitting alone in her kitchen and listening to an old vinyl Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, while the dusty, unremarkable spinet piano of their childhood gathers dust in the corner, next to the tree.

A few weeks ago, Susan and I were down in Florida visiting my cousins, as we often are over Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, I squirreled myself away for a long, call-in phone interview with the folks over at Wisconsin Public Radio; people phoned in from all over the northern midwest wanting answers to everything from how to shake up lentil nut loaf (I was kind) to how to brine a pre-brined turkey (don’t). The number of vegetarians and vegans who called was astonishing, and for the first time ever, no one asked anything about leftovers. The conversation eventually led to a discussion about my favorite vegetable dish, and when I described it, I could hear a long, cavernous echo coming from that great freezing land of beer, badgers, and brats.

Brussels sprouts and grapes? the host repeated, incredulous.

Yes, I said. It’s sweet and savory; the grapes release their delicious sugars as they cook, which in turn caramelize the sprouts. You can eat it hot, cold, or at room temperature. You can add anything to it, within reason: toasted walnuts, pine nuts, spicy pepitas, lardons, whole garlic cloves, fresh thyme or rosemary, sea salt. Or nothing at all, which is generally how I like it.

And then people started calling in to ask for the recipe, and I realized that, while I’ve often spoken of the dish, I’ve only infrequently provided a recipe for it, or any inkling into its provenance.

I was never much of a Brussels sprouts fan; the idea of them conjured up memories of sitting in my sleepaway camp dining room as both a camper, and then, a counselor, and having them whiz past my head after being hurled like a small boulder from a trebuchet. Years later, when I was studying in England, they were presented to me cloaked in a sort of grayish grease, having been boiled in water for what must have been days. Or months. A little while after I came home to New York, I was having dinner with my mother at a very trendy restaurant on the Upper West Side, and there were Brussels sprouts leaves strewn about the plate, but no sign of the sprouts themselves. Eventually, I read Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, and took note of the part where she says she sometimes makes marinated Brussels sprouts for the Christmas holidays; I trust her completely, so I gave it a shot. And lo and behold, I discovered that I not only liked them. I loved them.

A few years ago, I was driving around my neighborhood, running errands, when I heard a restaurateur on NPR talking about roasting Brussels sprouts together with grapes. The host was mystified, but so enamored of the dish was the guest that I pulled into my local market and bought a pound of sprouts and a bunch of grapes, and headed home to make them. No recipe had been given, so I had at it: I tossed the sprouts in a cast iron pan (cast iron is key) with a few dribbles of olive oil, a pinch of salt, and a bit of pepper. I gave the pan a shake, and then popped it into a hot oven. Once the sprouts turned bright green, I added a handful of red seedless grapes. I gave the pan another shake, and put it back in the oven until the grapes softened and the sprouts were knife-tender and caramelized. It was easy and delicious. And just a little bit surprising.

Over the years, I’ve tweaked the recipe: if the Brussels sprouts are big (or if time is a concern), simply slice them in half. Add herbs, or not. Or nuts, or not. Add tiny, cubed, crisp lardons. Or not. Drizzle it with a light splash of red wine vinegar, and serve it at room temperature with a wedge of earthy sheep’s milk cheese like Sardo di Pecora. I’ve even cooked the dish in a metal basket on the grill, alongside a steak. The direct-fire method results in a bit more charring, but the dish is still delicious.

However you make it and in whatever proportions, bear in mind the balance of sweet to salty/savory, and keep an eye on the pan as your guests begin to arrive. Shake it frequently to keep things roasting evenly, and when it’s time to eat, bring the pan directly to the table. Even Brussels sprouts naysayers will fall in love; they will likely be found in the middle of the night, eating the leftovers directly out of the fridge.

At least in my house.

Brussels Sprouts and Grapes

I’ve been making this dish for years, and always to various levels of bemusement and scoffing, until my guests tuck in. If you’re able to find very young, tiny Brussels sprouts, add grapes with a lighter hand, otherwise you’ll wind up obscuring the fresh, grassy flavor that make baby sprouts so wonderful. Forget about slicing an X in the bottom of your sprouts; in this dish, there’s no need for it.

Serves 4

1 pound Brussels sprouts, tough outer leaves and stem removed

1 tablespoon Extra virgin olive oil

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1/4 pound red seedless grapes (not Globe)

Optional: fresh thyme sprigs, fresh rosemary sprigs, whole peeled garlic cloves, toasted walnuts/spicy pepitas/toasted pine nuts, lardons

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Place the sprouts in a large cast iron pan and drizzle with oil, shaking the pan to lightly coat them. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and give the pan another shake. Place the pan on the middle rack in the oven and roast, shaking every once in a while, for twenty minutes.

