My Family Recipe
I'm the Food Expert. But My Kids Love My Husband's Cooking.
On learning to cook again, after children.
Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.
A few years ago, when our podcast, Burnt Toast, was in its infancy and we were dreaming up topics for episodes, someone suggested that Merrill and I bring our children on a show about the challenges of feeding kids. A timeless topic—and we had lots of experience to share. Perfect.
So we set it up. First, Merrill and I weighed in with our theories and beliefs about how to feed kids. We knew all about cooking and palate development, and we were parents, too. After we held forth, Kenzi Wilbur, the host at the time, brought the kids in to ask them about their eating habits.
“What’s your favorite thing to eat?” she asked my twins, Walker and Addison, who were 8 at the time.
“Daddy’s pasta!” Walker said, Addison nodding enthusiastically.
There it was, recorded for posterity. (1) Our kids, who in their first few years of life had tasted nearly all of the 1,400 recipes that Merrill and I tested for a cookbook, who had been introduced to oysters and sea urchin as toddlers, and who, in my attempts to educate their palates and broaden their openness to the world around them, ate whatever I put in front of them—pho, shishito peppers, lamb curry—cherished none of this. They preferred a simple, homey dish made by their dad.
When I met Tad, he kept books in his oven and nothing edible in his fridge. He drank cheap beer and ate a lot of takeout and burgers. I found this irresistibly troubling and remediable. (Okay, I may have found it so irresistible that I named him Mr. Latte, and wrote a column and a book about him.)
Over the last 18 years, we’ve found our middle ground. I’ve converted from drinking wine to craft beer and now eat more burgers. Tad puts his books on bookshelves, where they belong, and, happily, he even cooks!
One of my other nicknames for Tad is Mr. Efficiency. He obsesses over the shortest route to a destination, orders everything in bulk, is always on time, writes thank-you notes within a day, and absolutely detests standing in line. Especially for food.
When it came to cooking, Tad was characteristically economical. Once we had our kids and our schedules went haywire, he set about mastering a handful of dishes he could pull off on a moment’s notice: fish tacos, pasta alla vodka, and Daddy’s pasta.
Daddy’s pasta is a variation on pasta all’arrabbiata, a low-touch, slick sauce of tomato, red pepper flakes, and cheese. Tad started out shadowing the classic, but soon broke out on his own, adding chopped bacon and a bit more tomato. Rather than a long noodle, which was difficult for our kids to twirl and swallow, he used penne rigate, then orecchiette. His pasta shape du jour is now rotelle, because the tomatoes and bacon get trapped in its spokes. He tinkered and honed, making mental notes of our dinner table reviews and translating them into the next version:
- Cook down the sauce longer so it really clings to the noodles.
- Let the pasta sit for a few minutes before serving, which helps the whole shebang bond.
Meanwhile, I continued to roam and experiment, rarely making the same dish twice. I enjoy the hunt for a new great recipe, the push for something better. But it comes at a cost; cooking new things is more stressful because the unknowns are many. Tad would chat with the kids while making his pasta; I would cook distracted, with my nose in a recipe. Even after focused cooking, things don’t always work out well, and no one around the table is happy. And it’s hard to expect anyone to build an emotional connection to a dish if they’re only seeing it a few times.
One of the things I like most about cooking is how humbling it is. You can never master cooking, you can only continue to learn and change as a cook. The cook I was in my twenties is radically different from the cook I am now. Then, I had a family of bread starters inhabiting my mother’s fridge, and thought nothing of making duck confit for cassoulet. I was more ambitious, yet less efficient, a tiring combo. These days, I’m well planned and more patient. I’m probably not going to cook a Thomas Keller beef stew when you come over, but will happily whip up rice jook and a vegan cookie. Food has changed and I have changed.
The learning that comes with cooking is not only about your cooking abilities and tastes. The longer you cook, you discover not simply deficiencies in your skills, but flaws in yourself.
Once I had recovered from a bruised ego over Daddy’s pasta, I could see that my restlessness had been laid bare.
It’s a trait that’s often in deep conflict with another vital part of my personality. I’m an unabashed homebody. A comforting home and stability are things I have an almost desperate need to maintain. And yet, even when I have a home that feels comforting and right, I’m always itching to iterate and improve the physical space—to paint a wall, rearrange the furniture, recover the chairs. The same thing happens in my kitchen. I may love being in the kitchen and cooking for family, but I clearly can’t help myself from exploring some new taste, technique, or idea.
This urge for newness and evolution worked for me for many years. When I was a full-time writer, whose job was to constantly discover and write about what’s next, it was like feeding candy to my pathology.
Now that I have kids, though, to whom I feel an intense responsibility to nurture a sense of security—not to mention, to establish family traditions—my searching ways floundered. The night after the podcast interview, while “joking” about it over dinner, I asked the kids what dishes of mine they liked. They paused and looked at each other. It was difficult for them to conjure up anything specific.
Kids rarely need to be direct for their message to be loud and clear. If I wanted them to remember my cooking, I had to slow down, I had to repeat, I had to make food that they could count on. Like their daddy did with pasta.
Over the past few years, I’ve done just this. I’ve stuck with dishes, and I keep a folder of recipes we like to go back to again and again—Roberta’s garlic dressing, porchetta, and Thai steak salad. Last summer, after getting back from the greenmarket with a haul of tomatoes, Addison asked me if I could make my brown butter tomatoes.
Mommy’s brown butter tomatoes. I like that.
| 8 | ounces bacon, cut in 1/4-inch slices |
| 1/4 | cup plus 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil |
| 1/2 | cup tomato paste |
| 2 | pinches red pepper flakes |
| 1 3/4 | cups canned chopped tomatoes (preferably Pomi) |
| 1 | pound rotelle |
| Grated Parmesan, for serving |
| 8 | ounces bacon, cut in 1/4-inch slices |
| 1/4 | cup plus 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil |
| 1/2 | cup tomato paste |
| 2 | pinches red pepper flakes |
| 1 3/4 | cups canned chopped tomatoes (preferably Pomi) |
| 1 | pound rotelle |
| Grated Parmesan, for serving |
(1) Ultimately, Walker’s “Daddy’s pasta!” response didn’t make the cut—not because I had it edited out to save my pride, but because the original recording was lost, and the episode we posted was a re-recording. The effect of Walker’s comment, however, stands firm.
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Written by: Amanda Hesser
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