The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table Hop Like a Pro (Almost)

Book by Roberts Adam D

Chapter One
Start with Spaghetti

The story goes that Mom, recently married, prepared a spaghetti dinner for Dad to enjoy upon coming home from work. According to her, she spent the day shopping for ingredients, rolling the meatballs, simmering the sauce. Dad, an ambitious young dentist, spent the day drilling holes in people's mouths and wiping saliva off their chins. He came home very hungry.

I suppose Mom welcomed him home with open arms and then declared that there was a feast to be had on the kitchen table: spaghetti and meatballs. Come, darling, have a seat.

If one were to observe my father at any meal—including the meals he enjoys to this day—one might make the false assumption that he was raised in abject poverty, one of thirteen siblings who all had to fight for small slivers of government cheese at a table made of cardboard boxes. And while he didn't grow up at the Waldorf Astoria, his Brooklyn childhood provides little evidence to justify the furious way he scarfs down food.

"How is it honey?" asked Mom. "I worked all day on it."

"Good," said Dad, scarfing and slurping.

"Do you like the sauce? I used special tomatoes."

"It's good," said Dad, halfway done at fourteen seconds.

"Do you want cheese on it? Or maybe some bread with it?"

"No, thanks, it's fine. Very good. Thank you."

Were we to counsel Mom at this moment in her life, sitting on her shoulder like a good guardian angel, we might suggest that she stop asking questions now. "I think he likes it," we'd say. "You can quit pestering him."

Mom, however, had no sage marital guru—no Dr. Phil flapping around her cranium—so she persisted.

"Do you like the way the sauce clings to the spaghetti? Do you like the way the onions are translucent? Do you like how the tines of the fork spell out ITALY?"

There are no witnesses to corroborate what happened next, but according to my mother, Dad took a fistful of spaghetti and flung it at her, streaking her overeager face with tomato sauce. My dad is not a violent person, so the mere act must have surprised him as much as it surprised her. Anticipating fireworks, he fled to the bathroom, locked the door, and quivered, terrified of what Mom—already a tempestuous spirit—might do.

But Mom didn't chase him into the bathroom. She didn't put cyanide in his toothpaste or slash the tires on his car. Mom didn't even curse his name as she wiped the translucent onions off her eyebrows. She simply chose the best revenge she could—a revenge worthy of Clytemnestra. As Dad came home from work day after day, exhausted and emaciated, Mom would greet him at the door with a warm welcome and then snatch away his car keys.

"What's for dinner, honey?" Dad would ask.

"Depends," Mom would say.

"Depends on what?"

"It depends," said Mom, halfway out the door, "on where we're going."

You see, Mom, with little exception, never cooked for him again.

If Mom's culinary career ended with spaghetti, mine began where hers lefts off. Two and a half decades later, in the kitchen of my one-bedroom Atlanta apartment, I made—for the very first time—a sauce that's become a staple in my repertoire. It's the sauce that made me fall in love with cooking, a simple assemblage of ingredients that within thirty minutes becomes something entirely new. Upon tasting the concoction, I had all the enthusiasm of my young mother and no one there to throw it, quite literally, back in my face. The recipe comes from chef Mario Batali's Babbo Cookbook and that's where our adventure begins.

Basic Tomato Sauce
From The Babbo Cookbook
Makes 4 cups


1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 Spanish onion, finely diced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
3 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme, or 1 tablespoon dried
1/2 medium carrot, finely shredded
2 28-ounce cans peeled whole tomatoes
Kosher salt
In a 3-quart saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until soft and light golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Add the thyme and carrot and cook for 5 minutes more, or until the carrot is quite soft. With your hands, crush the tomatoes and add them with their juices. Bring to a boil, stirring often, and then lower the heat and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the sauce is as thick as hot cereal. Season with salt and serve. This sauce keeps for 1 week in the refrigerator or for up to 6 months in the freezer.

"Okay, I'm at Whole Foods," says Lauren. "And I can't find a Spanish onion."

