Reading Amanda Hesser

I just finished Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte, a memoir-cum-cookbook adapted from the years she dated and then married Mr. Latte. I'm late in reading this, a book that came out years ago, but enjoyed it just the same. Particularly because, with our weekend at the grandparents', I could leisurely read in the middle of the day, full chapters at a time, while the kids played.

And while she records a very food-intense world--she was a food writer at the NYTimes, knew Julia Child, and regularly dines with Jeffrey Steingarten--a world as foreign to me as many of the fancy NY restaurants she visits, I enjoyed vacationing in her NY foodie world, mainly because I just haven't enjoyed cooking recently and most of it has, until the beginning of our CSA last week, been a chore. Maybe that is the nature of trying to cook organic, local, and seasonal in suburban Connecticut as spring warms into summer; maybe it's what happens when the kids just want the same thing over and over; maybe it's what happens after almost a month-long emotional eating binge--perhaps it's a subconscious fast.

Coincidentally, while reading her book, I was also in another food-intense world. Because food is something Ma, Gong, and Goo do well. The birthday weekend started at dim sum in Flushing, with two new favorite dishes for me--sauteed bean leaves and this churro-like dough wrapped in a white noodle and slathered with hoisin sauce. Plus, we enjoyed all our usual favorites, like Sis's love affair with don ton and custard buns, shumai and ha gao and ha chung (noodles with shrimp). Bud discovered and devoured shrimp in several guises. Then we continued to the Chinese grocery, where Sis and Bud stared for an entire half-hour at all the fresh, live seafood, including crab, lobster, fish, eel, turtle, and frogs! (Bud had earlier seen a lobster on a truck and wondered if the lobsters were going to an aquarium; "nope," I said, "dinner!" I don't think he believed me, even when we were standing in the grocery store). We wrapped up our outing at not one but two bakeries.

We then went home and savored the fresh fruits while contemplating what we were going to grill. Soon, Goo and I were side-by-side in the kitchen, goodnaturedly competing to shape the best pizza dough for the grill. This was followed by "chicken on the bone," fried tofu in peanut sauce, stir fried cauliflower with shrimp, sauteed Asian mix (two way, one with soy sauce and garlic; the other with miso), and two birthday cakes. Today, after a morning of oatmeal with fresh fruit and pastries from the bakery, we made our own wontons when we got back from the beach. We ate these with steamed and stir fried vegetables and two kinds of noodles, wide white and thin, long yellow. And I'm betting we won't leave before there is another meal. After the ice cream man comes by.

Sure, it's not the world of Armagnac and arugula, but I think Hesser would appreciate the family's interest and immersion in all things edible. The book, the weekend--it all makes me want to cook again.

(Though, one of the foods I really wanted to try from her book, oatmeal cookies with orange zest, wasn't included as a recipe, even though it was mentioned twice! I guess I'll have to experiment. Though maybe it's Quaker's Vanishing Oatmeal Cookie, a box-label recipe she likes, with zest added).