Cooking for Mom

Pot pies and stir fries, savoring the yolk, cocktails, books, movies and more...

One of the many wonders of the pot pie is that it’s a way to put leftovers to elegant use, for a gorgeous, delicious, nourishing winter meal. The above is a turkey pot pie Ann made a day or two after Thanksgiving, using leftover turkey, green beans, and chunks of dressing all simmering in a gravy made from stock from the turkey carcass. She froze it so that we could enjoy a turkey dinner many weeks after the turkey overload had passed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about savory pies over the past months as Brian Polcyn and I are working on a book about savory pies, which can be anything that’s baked in a crust. It seems that “pot pie,” though, is a term unique to America. England is the land of the savory pie—the pork pie, the Cornish pasty, steak and kidney pie. But, according to our dear friend Elizabeth across the pond, the British don’t use the term pot pie, only pie.

I love the traditional preparation of a “pot pie” because it’s so simple: some sort of stew is placed in an ovenproof dish, covered with a sheet of dough and baked. Given that the quality of store-bought puff pastry is so good, leftovers turned into a great meal are a snap. It could be anything. Ann made a fabulous Thai chicken curry the other night (one of her own devising, no recipe for my recipe loving wife!). Had there been leftovers, they would have made splendid individual pies.

I would love to hear from readers what your favorite savory pies are and what kind of pies you’d like to see in a book. Please feel free to leave a comment on the subject!

Cooking for Mom …

My beloved mom had an unfortunate fall last week that put her in the hospital for more than a week—ugh!

I said, “What can I do, Mom?”

She said, “I want to see you. I want you to cook for me!”

So I flew down to West Palm Beach. The day after I arrived, she was released from the hospital. Fresh from her first shower in a week, and thrilled to be home, she arrived in the kitchen and requested … an egg: poached on a bacon-topped English muffin (Bays of course). With her right hand immobilized in a cast, I made the first cut for her, so that yolk oozed out into the muffin and onto the plate.

I asked if she wanted me to make another cut and she said, “No, let me just savor this yolk.” It made my heart glad to see her devour the egg. Yes, savor that yolk, I thought.

One more reason to honor the egg. One last thing—and I’ll stop with writing about eggs for a while, I promise—I’ve been contacted recently by reporters to comment on the egg, given that an egg shortage has made their cost skyrocket. My thoughts: eggs, this miracle of nutrition, deliciousness, and natural design, have always been so inexpensive we have taken them for granted. Me, I think that $1 per egg would be a bargain if that’s what they cost.

The second request …

Of all things mom wanted on her return, it was chicken with cashews for dinner. What an odd choice! Not one of our staples.

This was just a simple stir fry, starting with Asian mirepoix (scallions-ginger-garlic) followed by chicken, then a simple sauce (hoisin, white wine, soy, fish sauce), then the cashews.

What I loved about making the dish was velveting the chicken. As I did not travel with The Wok, Kenji’s masterful cookbook on all that can happen in this all-purpose vessel, I did a little searching and found, on both Serious Eats and a Kenji video, that it’s perfectly fine to velvet in water. This was news! I’d always thought you had to use oil.

Velveting is a technique of tenderizing meat. It’s first washed, aggressively massaged and wrung out, then marinated in soy, wine, cornstarch, egg white, and baking soda—then dropped into boiling water for 20 seconds or so. The result is surprisingly tender meat. (See the video by Andrew Rea on his Basics with Babish youtube channel.) So glad I did it.

The other practice for stir fries that I’ve embraced is to thicken the sauce not with a cornstarch slurry but instead with beurre manié. The sauce is so much more satiny than a sauce thickened with slurry. It worked especially well with the sauce for the snap peas and water chestnuts.

What We’re drinking …

When I come to Florida, my mind goes immediately to the daiquiri. This cocktail, many, many years ago, was, in a way, my introduction to what would become the craft cocktail movement.

I had only known daiquiris that had been frozen and sometimes even had strawberries in them. I don’t know where I read it—an article on the Hemingway daiquiri perhaps?—but what I noted was that a daiquiri was simply lime juice, simple syrup and rum. I tried it and was astonished. So this is a daiquiri, I thought!

This illustration is by Marcella Kriebel for my forthcoming book, The Book of Cocktail Ratios. Have a look at her site—I adore her work.

Pre-order The Book of Cocktail Ratios here. Why? An article in the links below explains exactly why pre-orders are so important to authors.

What we’ve been watching (it’s a lot!) …

Close is a beautiful movie with perfect performances about a friendship between two 13-year-olds that cannot last. It’s so good in fact that it’s very difficult to watch because ultimately the story is so sad and nuanced. Impossible to describe without spoiling but suffice it to say that it is an extraordinary rendering of boyhood.

After Love took our breath away. The story is based on a brilliant premise: a woman’s husband dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. She’s in her sixties and overweight (important to the story, and quite moving). Going through his things, she finds the ID of a woman in his wallet, and on his phone, intimate texts between the two. The widow, undone by the discovery of the affair, crosses the English Channel, from Dover to Calais, to confront the woman. The woman is French, svelte and blonde. The widow shows up at the mistress’s house, is mistaken for the new cleaning woman. And so the widow goes to work for the mistress to learn more. Learn more she does! And it is more than finding her husband’s shirts hanging in the mistress’s closet. Great movie.

We’d been dying to see Babylon because we love the work of its director Damien Chazelle, especially Whiplash and La La Land, and we’d heard how outrageous it was. It is! A crazy, far-too-long-but-who-cares? tale of Hollywood as it transitioned from the silent era to the era of talkies. Fantastic performances by Brad Pitt and especially by Margot Robbie, as two stars who can’t make the transition. It’s a wild ride.