Add the grapes to the pan, place it back in the oven, and continue to roast for another ten minutes, shaking frequently, until the grapes have softened and their skins wrinkle, and the sprouts are knife tender. Serve immediately, or at room temperature.

ADD-ONS NOTE:

If you are adding nuts to this dish, add them five minutes before removing the pan from the oven.

If you are adding thyme or rosemary, add it to the sprouts after the first pan shake.

If you are adding whole garlic cloves, add it to the sprouts after the first pan shake.

If you are adding lardons, you can either:

1- Cook the lardons separately, drain off the fat, and add them when you add the grapes. Or,

2 – Cook the lardons in the cast iron pan, remove them to a bowl, drain off all but one tablespoon of the fat and then add the sprouts to the remaining fat in the pan, and continue with the recipe. Add the cooked lardons as above.

My mother let fly with a nonstop barrage of chatter the minute I arrived at her apartment.

“Look at this,” she said, holding an ancient Missoni sweater up to herself the way she’d held clothes up to me on shopping trips when I was five.

“It’s from 1988 — and I still have it!”

Keeping stuff from years ago that she could still wear if she wanted to gives her options, she says, even if she never actually wears them.

“Wait–” she said, “I have something else to show you. It’s fabulous. You’ll love it—-”

It was like she’d been suddenly released from a vow of silence, and her words erupted like bullets from a Tommy gun. She disappeared into her bedroom and came out with a delicate silk kimono that I’d never seen. It would have been enormous on her, so I knew it wasn’t hers.

“It was Grandma’s, from the 1920s,” she said, holding it up so I could see it, turning it around, front and back, front and back. It was a flurry of powder blues and dusty mauves, made from roughly textured raw silk, and printed on the very bottom hem was the word JAPAN.  I instinctively took a sleeve and held it up to my face to see if there was any essence of Grandma there — of the mothballs and Jean Nate and schmaltz that co-mingled to make up the Proustian essence of her. But there was nothing.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“When she died—” she said.

“But that’s thirty years ago — why didn’t you show it to me before?”

“It was buried behind other stuff–”

“Maybe you should get rid of some of the other stuff–”

“But then I wouldn’t have options, would I-–” she answered ruefully, and took off back into the bedroom with Grandma’s kimono flying over her shoulder. I heard the closet door swing open, and the clattering shove of hangers pushed far to one side. She hung the kimono up behind other stuff, and closed the closet door.

And that’s the thing about stuff; sometimes, we accumulate so much of it over the years that we start to forget about all the other, better, more important stuff that’s hidden behind it. During the holiday season, the accumulation of new stuff knows no limits, especially where kitchen stuff is concerned. There’s reading stuff, and cooking stuff, and baking stuff, all of which falls under the kitchen stuff heading. Sometimes, the reading stuff doesn’t always lead to cooking, even if it’s about cooking. It’s still good stuff. As George Carlin once said, a house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. 

When I got home after the kimono incident, I said to Susan, you know—for two people, I think we have way too much stuff. We were standing in the kitchen at the time, surrounded by kitchenware catalogs. I had just tried to open one of those drawers underneath my kitchen bookshelf (which contains some reading stuff that I use a lot), and it was stuck because something was clogging up the works: when I finally pulled it, hard, out flew a couple of very important corks (1993 Banfi Brunello, from our first trip together to Tuscany; 2000 Romanee-Conti Grands Echezeaux, and a gift from an author when I left Clarkson Potter in 2006) which were buried under a bag of those flat French sponges, which was wedged against the side of the drawer by a large Glad bag of twist ties given to us by my mother-in-law, who saves that kind of stuff, just in case.

“I mean,” I said to Susan, who was sipping on a glass of water while going through a pile of mail, “do we really need twenty-seven wooden spoons? Or those tiny pathetic little whisks meant for beating a single quail egg? Or a special teeny rasp for nutmeg? Why can’t we just use the regular rasp? And why all the twist ties? We don’t even use plastic baggies anymore—”

“Fine—then let’s get rid of some stuff–” she said, putting the mail down on the counter, alongside a stack of magazines and circulars and the free supplement that my local newspaper sends out every Friday.  A hardware store catalog featuring Santa dressed in Carhartt overalls and wearing Bose noise-canceling headphones slipped off the counter and fell into the dog’s water bowl, and I thought I was going to have a stroke.

Because most of my professional life is spent in either my office or my kitchen, I’ve lately become very sensitive to the towering pile-ups of stuff in those rooms. I’m not even sure if it’s lately, or if it’s just that I’ve finally hit my tipping point, like when your body hits its allergen wall and your throat suddenly closes up with no explanation. So I planned my course of action: I would go through books first, and whittle them back to absolutely only those I use and/or truly love. Whatever reading stuff I was getting rid of would go to neighbors (who cook) and friends, or to the culinary department at the local high school. Once the books were sieved down to the essentials, I’d attack the other kitchen stuff — the whisks, the tipless knives, the glassware that we bought because it was cute, the tart tins with the missing bottoms, the goddamned important corks — and by the time I was done, surfaces would be clear, shelves and drawers would be orderly, and our house would be able to breathe again, just in time for the arrival of more holiday stuff.

