What's for Dinner?

For a cookbook writer, that can be a tough question.

Dear Friends,

You may assume that the life of a food writer revolves around meals at elegant restaurants, or cooking effortlessly on a professional range producing dinner for 12. It does sometimes, and it can, but most of the time it is a job that requires focus, especially when I am testing recipes for a new book. That’s when dinner often suffers.

Here’s my recipe for Anadama Bread

“What’s for dinner?” My kids once asked, in between courses of cheese bread, corn muffins, and popovers as I worked on the bread chapter for one of my cookbooks. Often they’d open the ‘fridge door, shelves packed with leftovers from failed attempts, too good to toss, yet not worthy enough to serve. “ There is nothing to eat in this house. ”

I called a fellow cookbook writer who had written 13 cookbooks, to ask how she feeds her family. She answered the phone just as her oven timer was going off in the background. “ I’ve spent the whole week testing whoopee pies, “ she confessed, putting down the phone for a minute while she pulled a tray from the oven.” Luckily, she has two sons who are more than willing to help taste-test whoopee pies. 

Yippee! But what’s for dinner?

“You can be miserable before you have a cookie and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie but you can't be miserable while you are eating a cookie.”
― Ina Garten

When I was sixteen, my mother placed the Better Homes and Gardens bread cookbook on the kitchen counter opened to a recipe for Anadama Bread, then walked away.  It was her way of teaching me to cook. Her mother had not shown her how to cook, yet she became a self-taught gourmet cook by reading Julia Child and Tante Marie cookbooks like a novel, front to back. I was learning to do the same.

Perhaps this is why I value cookbooks so much. I’ve often thought about what it takes to be a good cook. How can some people put ingredients together without a recipe, while others need to follow instructions? Why do others simply refuse to learn how to cook, or claim they can’t? I have concluded that cooking comes from practice combined with growing up in a family that appreciates coming together around the table.  

It was no coincidence that my introduction to cooking started with the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook since my mother’s father, Rex Stark, designed the classic red plaid checked cover. He was the lead designer at BH & G when the concept of the three-ring binder was introduced.  Every issue of the magazine offered a new page, spurring sales and encouraging home cooks to build their recipe repertoire.  Forty million copies later, it was clearly a success.

Start with Bread

Writing cookbooks was never what I set out to do in life, yet I can trace my enthusiasm for food, recipes, and all things about cooking to the moment when the alchemy happened between the yeast and the warm water, the flour forming a pliable dough, and the aroma of the baking bread infused me with a sense of pride.

I’ve learned that it’s not always a recipe that inspires, yet the ability to improvise. A recipe is only a template, and where the real magic happens is when you heat a little olive oil in a saucepan, begin to sauté onions and garlic then open the refrigerator to see what you can chop and add. The only advice I can give is to always garnish the plate with fresh parsley or an edible flower to spark the appetite. That’s the way I get dinner on the table, and sometimes, it turns into a recipe.

From my kitchen to yours.

Ellen O.

Ellen Ecker Ogden is the author of The Complete Kitchen Garden and The New Heirloom Garden. Designs and Recipes Cooks Who Love to Cook.

www.ellenogden.com or Instagram.

Now Get Cooking!

Starting March 2nd, I’m hosting an online class called How to Write a Family Cookbook. If you have recipes to organize, or always wanted to write your own cookbook, or simply talk to other cooks about food, I invite you to sign up. It’s fun!