STEAL THESE RESTAURANT HACKS...
For dinner tonight. Here's how to make your meals cheaper, faster and more delicious (hint: you might need to whip some feta).
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Hi friends,
The longer I live on this earth, the more I realize one heartbreaking fact: I don’t have control. Type A’s love control. Whenever I think I’ve mastered it—the perfect system for grocery shopping, the routine that keeps me on top of school lunch, the best dinners for busy nights—something shifts. Someone becomes a vegetarian (or the vegetarian starts eating meat!!), the schedule dramatically alters, and I’m back to square one.
Last week, just after I wrote this What I’m Feeding My Kids guide, feeling super on top of my game, the septic system supporting our 200+ year old home failed, wreaking literal havoc on our lives. We couldn’t run water, load the dishwasher, or eat on real plates, much less cook the kinds of fresh, spring-fortified dinners we craved.
Parenting and running a home kitchen (or any part of a home, for that matter!) requires one to be incredibly nimble. Nimble—and organized!
The deeper we get into the throes of big kid life, the more I fall back on tricks I learned during my short but deeply influential restaurant stint twenty years ago. Both of the New York Times’ three-star restaurants I was lucky to work in, Cafe Boulud and Savoy, had much lauded chefs at the helm: Daniel Boulud, and Peter Hoffman, who famously rode his bike to the farmer’s market long before it was chic, fed his staff fresh baguettes and farm-stand greens for staff lunch, and cooked on live fire in the restaurant’s dining room. They both had a huge impact on the way I live and cook to this day.