The act of ridding oneself of cookbooks is not an easy one for a writer, much less a writer who used to be a cookbook department manager at a well-known gourmet shop. Compound that problem with more than a decade of being a book editor at two major publishing houses. Add to that the fact that when one’s spouse works for one of the said major publishing houses as a book designer, fringe benefits include all the reading stuff you can handle, for a lifetime. And of course, reading stuff, like my mother’s 1980s sweaters, holds the promise of options, and possibility:  I could make Thomas Keller’s oysters and pearls if I wanted to, even though I never actually would.

Promise is so seductive.

Anyway, I was ruthless: unless it was a classic, or if I hadn’t opened it in a year, it landed in the giveaway pile. If it contained three or more handwritten notes angrily correcting recipes that obviously hadn’t been tested prior to publication, it went away. If its content was maddening — if it required immersion circulators and liquid nitrogen and an Ortolan — it was packed up.

“Aren’t you being a little bit extreme?” Susan asked. It was right after her surgery, and she was ensconced on the den sofa like a pasha, watching golf.

“Are you planning on buying an immersion circulator? Because I’m not.”

“Do I get to keep any of them?” she asked, sadly.

“Sure,” I said, putting my hands on my hips.

She got up and perused my toss pile and pulled from it exactly one book, on the baked goods of Sardinia.

“I’d like to keep this one,” she said.

“Will you ever use it? I mean, we’re keeping Maida Heatter, Jim Lahey, Peter Reinhart, all those tiny Elizabeth Alston baking books, and everything that Dorie Greenspan ever wrote. Do you really need a book on Sardinian baking?”

She looked at me over her light blue Lina Wurtmuller glasses.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.” And then she went back into the den.

I divvied up my giveaway pile of reading stuff among my neighbors, who were thrilled. Suddenly, my bookshelves were able to inhale and exhale, like they’d taken a shot of Afrin during a horrific head cold. I felt free, and joyful, but not for long: my next goal was to rid us of unnecessary cooking implements, like olive pitters and the aforementioned tipless knife. I wanted to whittle down our wooden spoon collection to a mere six. The French steel crepe pan, which I had to have, could go away, along with the All-Clad searing pan really designed for flambeing Bananas Foster. I never make Bananas Foster. And since that one unfortunate class in cooking school, I never flambe. The plastic cruet set that someone — I have no idea who — so obviously re-gifted to us would find its way to the Goodwill box, along with one of three digital thermometers and the dyed green St. Patrick’s Day toothpicks from the Reagan Administration.

But first, before I did anything, I decided to spend an evening with the books I really loved — the ones that would never, ever leave: there were all the idiosyncratic Chez Panisse books—the ones that assume you have access to Meyer Lemons even if you live in Newfoundland. There was Elizabeth David, and even though I have both the American and British editions of French Provincial Cooking, and hardcover and softcover editions of Italian Food, they all stayed. There’s Marcella’s The Classic Italian Cookbook, which I bought in the basement “book room” at Random House in 1985, days after I graduated from college. There were the books that I use on a daily basis, like all of Deborah Madison’s, and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking Every Day, which is worth its weight in gold for both its aesthetic and its recipes, is still in the kitchen. Edna Lewis stayed put, as did Laurie Colwin, Jacques Pepin, Marion Cunningham, Craig Claiborne’s New York Times, Amanda Hesser’s New York Times, Lord Krishna’s Cuisine, Paula Wolfert, Diana Kennedy, Nigel Slater, David Tanis, and Julia’s The Way to Cook. I couldn’t bear to part with Lee Bailey, even though I look at his books precisely once a year, usually on New Years Day, after everyone’s gone home. The Silver Palate could have gone either way, but when the book fell open to a spattered page and the recipe for chicken marbella, I couldn’t part with it.

Susan yelled hoarsely from the den “If you get rid of Jean Anderson, I’ll break your legs.”

Of course, I yelled back.

Naturally, my plan to rid the house of unnecessary stuff coincided with every magazine, newspaper, blog, and radio show doing their year-end mash-ups of must-have books and gadgets like that $625, multi-volume treatise on modern cooking, or a $200 Japanese ice cube maker. The other day, while standing in the wonderful Posman’s Books in Grand Central Station, I found myself in the cookbook section, staring glassy-eyed at all the new and gorgeous volumes that would attempt to seduce me into taking them home to my now corkless, stuffless lair, to refill the spots vacated by the books I’d shed so recently. For the first time ever, I was able to restrain myself.

