The Only Low-Paid Mexican in My Kitchen…
The first thing you should know before you start making grocery lists based on any recipe of mine that you find on this site, is that I am not a cook. To be fair to myself, I am also not a woman who brags that she doesn’t know how to fry an egg, or that she uses her oven to store shoes. I do cook. I have even on occasion been paid for my cooking. I spent a summer baking for the most expensive food store on the planet, Loaves & Fishes. And I had the good fortune to do an internship at Chez Panisse. So what that it only lasted a week, and that the most complicated task I was assigned was toasting bread on my last day to make panade. (Don’t be afraid to ask; I didn’t know what panade was either until I toasted that bread. The food dictionary will tell you that panade is something different, but panade according to Chez Panisse is a soupy, soggy, and delicious cross between a savory bread pudding and French onion soup).
If I’m not a cook, you ask, why should I use your recipes? Maybe you shouldn’t, but if you did want to, there are plenty of reasons. First, I’m going to venture a wild guess that if you are considering consulting a recipe for butternut squash soup, that you are not a cook either. So there: we’re equals. Only I make a great squash soup—and I know how to write a recipe for it.
Which brings me to the second reason: Not only do I know how to write recipes, but you can rest assured that my recipes work. (And no; to address a common misconception: there is no Recipe Police out there who makes sure cookbook readers are not going to destroy sixty dollars worth of groceries and waste the better part of a day following a recipe down a dark, dirty dish-strewn alley to Dominoes Pizza delivery, putting your trust in those times and measures just because they are bound in a book (or printed on a website). The way it works is that I write a recipe, and then, and then… it goes to print. As the vulnerable reader, all you can do is hope the recipe was tested somewhere along the way; in the case of any book with my name on the cover (no matter how small the font), they were.
But the last, best argument for my recipes is that I am not a cook. Which means my food is easy. It’s the kind of food regular people are likely to cook at home because I am a regular person, cooking at home. These recipes were not written with the idea that you have a battalion of low-paid Mexicans in the kitchen peeling peaches and plucking parsley and thyme leaves off their stems. I am the only low-paid Mexican worker in my kitchen. When people ask me if I’m a good cook, my standard response is: I cook good food. The success of my food is not about my impressive cooking skills, because I don’t have any. I am proud to say I have never used a square of cheesecloth in the kitchen. I would be fine if I died never having Frenched a rack of anything. And I try to avoid any recipe that requires string. So what’s my secret? I know what to buy, when to leave well enough alone—and who to call when I need help.
If you had my Rolodex you might not need my recipes.
