parents Archives

The Other Side of Our New Kitchen & A Plant

Chloe, our beloved neighbor back at the old place, pointed out–before I left–that in my “new kitchen” post I only showed one side of the kitchen, not the side with the stove. So here it is: the other side of our kitchen, with a glance into the other room which had some boxes in it still, at that moment, because we hadn’t unpacked. Not to brag, but we have five–count ’em, five–burners. And I love the white subway tile behind the stove, I think it made the pasta in the red Le Crueset in today’s pasta post really pop.

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Postcard from Eataly (10/9/12)

If my ears are made of ashes today, that’s because they’ve never burned harder than they did on Tuesday night when Lidia Bastianich–one of my food world heroes–introduced me at the first of two Eataly dinners we’re doing to launch my new cookbook. (The 2nd dinner, on November 9th, still has seats available here.) The whole night was surreal. Before the guests arrived, Ann Bramson, Artisan’s legendary publisher, came by to toast the book with me, Judy (my indefatigable editor) and Molly (my impressive publicist who arranged for this whole dinner, as well as all the dinners coming up). Then came the guests, friends and family, including my beaming parents.

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Exclusive: Inside My Parents’ Refrigerator

For years, I’ve hounded my parents to let me videotape the inside of their refrigerator, a barren wasteland of processed foods and Tupperware containers filled with pre-chopped onions. (For those late to the story, my parents do not cook.) This Mother’s Day, they finally relented and the video above offers you EXCLUSIVE access to a world of Egg Beaters, sugar-free Concord jam and a strange plastic bag hidden in a drawer. Thanks, mom and dad, for granting us access; and to all the mother’s out there, Happy Mother’s Day!

[Note: the sound gets muffled at the beginning, but stick with it. I think I had my thumb over the microphone.]

Dinner on Ellis Island (Molly O’Neill’s “One Big Table” Event)

In college (at Emory Univeristy in Atlanta), I took a class called “The Modernization of Judaism.” The class was taught by a lesbian rabbi and, over the course of the semester, we studied the various divergent branches of the Jewish community (I attended an Orthodox Shabbat service, the women separate from the men) and learned how Reformed Jews (the Jews I was raised amongst) were a dying breed since they reproduced the least (Hasidic Jews have us significantly beat).

We also studied the two large waves of Jews that emigrated to America in both the 19th and 20th centuries. The first wave came mostly from Western Europe (predominantly from Germany); the second wave, a much larger wave, came from Eastern Europe as Russian Jews fled the pogroms. And if you were to study that second wave you’d see, splashing somewhere in the water, the ancestors whose crossing set cosmic forces in motion that led to the creation of this food blog. One of those ancestors was my mother’s father’s mother, Netty Rosenblum.

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