Because, just for a little while, I want to be able to breathe. To know, cook from, and honor what I have. And to live with the hidden jewels that, like my grandmother’s mysterious kimono, might otherwise be obscured by the allure of the new, and the delicious temptation of possibility and promise.

It happened at exactly 1:07 pm this afternoon, Eastern time.

She called my cell as I was sitting in a restaurant, having the Tuesday sushi lunch special.

I was minding my own business, wondering about the freshness of the so-called toro, when my phone vibrated and her number came up. Not being of the mind to take calls on my cell while I’m sitting in a restaurant, I let voice mail pick it up. I took a sip of tea, and listened to her message. She was talking through her teeth.

I have tried you everywhere. I called you at home. I’m calling you now. I demand that you call me back this instant. DEMAND.

And then she slammed the receiver down so hard that I heard the ringer vibrate on the old Princess phone that she refuses to get rid of, even though talking through two Dixie cups and a string would be clearer.

This is the conversation that my mother has initiated absolutely every Tuesday before Thanksgiving since 1978, when my parents divorced and my father invited me to attend a big, happy, holiday celebration at his sister’s home on Long Island. It was, otherwise, a fairly miserable time in my very young life, so Thanksgiving with a giant raft of cousins, their children, and my aunt and uncle turned out to be a bright spot. The food was very good, if extremely traditional. We’re all musicians to some degree, so there was always a lot of music. Eventually, I started staying over and spending Friday with them too, and then, a few years later, the whole weekend. I’ve done this every single year since 1978, apart from two: one year in the late 80s, I spent Thanksgiving in Woodstock, NY with some vegetarian friends, and roasted a stuffed pumpkin which leaked all over the inside of their oven and onto their heart pine floors. Last year, Susan and I rented a cottage in Mill Valley, and spent the holiday with her cousins who live in the Bay Area. Other than those two times, I have spent Thanksgiving with my father’s family every year since Jimmy Carter was in office. Since before the Iran Hostage Crisis. Since before John Lennon was shot. Since before Three Mile Island. SInce before Harvey Milk was murdered.

That’s a long time.

So the question Where are you going for Thanksgiving — the one that gets wielded, angrily, like a scimitar by my mother every Tuesday before the holiday — needn’t be asked, really. Really.

But, in the way that some people automatically begin their preparation for the holiday the minute the Halloween candy gets put away, her vituperative message is like a call to action for me. I start fretting about Thanksgiving dinner around noon the Tuesday before — that would be today — when she phones to remind me (in the spirit of the season, of course) what a lout I am, and have been, lo these many years. While she harangues, I wonder blithely to myself if my cousin Carol, who is a stellar cook, will plan to brine the turkey, or dry-salt it the way Russ Parsons now does thanks to Judy Rodgers. We have some food allergies in the family — I’m allergic to melon (crazy), my cousin Mishka is allergic to fish, my cousin Joan is allergic to nuts and fish — and so I have to remind myself not to worry because we’re really not a pecan-and-oyster stuffing sort of crowd.

While I hear her scream the litany of wrongs I have perpetrated over the years that I haven’t seen her on Thanksgiving, I make notes to myself about wine: Carol is an oaky chardonnay drinker from way back, and proudly prefers the hefty, syrupy style that American chard drinks often love. Nina, her sister, drinks only red because white wine is simply too acidic for her. Susan and I will drink red — a nice Pinot Noir, like maybe the Sinskey that I once had with my cousins some years back when they invited me to spend a few days with them in Aspen. So maybe this year we’ll surprise them with bottles of Heitz chardonnay, and, if we can find it, Van Duzer Pinot.

Right around the time that she asks ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? and I mistakenly remind her that I have just cooked a fancy dinner for her and her friends over the Jewish holidays — it’s really the only time that she likes to trot me out as a doting cook — and that her cousins have invited her to their home in New Jersey the way they always do and she tells me that it will be just too embarrassing for her to be seen without me, that she’s too sick to death to bother eating anything and will plan to just lay in her bed and rot while everyone around her has a good time, I make a note to myself to remember to tuck our autumnal cookie cutters into the suitcase, in the event that Susan is asked to make the apple pie that everyone loves.

You’ve never spent Thanksgiving with me, I hear her shout. Never.

And I remember, through the short, bitter silences, and the accusations of neglect and the implication that I have chosen one side of my family over the other during this, the season of love and togetherness, that there was one other time that I didn’t spend the holiday with my cousins on my Dad’s side: instead, I stayed home in Forest Hills and made a small turkey for my mother and her soon-to-be second husband, Buddy. When my father had moved out, he’d taken the electric slicer with him, leaving me to hack away at the Butterball with a serrated Ginsu tomato knife.

“It cuts through steel,” Buddy said. “So you should be fine.”

