cooking

I am completely obsessed with cooking. It's partly Smitten Kitchen (we joke that Deb rules our kitchen—what she writes, we cook), partly farm bounty, partly just plain excitement experimenting with food.

Plus I'm reading all these food books—recently, The Butcher and the Vegeterian and Ratio. Ratio is particularly hunger-inducing and I find I can only read it in small bits, tackling the pie dough chapter one week, the custard chapter the next.

On top of it all, I bike a lot, and often my rides turn into extended cooking daydreams...my wheels spin the miles away and my mind spins plans to make a ginger–soy sauce glaze for salmon or toast a new combination of nuts, seeds, and oats into crunchy granola. 

My most elaborate bike-fueled meal plan became Mother's Day brunch. I cooked nearly nonstop that weekend, on Saturday a graham cracker crust and pastry cream and sliced strawberries to stash in the fridge for Sunday dessert, then homemade pizza all evening, a feast of herbed dough and fresh mozzarella. Sunday started with brunch prep before church, then a whole afternoon playing head chef and ordering around my soux-chef husband, dad, and sister as we baked, cooked, sautéed, chopped, and plated a spring feast. It was every bit as luscious as I'd dreamed while cycling to the water taxi.

And then—and then. I promised myself I would take Monday night off. But when I got home, I discovered a lonely hunk of the last week's no-knead bread on the counter, so dry I couldn't even hack at it with our new bread knife, and just had to rescue it. A la Ratio, a ridiculously simple custard base and some cinnamon and about 5 minutes of work became bread pudding. 

Tuesday, I promised myself another night off. But then there were turnips—perfectly round and golf-ball-like turnips out in the hoop house, basically bursting out of the soil and begging to be sautéed in butter and sherry (doesn't everything?) with some chive blossoms sprinkled on top. 

Finally, tonight—after another week of cooking frenzy, my biggest triumph fish tacos on the fly—I have been stopped in my tracks. We bought a whole chicken this weekend, so on the water taxi this afternoon I let hints of this article (http://www.nytimes.com/recipes/1016335/steak-mock-frites.html) inspire my dinner plans. Chicken, rosemary from right outside our door, butter, and mock fries. Seriously, what could be better? 

To be completely honest, when Tim replied to my butter! chicken! rosemary! text with I already have dinner cooking!, my first instinct was to call him and cry, "halt!" 

I am that addicted. 

And Tim knows it. His first reply was Sorry!!! 

But I am a smart wife. I might even go so far to say that it's a dreamy thing to have a husband who cooks too, who I have to race to the kitchen, who concocts feasts like lentil stews and chilis—without even consulting a recipe book or website—that are most often better than my attempts at the same things with recipes. 

For now, my mock-frites vision must wait. I must relax on the couch to the smell of slow-cooking chicken and piles of melting vegetables seeping out of our slow cooker and...dream up tomorrow night's dinner.