An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

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If, somehow, we’re able to hold on to this sense of preservation and frugality and craft after all this, I think that’ll be great,” Tamar Adler says. Photograph by Emily Johnston I really enjoyed most of the chapters as descriptive, not prescriptive. As one meal ending and holding hands with the next. Springboards. Some people don't like food that much to think about it so ... constantly, but I found the ideas inspiring. It is a book to cook in the spirit of, not the specifics. I don't really understand the constant ladling soup over bread ... The Everlasting Meal Cookbookis as inspiring as it is essential. Before you even finish reading the introduction, you know you are in good hands. Tamar Adler can teach the most trepidatious person to become a more intuitive and spontaneous cook." —Andy Baraghani, author of The Cook You Want to Be

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace | Eat An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace | Eat

Adler begins by stating that "we don't need to shop like chefs or cook like chefs; we need to shop and cook like people learning to cook, like what we are - people who are hungry." She takes all the angst out of the performance of cooking. Instead, she presents it as an enjoyable and inclusive activity for everyone. This [making mayonnaise] should all be done by hand. Good olive oil gets bitter when broken by blades. Making mayonnaise by hand is tiring, hurts a little, and is particularly worth it once you’ve stopped sweating.

Tamar Adler is more than a wonderful food writer—she is a wonderful writer … A profound book’ Sheila Heti Inspired by this idea, I made a salad with broccoli roasted until quite crisp, tossed with sliced red onions, red wine vinegar, and a bit of nutritional yeast. Delicious! The leftovers got even better, too--the broccoli was obviously no longer crispy, but the flavor was wonderful. This is a great treatment for roasted veggies and I will try again with a thinly sliced chile, like Adler recommends. About salad, Adler writes, that "it just needs to provide tonic to duller flavors, to sharpen a meal's edges, help define where one taste stops and another begins." Who knew? I feel as if I have a whole new perspective on salad and will look at it with fresh eyes. I loved her paragraphs on roasting vegetables and what she has to say about adding "a few bunches of dark, leafy greens. This will seem very pious. Once greens are cooked as they should be, though: hot and lustily, with garlic, in a good amount of olive oil, they lose their moral urgency and become one of the most likable ingredients in your kitchen." I still have plans to make so many — so many different — curries that it would make your head explode. If I told you how many I’m afraid the information would hurt you.

An Everlasting Meal | Book by Tamar Adler, Alice Waters

Tamar Adler has written the best book on ‘cooking with economy and grace’ that I have read since MFK Fisher.” It wasn't far into the book that I decided that I simply MUST have a copy to call my very own. Not long after that, I realized that one of the reasons I loved this book so much is that it reminds me of my grandmother. Tamar cooks with the grace & love that my grandmother did, and that she passed along to me.Many people, myself included, have long believed that vegetables are best if they are cooked just before they are served. But cooking vegetables as soon as you buy them essentially turns them into a convenience food, She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery, and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully. Waste not. Want not. Influenced by the first chapters, while I was making one meal I piled the vegetable scraps and skins I would generally toss into the compost into a big pot and covered them with water and the bit of beer I had leftover from the main dish...threw in a few peppercorns & a bay leaf...and simmered until the scraps were very soft and had given up their flavor. I strained the broth through fine mesh. The result was a beautiful brown delicately earth flavored broth. I pulled leftover mashed potatoes and the quarter cup of leftover cream I had in the refrigerator. Sauteed the quarter onion in the vegetable drawer. We had two huge bowls of delectable potato soup for dinner that night...sprinkled with a last small bit of gruyere grated...with a glass of hearty rustic red wine. It was a spectacularly simple feast made from bits & pieces. So satisfying. a.m.: I get incredibly hungry for breakfast. Today it’s Greek yogurt with my mom’s granola. I usually make granola, but my oven is broken. There’s an oven in the guest house, but the twenty feet that divides me from it seems too far. Plus, my mom’s granola is good. Mine is better. But hers is good. After that, I turn to book tasks. Like the earlier work of Michael Pollan, and so many who wrote before, say, 1950, Adler’s simple and somewhat tradition-based approach could go a long way to ending the confusion around food - and many of the environmental and health problems that accompany it - in North America today.