Together, they sat at the table in silence while I fruitlessly searched for the ball joint that connects the leg to the body, like a blindfolded surgical student. My grandmother held aloft an open can of cranberry jelly — the stuff with the ridges — over a serving bowl, waiting for gravity to suck it out like a vacuum. And I, at seventeen, played the role of the Dad, serving everyone hunks of turkey that looked as though it had been carved with a dull axe, and had the general consistency of a Balsa Wood airplane. I don’t really remember eating much that night, although I’m certain I did.

Maybe this is why I’m not terribly fond of turkey, and only prefer it when it’s morphed into something else, like turkey soup with dumplings, or turkey hash, or turkey croquettes, or turkey pot pie. Maybe this is why I invariably wind up sneaking away during the holiday week and gorging myself guiltily on things that the Pilgrims most certainly never ate, and that have no bearing on this bittersweet holiday, like tofu, or Shanghai soup dumplings, or Penang curry, or a middling sushi lunch at a suburban Pan-Asian dive eaten while scribbling notes to myself about things to pack for our holiday trip to my cousins’ house.

I’ll never know for sure.

Crusted Delicata Squash with Dilled Yogurt

(adapted from Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi)

The original version of this dish calls for pumpkin, which I just can’t cope with. It could be because of the exploding Thanksgiving pumpkin experience I’ve mentioned in the past, or it could just be because there are only two of us in the house and roasting a whole pumpkin seems excessive if you’re not doing it for a crowd. I happen to love delicata squash for three reasons: one, it’s so — well — delicata. Second: you can eat the skin. At least I can, and I do. Third: it takes virtually no time to cook, comparatively speaking. The bread-crumby, Parmigiana crust is a lovely counterpoint to the squash’s smooth texture, and the yogurt, which replaces the dish’s original sour cream, offers a tangy high note to the dish.

Serves 4

2 medium Delicata squash, sliced into 1/2 inch rings, seeds removed

1/2 cup grated Parmigiana Reggiano

3 tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs

6 tablespoons finely chopped parsley

2-1/2 teaspoons finely chopped thyme

grated zest of 2 lemons

2 garlic cloves, crushed

salt and pepper, to taste

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1 tablespoon chopped dill

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

In a small bowl, mix together the cheese, breadcrumbs, parsley, thyme, half the lemon zest, the garlic, a small amount of salt, and black pepper.

Brush the squash with the oil, and sprinkle with the crust mix, making sure the slices are covered well. Place the squash on a greased, stick-proof baking sheet and roast for about 30 minutes, or until tender.

Mix the yogurt with the dill. Serve the slices warm, sprinkled with the remaining zest, and drizzled with the yogurt sauce.

Over the last ten or so years, I have sat on countless conference and symposium panels, dressed in different hats. Sometimes, I wear my prim editor’s hat — not quite a pillbox, it sits painfully safety-pinned to my head lest it be blown away in an electronic windstorm. Sometimes, I wear my writer’s hat — a vintage one, its gray hatband missing from years of benign neglect, it’s now pulled on so firmly that it’s hard to remove. Other times, I wear my baseball cap backwards so that the peak doesn’t cast a shadow on the speech that I’ve downloaded to the iPad that generally, when I am not reading it on train trips or long commutes, lives in my kitchen, right next to my stainless steel fridge.

Whatever hat I wear, there is always the inevitable question that comes up, either as the subject of the panel I’m on, or directly from an attendee:

So when, exactly, do you think the digital world will kill cookbooks?

My answer is always the same:

Never.

Sometimes, there’s guffawing. Sometimes, I hear strains of relief. Sometimes, people get up and shuffle out. But the fact is, there is nothing to worry about: cookbooks, contrary to Julia Moskin’s wonderfully-written New York Times piece about apps potentially rendering cookbooks obsolete, are not going anywhere. In fact, in the face of the more remarkable apps out there, like Dorie Greenspan‘s amazing Baking with Dorie, cookbooks will be better produced, more interesting, and more desirable for one reason: they’ll have to be.

As a longtime editor (I went straight to work for Random House after graduation from college in 1985, then took a break to attend cooking school and to work at Dean & Deluca as a specialty cookbook buyer; then went to Little, Brown and then to Harper for ten years; there were a few other editorial pitstops along the way) who came of age at a time when “food media” toggled back and forth between books and their television tie-ins, I saw cookbooks increasingly become products timed to release simultaneously with their on-screen counterparts. Bookstore shelves were packed with this “product” to the degree that the average shelf lifespan for the average “B” list book (in other words, a book produced by a midlist author who has not yet become a household name or a bestseller) was six weeks; the rule of thumb among chain stores was that if a “book product” didn’t “move” within that time period, it wasn’t going to, and it was sent back to the publisher as a return.