I have requested that Lauren, my friend and former roommate who now lives in Washington, D.C., make tomato sauce along with me over the phone. The point of this project is to prove that making tomato sauce is so easy and so pleasurable that even a self-confessed noncook can make magic in her kitchen.

"I see yellow onions and I see white onions," she says. "But I don't see Spanish onions. What's a Spanish onion?"

Earlier in the day, I sent Lauren the ingredients from the Babbo Cookbook recipe. I didn't send her the recipe itself—I was going to take her through it step-by-step. The ingredients, I figured, she could get on her own without any trouble.

Flash forward to Lauren at Whole Foods stuck in the onion section needing my help. When I'd gone to the Whole Foods in my neighborhood earlier in the day, there was a clearly labeled stack of Spanish onions. I assume the one in D.C. is the same, so I ask Lauren: "Do you see the labels above the onions? Does one of them say Spanish onions?"

She pauses and says: "I'm not an idiot! If it said Spanish onions I would've just taken one and I wouldn't have called."

What Lauren is expressing here is the anxiety we all experience the first time we shop for a recipe. "

Lauren," I say calmly, "a Spanish onion is larger and sweeter than a yellow onion, but a yellow onion will work fine."

A pause and then, "Okay, got it. I'll call you if I get stuck again."

Tomato sauce represents everything I like about cooking. First of all, I like the infinite variations on a theme—if you simmer tomatoes in a pot for thirty minutes you'll have a sauce. You can make that sauce with butter or olive oil or pork fat; you can make it with onions or garlic or shallots; you can make it with fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes; you can use fresh basil and thyme or dried basil and thyme or any combination thereof. In my cookbook collection alone there are at least thirty recipes for tomato sauce.

Second, making tomato sauce rewards attention to detail. The more you make it, the better you'll get at it. The first time you might, say, add the garlic too soon and it may turn too brown; next time you'll know to add it a little while after the onion. You'll discover that squeezing the tomatoes submerged in their own liquid will prevent you from squirting yourself in the eye. You'll know precisely when the sauce is done and how much salt to add.

Finally, making tomato sauce is like meditating Italian style: you stand there over the stove, stirring softly and fanning the smells toward your face, and you feel a deep sense of inner peace. That is, until the phone rings.

"Okay," says Lauren. "I have my ingredients. I have water boiling for the pasta. Now tell me: how do I chop an onion?"

You'll discover as you cook more and more that the tasks you once found difficult you now take for granted. Lauren's inexperience reminds me of where I was just three years ago. Chopping an onion is one of the easiest things to do and should be a cinch to explain over the phone.

"Take your onion," I say. "Put it on the cutting board and cut the top and bottom off."

I wait to hear the appropriate chopping sounds and when I do I say, "Okay, good. Now then, I want you to cut the onion in half, north to south."

"North to south?" asks Lauren. "What does that mean?"

"It means," I explain, "you should cut it through the root end."

"Through the root end," she repeats and I wait again for another noise, hear it, and congratulate her.

"Very good," I say. "Now peel the skin off."

Crinkly noises echo over the line and then Lauren says, "Done."

"Now," I press on, "place the onion cut-side down on the cutting board with the root end pointing away from you. Make slits in the onion east to west, parallel to the lines in the onion toward the root end without cutting all the way through."

Another pause and then: "Huh?"

I take a deep breath. "Look at your hand, okay? Point your fingers at your face. You want to make slits in the onion the way there are lines between your fingers, not cutting all the way through to the knuckles but cutting all the way down between the spaces in your fingers. Got it?"

"I think so," says Lauren nervously and I hear the knife hit the board several times.

"Excellent," I say. "And now we're going to make cuts along the z-axis. You remember the z-axis from algebra?"

Silence.

"Okay, imagine a globe. There are the longitudinal lines and latitudinal lines. You just made cuts along the longitudinal lines, eventually you'll make cuts on the latitudinal lines, but right now you're going to make cuts into the globe."

"Into the globe?"

Lauren sounds tired.

"Let me put it another way," I offer. "The onion is flat on the board now, right?"

"Right."

"Turn it so the slit end is facing the right and the root end is to your left. You are going to ...