TheKitchenSinkRecipes.com

I am an unabashed creature of habit. I’ve enjoyed routine—its dependableness, its ease, its comfort—since I was very young. Let’s just say that I’ve been picking out the next day’s outfit before I go to bed since my bedtime was somewhere in the neighborhood of 8:00 p.m. Oh, and that’s another thing: I firmly subscribe to a bed time. Ten-thirty every school (er, work) day. (Wow, I’m making myself sound like a barrel of laughs here, eh?)  So, as I’ve started to settle into a routine with my new job (a new gym time in the morning; a new spot to stop for a cup of coffee; a new el station), I can feel myself relaxing even as my workload and responsibilities increase.

Given this proclivity, I suppose its no great surprise that this blog has developed its own steady cadence: I post and comment at the same time of day, I upload photos to Flickr about 24 hours in advance, I lay out each post in almost the exact same format. And, even though I hadn’t planned it this way, it turns out that my Friday posts since I’ve started working have fallen into a pattern of their own.

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Well, well, well. It seems you all are just not that excited about beef stew. A very delicious beef stew, I might add. Sure there was a comment or eight, but most people, according to my site’s analytics, stopped by, took one glance at the stew and clicked elsewhere (I feel sort of like a Wizard of Oz behind the curtain having access to that sort of information, but I can’t resist). Because I had such a fondness for the stew, I was kind of baffled. I posited several theories. Too old-fashioned? Jumping the gun with full-on winter fare when we’ve only just ushered in October? Many of you are vegetarians? All these hypotheses are plausible, I suppose. But I don’t think any of them gets it quite right.

No, I think you, like me, are still transfixed by the homemade pumpkin puree that I showed you last Friday—the plump folds of silken pumpkin flesh, vibrantly orange and full of promise. The photos of the pumpkin roasting and pureeing sat atop this page all weekend. And I bet you thought that, come Monday at the latest, I would deliver on my promise of bringing you, and I quote, “baked pumpkin goods galore.” And when I didn’t, you responded with a boycott of sorts. No pumpkin, you said, then no enthusiasm for a measly beef stew. Nada. Crickets! And, well done: the silence was deafening.

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The weekend before last I was reminded how lovely—how decadent—a weekend could be. During my three years of law school, “weekend” was a loose term. Rather, each semester felt like a marathon, with cases and topics and outlines piling on like so many miles to be run. Sure, you could stop for a pit stop here and there, but a full-scale rest wasn’t feasible—you might never finish the race. The bar exam was even worse. And then there were the breaks—winter break, spring break, summer break, post bar exam weeks. During those times, the days just blended together into a seemingly endless weekend. So after my first full week of work, I signed off my computer and marveled at the notion of having Nothing To Do until Monday.  Exactly two days of much-needed rest.

Unsurprisingly, I filled my weekend with a number of baking and cooking projects. You’ve already heard about the biscotti and the roasted pumpkin. But there was this beef stew too. We also reveled in a delicious dinner out, caught up on the TV shows waiting patiently on our DVR, ate yogurt topped with the very best granola two breakfasts in a row, jogged through the neighborhood’s quieter streets, and visited the farmers’ market. It was restful and restorative and, well, I have a sneaking suspicion that weekends (the work-free ones, at least) just might turn into my favorite part of my new job.

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I might be a full-fledged grown up (I am finally done with school once and for all, I’m married, I have a mortgage, and this list goes on), but there’s something about the first few days of October—with their cool, crisp air and earthy aroma—that has me channeling my inner trick-or-treater.  Or, to be more accurate, my inner jack-o-latern artiste.  Carving pumpkins—-carefully selecting my gourd of choice at the pumpkin patch; rolling up my sleeves, reaching inside the deep pumpkin and scooping out the stringly middle; crafting a snaggle-toothed, triangle-eyed face on the slick orange skin; lighting a votive candle nestled inside the hollowed-out pumpkin, which promptly casts a flickery glow and warms the pumpkin’s flesh, emitting a scent that only exists in October—has always been my favorite part about Halloween.

As a kid, this autumnal ritual generally unfolded sometime during the week before the 31st, when our house was abuzz with other Halloween preparations: assembling costumes (often embarassing and always homemade); filling a behemoth, marigold-colored Tupperware with miniature candies; baking sugar cookies shaped like pumpkins, bats and witches’ hats.  Back then, the knife work—always performed with the biggest wooden-handled knife in our Chicago Cutlery knife block—was a strictly parental duty.  My sister and I stuck to scooping out the pumpkin seeds and outlining the faces with a thick black magic marker.

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I have a go-to savory biscotti recipe and you’ll just have to believe that I’ve been feeling bad for quite some time that I haven’t told you about it yet. But, it’d been blogged about elsewhere and, well, I never got around to it. But I can more than make up for it with these delightful biscotti, which are also savory and happen to be loaded with aged gouda and studded with bits of walnuts. After one batch, they have displaced my previous go-to and I can tell already that they’ll grace many book club meetings and cocktail parties in my future.

They are compact and crunchy and golden, which is to say nothing of their incredible flavor: full, warm and toasted. The flavor was awfully comforting and hauntingly familiar and, after thoughtfully munching on more biscotti than I care to share, I finally put my finger on what they reminded me of. Cheez-its. And I mean that in the very best way possible. It’s also the first biscotti recipe I’ve seen that calls for yeast—an addition I initially questioned, but ultimately praised once I tried the crisp exterior and softer middle that it created. But all this said, I could hardly care less about this recipe right now. And I’ll tell you why …

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This recipe is a revelation—in texture, flavor, simplicity, beauty and, most of all, speed. And speed in the kitchen is something I’m prizing quite a bit since I started my job. (I know, I know. All of you out there who had full-time jobs or kids or, I don’t know, responsibilities before, um, last Monday, are probably rolling your eyes and possibly even uttering a “duh.” But I’m catching on. Bear with me.) And this recipe is lightning quick—the sort that doesn’t merely suggest a mise en place, but rather demands it.

I especially value speed, though, when it doesn’t come at the expense of a dumbed down, flavorless, uninspired end result. And, oh, that is just not the case here. Unless you consider a glistening, tangled heap of emerald green baby bok choy (cutest vegetable ever?), greens wilted and bulbs still almost crunchy to be “uninspired.” I, for one, do not. Especially when said tangled heap is enveloped in a unctuous slip of garlicky sauce, which tastes like the dregs at the bottom of your very, very favorite Chinese takeout boxes—but which, in reality, you whipped up in your very own kitchen: no take out menus, no hunger-induced over-ordering, no delivery charge.

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