Qualitatively-speaking, the faster these “book products” were being cranked out to appear with their television tie-ins, the more flimsy and slipshod they became: paper quality suffered. Recipes weren’t tested. Edits were truncated. Photos were mistakenly repeated pages apart. Proofreads lost importance. Cookbooks suddenly became the equivalent of the inflatable Paul McCartney that my father bought for me in the mid 1960s, when The Beatles’ Saturday morning cartoon series eclipsed everything else in the same time slot: when inflatable Paul, who was made cheaply in China, sprung a leak, we just patched him up with duct tape, until his head was completely swaddled in it and he began to resemble Marley’s ghost. Inflatable Paul was never meant for the long haul or for snuggling with, in the same way that a lot of the cookbook “products” I speak of above weren’t meant for long haul cooking and certainly not snuggling: their spines would break and their pages fall out, but in the end it didn’t really matter, because it was really all about the television show. Cookbooks, in many cases, were thought of as a secondary “support” to a primary “new media” product, that being television, and a few years later, video.

Eventually, even as cookbook quality slipped, publishers began to fuss and fret about how the books were going to be used, or even if, in the face of this new media;  I remember the day I sat in an editorial meeting, and my publisher announced that “if home cooks can watch Jacques Pepin boning a chicken over and over on a video, they’re not going to buy a book to read about it.”

Years before I sat in that meeting, I was instructed by Joel Dean to carry the paperback edition of Pepin’s instructional opus, La Technique, in my department at Dean & Deluca. It was — it is — a remarkable book featuring black and white, step-by-step images for doing everything from correctly making choux pastry to filleting a flatfish. It takes time and patience and unerring focus to work from it; it assumes a certain level of concentration and dedication to task, as do all serious instructional books. When Julia Child described in both words and illustrations how to bake a baguette in 36 pages, she did not assume that her reader suffered from the media-related attention deficit disorder that now plagues us all; the affliction that thrives on, prizes and applauds the reduction of a human thought to 140 characters had no place in her work, as it doesn’t for anyone who wants to put method to steadfast practice. Julia, love her or hate her, assumed that her readers wanted to learn, and to learn thoroughly. Other instructional bibles followed, from Jacque’s to Anne Willan’s and James Peterson’s and, more narratively, Richard Olney’s, who instructed in words only how to turn a chicken inside out like a pillowcase for his poulet farci duxelles.

Beyond instructional content, cookbooks — good cookbooks; not the secondary product I mention above — are often read like straight narratives. Years ago, Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Cooking sat on my nightstand, and before I cooked from it, I read it like a memoir; when I was finished, I was drawn to the work of Lawrence Durrell and Paul Bowles (and if you’ve read Paula Wolfert’s work, you know why) and Elizabeth David. I cooked from the book too, and years later I still make the pasta con mollica di pane and bisbas michchi found within those pages; the book is alive with sights and smells and texture and poetry, and reading it, my brain wanders down alleyways it would never travel via a digital medium. When I made Wolfert’s paella, I accidentally splashed olive oil onto the recipe page; when I open the book today, I swear I can still smell it — I certainly can see it on the stained page, and I recall the dinner party I had the night that I made it, right down to the wine I served (Taurasi Salice Salentino 1995). Cooking and reading actual cookbooks show me where I’ve been; they reek of history, and anchor me in the way that, however vague, the assembly directions for Thanksgiving turkey in the 1951 Joy of Cooking anchored my aunt when it was just her and the book, and the concept of the iPad app was about as Jetsons as power steering.

Publishing is a sometimes fearful, ancient business that has, for the last ten years, been chewing on its collective fingers over what I call monomedia, or the belief that readers will get their information one way and one way only, exclusively, and not from books because they’re not sexy enough to compete with digitalia. To be clear, there is no question that cooking apps have claimed a seat at the publishing table, and rightly so: the ability to watch and re-watch Dorie Greenspan feel and poke biscuit dough so that you can actually see its correct consistency is unmistakably brilliant, and enormously valuable. I own the app, and use it, and will likely give it as a gift to many friends this season.

But to claim that the advent of the cooking app is going to render cookbooks obsolete is misguided; the digital must complement print, and vice versa, in order to achieve the innate balance between what Sven Birkerts calls, on one side, “the reading encounter, the private resource …” and on the other, “the culture at large, and the highly seductive glitter of mass-produced entertainment.” The response to the need for this reading encounter — this private resource — has been coming largely and most creatively from smaller cookbook publishers and highly-skilled self-publishers both in the United States and Britain who have eschewed the glitz and the six week bookstore sell-in, and instead purposely produced the kind of high production value cookbooks that are meant to be read, cooked from, cherished, and savored again and again. And they’re not going away any time soon.

Where Julia Moskin got it wrong is in describing the notion of “recipes that exist only as a string of words” as a relic. Recipes —  the writing of them, the printing of them — show us who we are; they speak of what Birkerts called in The Gutenberg Elegies,” the immobilization and preservation of language. To make a mark on a page is to gesture towards permanence.”

