Cooking with Amy

Last week my dearest friend Amy came to visit from Belgium with her family.  I had been looking forward to Amy’s visit for months, not only to catch up with her and her lovely husband and three teenage sons, but also to do one of our favorite things to do together:  cook.  Amy and I have been cooking together since November of 1988, when we attempted our first complete Thanksgiving feast for some international friends living in her university housing complex.  We spent hours of searching for and inventing recipes, calling our mothers in turn for advice and instructions, posing with the raw turkey for photos, then serving what we both deemed to be American home-cooked cuisine at its finest.

Since that time, we’ve been sharing recipes and food ideas across the Big Pond, and have had a few more opportunities to be in the kitchen together.  When Amy and her family visited in 2007, we prepared her eggplant-basil quiche, a wonderful addition to my recipe list.  I am always a bit intimidated by the quantities necessary to feed our broods simultaneously (eight people at every meal), but Amy cheerfully helps me use whatever is on hand to create a masterpiece, and this visit was no exception.

Eager to use up more greens from my CSA share, I suggested a recipe for our last evening together for a baked ziti with Swiss chard.  Amy smiled hesitantly, and never one to mince words, she said, “I’d love it, but I know my kids won’t eat it.”  Hmmm.  Well, to be quite honest, I thought to myself, my kid wouldn’t eat it either.  I’ve become a master at disguising vegetables, but Swiss chard has an earthy flavor and a rather tough texture that wouldn’t just disappear in a mass of pasta and sauce.

And now comes the mutual creativity part.  What to do?  Well, we had four lovely heads of fresh broccoli and several zucchini and yellow squash from the CSA share Amy had come to pick up with me earlier that day.  We soaked the broccoli for worms, and cut it up for steaming.  Amy set to work shredding a couple of zucchini and a yellow squash. I’m always astounded at the ease with which Amy orients herself to a new kitchen, new utensils, and the location of pots and pans.  I opened industrial amounts of canned diced tomatoes and set them to drain, then opened three packages of penne pasta.  We sent Florian, her eldest, to the garden with a pair of scissors to fetch the basil that’s been flourishing in the heat.  I minced a head of fresh garlic and a fresh onion from the share.  We made an extremely simple sauce by sautéing the onion and garlic, then adding the shredded zucchini and yellow squash, then the minced basil leaves (a huge bunch).  The diced tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, and a healthy tablespoon of dried oregano rounded out our sauce, which we set to simmer while we prepared the pasta.  We steamed the broccoli to a brilliant green, and served everything piping hot.  I added a large dollop of my homemade goat cheese on the top of the pasta and sauce for the finishing touch.  We stood back, amazed once again at how we two women—each of us normally a bit “control freak” in our own kitchens—were able to dance around each other to create another crowd-pleaser.

The eight of us sat together, the adults sipping a lovely Malbec, the children blissfully unaware of how many vegetables we had managed to sneak into their meal.  Everyone took seconds.  And Amy and I lifted our glasses in a toast to each other, creating a new memory of cooking together for our recipe box.