We love Poker Face, the episodic series of a young woman (Natasha Lyonne) who has a gift of unfailingly knowing when someone is lying, and she turns this power to use as a detective. (We bought a month of Peacock in order to watch it.) She’s fantastic. If you missed her last show, Russian Doll (Netflix), you have some fun in store. The new show is modeled on Columbo, which I used to watch with my dad (how he loved it), and which had an unusual structure. The audience sees the murders straight away; the tension of the show is watching Lyonne figure it out.

(Note to Laura Lippman: please weigh in on this in your next newsletter, please! We know Columbo is your fave and want to know what you think. For fans of Lippman’s books, be aware that she’s begun her own substack newsletter: Shaved Meats, Piled High. More on Lippman below in books.)

Turn Every Page. For two writers, this documentary about legendary political writer Robert Caro and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, was riveting from beginning to end. Made by the editor’s daughter, the documentary has an intimacy and ease as each man discusses his own work and how they work together. For Gottlieb, this means talking about how he edits and what makes him a good editor (he’s not modest, but nor is he wrong). For Caro this means discussing the process of writing The Power Broker about Robert Moses and the soon to be 5th volume of his LBJ biographies (fingers crossed; Caro is 87). And having watched the movie, I’m wondering what Gottlieb would have to say about that semicolon. The only odd part of the doc is that while, Caro finally agreed to be filmed in the same room as Gottlieb, he would not allow Gottlieb’s daughter to record audio as they edited some pages of his ms. But all in all an excellent, multifaceted portrait of a writer and his editor.

And most recently we watched Navalny, the Netflix documentary about the lawyer challenging Vladimir Putin who was subsequently poisoned but survived. And more: he proved that it had been a government sanctioned murder attempt. How Putin is not held to task for the atrocities he is committing on individuals, on countries, is beyond belief. Watch the movie, riviting, and be sure to share the hilarious hashtag #Moscow4.

One last note from Ann:

When my beloved went off with an old pal, I went to the Film Forum to see Una Vita Difficile, directed by Dino Risi and starring Alberto Sordi and Lea Massari. I love this description from A.O. Scott: “It’s a movie — released in Italy in 1961 and only now making its way to North American screens — about a great many wonderful and vexing things, including love, honor, money, cinema, politics and Alberto Sordi’s remarkable chin.”

What we’ve been reading …

One of the books I got for Christmas was a Graham Greene novel I’d never heard of called Doctor Fisher of Geneva, a tale of love and greed. It’s very short, and certainly would be considered a minor work in his great oeuvre, but it’s simply a pleasure to be in the hands of such a masterful storyteller. And I’ve just started The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, a deep dive into the mysterious world of North Korea.

Of course our Constant Reader has plenty of recommendations:

I’ve read three books recently that I love and urge you to pre-order. You will be so happy when they arrive.

Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea is a fictionalization of the true story of the WWll Doughnut Dollies, women who braved the front lines making coffee and doughnuts for soldiers while witnessing war up close. Urrea’s own mother was one of those women. (Publishes at the end of May.)

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis is one of the most original books I’ve read in years. A reality show in which the winners go to Mars. Forever. It’s funny and heartbreaking and wonderful. (Mid-June.)

Prom Mom is the newest Laura Lippman novel. What happens when Amber Glass returns home after staying away for her entire adult life? She reconnects with her high school boyfriend Joe, and…just wait. (July.)

I took a stroll to our neighborhood bookshop, Three Lives, and discovered Shine on Bright and Dangerous Object (1976), a Laurie Colwin novel I hadn’t read! A young widow. A sexy brother in law. Manhattan. Oh, joy!

And also Gina Berriault’s Seven Stories in a pocket sized edition. Perfect for subway reading. The Nation described her writing best: “She deepens reality, complements it and affords us the bliss of knowing, for a moment, what we cannot know."

What we’ve been listening to…

Having become fascinated by bar culture over the past year, I’m listening to Eric Alperin’s Unvarnished: A Gimlet-Eyed Look at Life Behind the Bar, about his opening a craft cocktail bar in Los Angeles, and I love his candid take on the life.

And from Ann:

On all this strolling I’ve been doing throughout the Village, I’m listening to THE Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, read by Bianca Amats and Jill Tanner. It has everything: a bookstore filled with old books, a mysterious writer, feral twins, a topiary garden, a fire, a heroine with moxie. I loved every minute.

MacDougal Street, facing north.

Links we’ve loved…

• Many people don’t know how important pre-orders are to writers. Here’s a link from The Irish Times that explains why.

• The Scottish whisky industry is booming (happily!).

• Here are two stories that revere the world of processed food. Love letters both, one to Kraft Mac and Cheese, the other to garlic powder.

• How do you become a human cannonball, let alone a whole family of them? (From Narratively.com, a long-form storytelling platform.)

• I was fascinated by this NYTimes obit of the jazz singer Carol Sloan, almost a star, then forgotten, then a comeback.

• Ann hates sponges. I love sponges, but not when they’re smelly. Smell is usually how I determine when to throw one out. But here’s what Epicurous has to say on the subject.

• The amazing story of the capsized boat and and a life saved by first-time rescue swimmer, Advanced Helicopter Rescue School 3rd Class John "Branch" Walton, who just happened to be training nearby. (Watch the IG movie embedded in article.)

• It’s been noted that WASPs have a habit of naming their dogs after liquor (e.g. my old dog, Brandy)—who knew? Now it seems people are naming their dogs after food.

• One-hundred forty rules of etiquette to live by, from The Cut. (Scroll down to the Amy Sedaris box.)

And finally…

Film critic David Ehrlich makes a video montage of the year’s best films.

Thanks for reading! Leave a comment. If you liked it, hit the heart button or share it with likeminded friends!

See you back here in two weeks.

—Michael (and Ann)