Cookbooks are about a sort of gastronomical cultural stability, and historical durability; they tell us who we are, as humans. Digitalia, in all its glitzy, glittering ability to visually elucidate, is at best, fleeting and illusory. And at every conference and symposium at which I’ve spoken, someone invariably stands up and announces in one breath that PRINT IS DEAD, and a few hours later, while sidling up to the bar for a glass of artisanal, small-batch bourbon, haughtily proclaims that his agent has just sold his next book.

“I grabbed the brass ring,” he says, “….again!”

We had talked about it for a long time: what would Susan want me to make for her last dinner at home prior to having the surgery on Long Island that would (hopefully) clear up her apnea, allow her to sleep, and put an end to my holding a mirror under her nose every morning at 3:37 am just to make sure she’s breathing.

“If I’m not going to be able to eat solid food for a while,” she said, thoughtfully, “I’d like you to make me Boeuf Bourguignon. With noodles.”

“Yes, honey,” I said.

I did not remind her that we’re both trying to eat more grains and far less meat and fat. I did not remind her that we’re supposed to be eating fewer simple carbs and white pastas and that egg noodles are the nutritional equivalent of Elmer’s glue.

I did not remind her of any of this because there are rules about this sort of thing: if the person you love more than anything or anyone else in the world is having surgery for the first time in your couplehood, you need to give them what they want without haranguing them.

And that was my plan.

The Boeuf Bourguignon recipe I turn to whenever I make it is ages old — it comes from Samuel Chamberlain’s Bouquet de France by way of Stevie, my best friend from college, whose three brothers-in-law and husband would scale the Eiger in toe shoes in order to get to it. Thick, velvety, simple, and meaty, it is not at all tarted up in the way that some Boeuf Bourguignons can be; the recipe, which in its original form calls for some water in addition to wine but which Stevie’s mother altered years back so that it uses entirely wine with no water, works beautifully if you follow it. If you don’t — and sometimes I haven’t — you’ll wind up with a sort of purply spackle like the stuff that I so ingeniously made for my friend Deborah Madison and her husband Patrick last year in Mill Valley over Thanksgiving. Of course, it takes a special sort of arrogant wisdom to nervously throw an off-the-cuff beef stew together for the woman who changed the way America thinks about vegetable cookery. It was a dismal failure as it was destined to be  — culinary arrogance somehow always leads to botched recipes— and if I was the sort of religious person who believed in divine retribution, I’d say that the snickering I heard in the middle of the night was not coming from the dog.

So I bought the meat and the wine and the mushrooms, and then carefully planned out the other, post-surgery dishes I intended to make for Susan once she was interested in eating anything again: congee and an elemental miso soup with silken tofu; strawberry jello; chicken broth doctored with star anise; dal with turmeric because, my Indian friends tell me, turmeric is a great anti-inflammatory. Susan went and got her hair cut in her lovely Jean Seberg crop, and laid out her clothes for the week of the surgery, since we were going to be spending it at my stepmother’s house on Long Island until Susan was steady enough to travel the hour and a half back home to Connecticut.

And then, on Saturday the 29th, while we were out doing some last minute shopping, it began to snow. Heavy, wet, gloppy snow that poured from the sky like milk from an upturned carton. In less than an hour, there was three inches of slimy, slippery gunk on the ground, quickly covering my neighborhood’s still-green yards and late autumn gardens; cars spun off the road, and it took us nearly an hour to travel the three miles from town back to our house in my Subaru. Trees, which had not yet dropped their leaves, began to bend and then snap, and by 3:00 that afternoon, the lights flickered and the power died, taking with it the phone, water, and, of course, heat. By the next morning, there was eighteen inches of snow on the ground, and it was not yet November.

It wasn’t so bad, I reasoned; our stove is dual-fuel and since we have a 99 gallon propane tank hooked to both it and our gas grill, I could cook anything. The little yeasted loaf that I’ve fallen in love with thanks to Heidi Swanson could just be baked outside. Tofu and vegetables could be cooked on top of the stove. The Boeuf Bourguignon with wide egg noodles would still be made for Susan, and it was. That great John Thorne essay came to mind — the one that has him leaping out of bed in a freezing Maine cabin, to race to the outhouse and then come back and make himself a strong cup of cocoa to have with his breakfast — and I stood in our dusky suburban kitchen, slowly browning the meat in batches by lantern light while wearing more fleece than a flock of sheep. Three hours later, we lit the antique hurricane lamps that my mother had given us last year, set the table, opened up a bottle of middling Petite Sirah, and ladled the meaty stew into coffee bowls, atop spoonfuls of lightly peppered egg noodles. It was delicious and soothing, and when we went to sleep under a pile of blankets, a dog, and several cats, we pretended to feel safe and happy.

