Please enjoy this blog post written by our head chef and founder, Marco Canora.
I never thought sending my eldest daughter Stella off to college would be as emotionally difficult as it was, especially considering her school of choice is a mere 17 miles away. Thankfully there was a silver lining that might very well be my proudest moment as a papa to date.
You see, I’ve spent most of my adult life cooking nourishing meals for my family, friends and customers at Hearth (my 20 year old restaurant in the East Village) and Brodo (my 10 yr old broth business). Cooking is my life’s passion and over the course of Stella’s 18 years on earth, I’ve served her thousands of home-cooked meals. There’s little I enjoy more, and luckily it comes easy for me. I’ve been cooking professionally for close to 40 years, have been managing our home kitchen for decades and was raised by a mother who was and still is a phenomenal cook. Cooking is truly at the center of my universe and I believe, now more than ever, it has the power to improve one’s life on many, many levels. Wanna lose weight? Cook your own food. Wanna feel better and have more energy? Cook your own food. Wanna build better relationships? Cook food and share it with the people you love. Wanna feel engaged and productive in our overly digitized world? Cook your own food (it’s one of the few things we do as humans that engages ALL of our senses). With all of the obsession around the latest and greatest health and wellness hacks, I am convinced cooking your own food should be number one on that list!
Back to Stella, there’s been one extremely annoying thing about feeding my kids over the years: it’s listening to them bitch and moan about the various things I have made them that they don’t like. Most of the time they seem like they would much prefer flavor optimized, food like substances that are engineered to trigger massive hits of dopamine through copious amounts of salt, sugar and fat. Hello Pizza bites, mac and cheese and packaged Ramen noodles. It’s a rigged game – and I’ve nearly given up on preaching to my children about the virtues of eating a diet filled with a variety of colors, nutrients and fiber. I’ve learned to bite my tongue in those humbling moments when they’ve pushed aside my home-cooked meal and proceeded to boil a box of Annie’s mac and cheese.
So when Stella returned home after a week of dorm living, complaining about how awful her food options were and how she would rather NOT eat than eat the “garbage” offered on her mandated meal plan or the affordable, carb laden junky options around the campus my heart nearly swelled out of my chest. All those years of whipping up weekday dinners have paid off…my eldest daughter has finally come to realize the value of fresh, clean and delicious food. She asked if I could help her set the tiny kitchen in her suite up and teach her a few things so that she could feed herself the food she grew up eating. It literally brings tears to my eyes as I write this. I’ve never been more motivated in my life to hang out and cook on a shitty stove with four uneven electric burners.
I’ve spent the last few weeks doing just that. Kitting her kitchen out for success – from baseline equipment and pantry items to teaching her some basic techniques and recipes that highlight versatility. Learn how to make soup and you can make dozens of them.
Learn how to pan roast a simple protein and make a pan sauce from the tasty bits left behind, again, and you can explore many iterations of that too. How about a frittata? A braised chicken thigh with veggies? Pounded and breaded meat cutlets? All of these dishes are born from a basic technique and are extremely conducive to variations. Stella is a creative soul who already finds coming up with her own menu plans quite enjoyable.
I’ve been so turned on by this framework that I’ve been thinking what a great opportunity to share these lessons and recipes with our brodo customers! They obviously value traditionally made, nutrient dense foods – I’m sure they would be open to cooking more often. If I could convince even one of you out there that cooking whole foods, from scratch, is worth every bit of effort and pays massive dividends in the long run, I’ll know that I’m doing good work.
We’ve all heard the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Well, I wanna teach you, and my daughter, how to cook.
