November 18, 2014 – When in doubt, cook!

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My dad took over cooking our family dinners when I was in junior high. My mom started two businesses and he was teaching at a special high school, where the kids had a shorter than normal day.  He found himself with more time and picked up cooking dinner.   He shopped every day and came home. Then he and I made dinner together.  I learned how to handle knives, cut up a chicken, chop an onion and make a white sauce.  It seems to me, unless we eat out somewhere, I’ve been part of making dinner nearly every night of my life since.  In a lot of ways, cooking is much more natural and intuitive to me than painting.  Though I love to peruse cookbooks, I most often cook without a recipe. I have a sense of what’s in the house without looking in the cupboards and refrigerator.  When asked what my specialty is, I say it’s cooking a nice meal with what’s in the kitchen.

When I was 14, I baby-sat for a woman in Woodacre who had three kids.  I stayed overnight while she went on a yoga retreat – in the days when no one went on yoga retreats.  This included making dinner for the kids and me.  Seems she forgot to leave much food in the house. I remember scraping the last bits of chicken of a carcass for tacos and roasting raw cashews in a skillet with a bit of butter and salt for extra warm protein.  I was fourteen!  Though it’s inconceivable to me now that she left her kids with me overnight (did I mention the toilet was backed up, meaning we had to go next door to use the bathroom, and that I ended up with poison oak from having slept in her sheets?), it’s good story to tell – and I now look back and see the start of my “specialty.”

It’s become who I am. I cook. I find myself saying “when in doubt, cook” and I have a Penzey’s spices bumper sticker on my car that says “Love People. Cook them Tasty Food.”  I just love that it doesn’t say Penzey’s spices anywhere on it. They aren’t marketing themselves, they are marketing cooking!

I’ve recently been working with an amazing coach (everyone could use one!). Recently when we were talking about my cooking, she shared with me something she read in a book called “Built to Last.”  All the people profiled in the book, people who had built sustainable bodies of work that have endured – every one of them has a passion that seems unrelated to their main work. And if they didn’t devote time to this other passion, their work would suffer.  It’s not a hobby, it’s a necessity.  It’s not a luxury, It’s a foundational practice that makes the rest of their work possible.

For me, this is cooking.  The Tuesday after this year’s Sausalito Art Festival, I got all the art and festival gear put away, I checked in with my husband’s office. I came home about 3:00 and actually let myself have a little nap. I woke up at 3:30, went into the kitchen and cooked. I processed the mountain of tomatoes from my parents’ huge vegetable garden that had been accusing me of neglecting them, lest they get overripe and go bad. I made an eggplant Parmigiana with the two eggplants that had just started to shrivel.  I stuffed one of the gigantic zucchini with a ground chicken mixture and sauced it with some of the tomatoes.  I cooked for three hours, in bare feet, the house quiet, Bo lying on the floor waiting for goodies to fall.  I felt back inside myself again.  Cooking does that for me.

Late last week, I was headed home. Joe wasn’t going to be home for dinner. In the car at a stop light, I was thinking about what I’d make myself. I wanted something like spaghetti carbonara, but I wasn’t in the mood for meat (I often eat meatless when I’m on my own).  I immediately thought of the cremini mushrooms at home, fresh rosemary and garlic.  Mushrooms and eggs are wonderful together, so why not?  When I got home I did a quick web search for vegetarian carbonara and found one with tomato (?) and asparagus (not!) and another with zucchini, better, but not what I had in mind.  So I made it up. And it was delicious, warm, satisfying, savory, creamy but not too heavy or rich.  I’d absolutely make it again.  Here’s what I did, including my yet-untested improvements (basically more garlic and rosemary). Let me know if you make it and if so, if you changed it – made it your own – and how you liked it.  I learned the method of cooking the not-quite-done pasta with some of the pasta water in a sauté pan from Michael Chiraello.  The results are delicious. If you’ve never done so, give it a try.  Buon appetito!

Spaghetti Mushroom Carbonara

• ½ lb. spaghetti or thin spaghetti
• 2 T olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 ½ – 2 t. fresh rosemary, finely minced
• 12 or so (more is fine too) medium cremini (brown) mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 1 egg, beaten in a small bowl
• ½ c. freshly grated parmesan cheese, added to the egg, plus extra for serving
• Freshly grated black pepper
• Chopped parsley

Put a pot of amply-salted water to boil. Cook spaghetti until it’s just barely under-done.

In the meantime, heat the olive oil in a sauté pan large enough to hold all the cooked pasta.  Add the minced garlic and let it sizzle just a few seconds (unless you like flavor of toasted garlic).  Then toss in the sliced mushrooms, stir around just a bit to coat with oil and let them cook undisturbed over high/med-high heat until they start to lightly color – a few minutes.  Then stir/sauté until they are fully cooked and any liquid they have released has been cooked away.  Towards the end of the mushrooms cooking, add the rosemary.  If the pasta is not done yet, turn the heat off or down low.

When the pasta is barely done, save about a cup or so of the pasta cooking water before draining the pasta.  I actually don’t drain the pasta, I use my pronged pasta scoop to lift it out of the water and into the sauté pan, it only takes a few scoops.  Ladle in a bit of the pasta water, about a half a cup at a time. Cook over high heat, stirring constantly, sort of risotto-style, to finish cooking the pasta and adhere the flavors to it. Add more water as needed.  When the pasta is done and all the liquid has cooked away –  you want it still moist, but not swimming – off the heat, add the egg and cheese and quickly stir to evenly coat the pasta with the egg.  Season with ground black pepper if you wish.  Sprinkle chopped parsley on top and serve with extra grated cheese, to your taste.

Serves 2-3 depending upon appetite!