But we were not.

We were freezing our asses off.

52 degrees outside might seem temperate; 52 degrees inside is cold.

I had hoped — we had hoped — that the few days before Susan’s surgery would be relaxing, or at least calm; they weren’t. They were freezing, and fraught. Power was knocked out to nearly a million Connecticut customers, including my 93-year-old mother-in-law who waited a full nine days for it to come back on, even as lights beamed through the windows of the homes on neighboring streets. We packed up the car the morning before the surgery and drove to New York, exhausted and cold, and not knowing when the power would return, or if it would come back before we did.

We were lucky: unlike a huge swath of the state (and half my town), our power came back three days after we lost it, and when I finally brought Susan home and put her to bed to recuperate, the house was warm. And I didn’t have to melt snow in order to do laundry.

Once I got Susan settled, I went out to the grocery store so that I could refill our refrigerator since we’d emptied it the night before we left for New York. In our tiny supermarket, my neighbors still without power after more than a week milled around, zombie-like and sleepless, their hair standing on end like they’d been pulled from their beds in the middle of the night. I brought home a dozen eggs, a tub of miso, udon noodles, and a carton of silken tofu.

“What can I make you?” I asked Susan, sitting on the side of the bed. I envisioned small bowls of soothing, umami-laden goodness, of slithering soft noodles and tender cubes of pillowy tofu.

“A soft-boiled egg,” she said, hoarsely.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she whispered.

And then she pulled the covers up high around her neck, asked me to turn up the heat, and slept until morning.

 A Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg

Most “invalid” dishes are heavy with carbohydrates, and for good reason: they’re easy to digest, they’re (usually) soft, and they’re kind to the throat. And therefore, soft-boiled eggs don’t usually show up on the intuitive list of post-surgery meals. But years ago, when my aunt was in the hospital and I went to visit her, she grabbed my hand and said, “Elissa, you know what I’m craving? A soft-boiled egg.” She closed her eyes and swooned. So when Susan asked me to make this for her, I wasn’t entirely surprised. That said, this elemental dish had to be made perfectly, and with care. I couldn’t set in the egg to boil and go wandering off to check my Twitter feed: a minute too long, and the yolk would be too hard for Susan to swallow. I served this protein-packed, silky bit of goodness to her in her childhood egg cup, and when she was finished with it, she whispered can I have another? 

Makes 1 egg

Bring a saucepan filled with water to a boil, and carefully lower the egg in, making sure there’s enough water in the pot so that the egg is completely submerged. Lower the heat to a bare simmer, and continue to cook for 3-1/2 minutes. Drain the pan, and re-fill it with cool water. A minute later, place the egg in an egg cup, and snip or tap off the point. Serve with a child’s nursery spoon.

Samuel Chamberlain’s Boeuf Bourguignon

(adapted from Bouquet de France)

Every Boeuf Bourguignon recipe I have ever tried — including a now-famous one produced by someone who shall go nameless, lest I be tarred and feathered — pales in comparison to this one. It might be the required veal knuckle, which I’ve never been able to find and therefore replace with two tiny pieces of oxtail, and which imparts a velvety consistency to the sauce; even on its own, ladled over a piece of day-old bread, it’s worthy of celebration. Refrigerated overnight, the stew is better the next day, and freezes perfectly for up to three months.

Serves 4

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided

2 pounds beef stew, cut in 1-1/2 inch cubes

1 tablespoon flour

salt and pepper, to taste

2-1/2 cups full-bodied red wine, divided

2 medium onions, coarsely chopped

1 medium carrot, scraped and quartered

1 garlic clove, minced

2 shallots, minced

Bouquet garni

2 small pieces of oxtail

1 tablespoon brandy

4 tablespoons Madeira

1/2 pound raw mushroom caps, quartered

In a large Dutch oven, melt two tablespoons butter over medium high heat. When the foaming subsides, brown the beef in batches, removing pieces to a plate as they sear. Return them all to the pot, along with any accumulated meat juices. Sprinkle the meat with the flour, blend it in thoroughly and add salt and pepper and 1-1/2 cups of wine. Reduce the heat to medium.

In a small frying pan, melt the remaining tablespoon of butter over medium high heat. When the foaming subsides, saute the onion until lightly golden, and add to the beef, along with the carrot, garlic, shallots, bouquet garni, and the oxtail, stirring well to combine. Add the rest of the wine to cover the meat; place the cover on the Dutch oven and simmer over a low flame for 3 hours, or until the meat is very tender and the sauce is a rich, dark brown.

Half an hour before serving time, add the brandy, Madeira, and the mushrooms, and continue to cook, uncovered, until the mushrooms are tender. Remove the bouquet garni, and serve the stew in warm bowls over noodles.