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A martini dirtied with the last of the caper juice. Egg salad sizzled into fried rice. Sauce for noodles born inside a scraped-out nut-butter jar. Sad greens sorted with a \u201cbullish, unwavering practicality.\u201d The encyclopedic array that Tamar Adler<\/strong> presents in The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A\u2013Z<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> a follow-up to her poetically instructive 2012 book<\/a>, spells an off-roading adventure in the kitchen. (\u201cOr, or, or\u201d is a common sentence-ender, signaling untold paths forward.) \u201cListen to your inner voice and follow its lead,\u201d she writes, a mystical voice on a rather prosaic matter: what to do about moldy jam.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI do feel like, to some degree, how you cook and serve people is a little bit how you live,\u201d Adler says by phone, taking the proverbial saying\u2014You are what you eat<\/em>\u2014a step further. There is bottomless creativity in her thrift; obvious deliciousness too. (The author and Vogue<\/em> contributor, now based in Hudson, New York, previously ran a restaurant in Georgia, alongside stints with the literary-minded chefs Alice Waters<\/strong> and Gabrielle Hamilton.<\/strong>) Adler, whose husband works in the climate sector around carbon sequestration, acknowledges that rescuing forlorn produce from the trash heap could seem to be a thimble-size effort. But as the New York Times<\/em> recently pointed out<\/a>, food waste\u2014more than a third of it coming from households\u2014contributes twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as commercial air travel. In other words, the odds and ends add up. Adler, who is loath to toss out a perfectly mendable sweater and saves vegetable scraps for broth, paraphrases Wendell Berry:<\/strong> \u201cHis statement was something like, \u2018God is a materialist, God made things.\u2019 It\u2019s not that I am a particularly religious person, but the idea that to love things and treasure things, like material things\u2014it\u2019s not bad. It\u2019s just that you have to actually love and treasure them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Adler isn\u2019t dogmatic, though. She appreciates the wave of self-forgiveness that accompanied the COVID quarantine era. \u201cSo many people were publicly saying, \u2018Wow, this is hard. I\u2019m not great at this. I thought I was going to run a school out of my house and now we\u2019re just watching movies.\u2019 Or, \u2018My family has been living on peanut butter for three days straight and that\u2019s just going to be okay,\u2019\u201d she says. That spirit weaves into The Everlasting Meal Cookbook,<\/em> as with her instructions for frying: \u201cYou\u2019re not doing anything wrong even if it\u2019s a little painful and a little messy. The way you\u2019re doing it is the one you\u2019ll learn from.\u201d Straightforward directives double as gentle counsel. \u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of people tell me that I was writing culinary self-help,\u201d says Adler, who logs a Zoom session with her own therapist in this three-day wellness diary. \u201cI\u2019m practicing what I preach. I\u2019m being as kind to myself as I\u2019m counseling other people to be themselves, which is nice to know.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The contents of Adler\u2019s double-decker freezer reflect her commitment to the cause. Waffles made with leftover sourdough starter sit next to bagels (gifts from city visitors), croutons, and eight different kinds of sliced bread. Mashed potatoes and sofrito and cheese-less pesto fill a series of ice cube\u2013style trays by Anyday<\/a>, a brand she learned about while recipe-testing. A blend of chopped ginger, scallion, and Chinese celery\u2014prepped on a particularly industrious afternoon\u2014is earmarked for dumplings. \u201cThat\u2019s a reassuring drawer,\u201d she says. \u201cIn the past I was looking out for me now, and I think that\u2019s a very self-respectful thing.\u201d Such grace for one\u2019s future self is, in a way, another exercise in sustainability. A line from the book comes to mind: \u201cWhen leeks look old and tired,\u201d Adler writes, \u201cthey remain lively within.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 6:50 a.m.:<\/strong> My son wakes me up every morning. This is the only way I\u2019ll get up. I\u2019m against alarms unless I have a train or plane to catch. (My husband sets his alarm for 6 then spends like 30 minutes in the shower, but he\u2019s quiet and I usually doze through. He\u2019s away for work this week, though.) Our son is officially allowed in at 7. But he comes in at 6:50 every day, tells me it\u2019s 10 to 7, then spends 10 minutes taking my covers, taking my pillows, and talking loudly about Pokemon cards.\u00a0<\/p>\n At 7 I get up.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of tricks I play with myself. The first of the day is waking up and getting dressed in exercise clothes because it\u2019s actually harder to remove exercise clothes than it is to just exercise at some point before the school bus returns at the end of the day. It usually works. I put on exercise clothes.<\/p>\n I make my son breakfast and lunch\u2014these tasks are usually handed off between me and Pete,<\/strong> but this week it\u2019s me. I sit down with Louis<\/strong> but don\u2019t eat breakfast with him because it\u2019s too early. I drink a mason jar full of half coffee, half whole milk, and maple syrup. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s particularly healthy. But I also don\u2019t think it\u2019s particularly unhealthy. It has what I need for the first few hours of the day\u2014caffeine, fat, and maple syrup.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nAn Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A\u2013Z, by Tamar Adler<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Wednesday, March 1<\/h2>\n