What Cookbook Author Jessica Battilana Cooks for Her Family in a Week

SUNDAY

I just published a cookbook, Repertoire: All the Recipes You Need, and am deep in the thick of promotion, doing lots of events. So I spent the weekend with my friends up at Scribe Winery in Sonoma, where I was the “chef-in-residence” (this is kind of ridiculous, because their team actually did most of the work). We—they—made the vermicelli bowls with lemongrass pork meatballs from the book, along with roasted carrots and salsa rustica (also from the book), to serve alongside their delicious wines.

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I'm so busy shelling a million fava beans and saying hi to the visitors that I forget to eat until I'm about to leave to go back home to San Francisco, so I wolf down a vermicelli bowl, down a petite cocktail made with St. George green chile vodka and lime juice, and hit the road.

When I get home my wife is putting our two boys to bed, but there's a hot dog on the stove, along with a few spoonfuls of baked beans, and she’d made brownies using Alice Medrich’s peerless recipe. Am I the luckiest? So I eat all of those things, doubling down on dinner since I’d eaten so little the rest of the day.

MONDAY

On Monday mornings I volunteer as a cook at the Zen Hospice Guest House, where I cook for the end-of-life residents. It’s a mellow morning there, and I cook scrambled eggs and buttered toast for our one resident. And I make a slice of toast for myself, generously slathered with butter.

My shift ends at 11 and I head to the grocery store. I’m at the grocery store most days. Often twice a day. I actually love to grocery shop, which is good because I have to do it so often, both because I develop recipes for a living and because I have to feed my family. I should have a plan, but I don’t, so I wander the aisles with a 50-yard-stare, trying to figure out what to have for dinner. (Professional food writers! They’re just like us!) I grab a bunch of chicken thighs, and the fixings to make the fattoush salad from my cookbook, and some asparagus.

When I get home, I make lunch. I write a bimonthly home cooking column for the San Francisco Chronicle, also called Repertoire. I’ve already developed the recipe for my next column, which is a walnut crema with roasted asparagus and a fried egg, but I have to take some photographs so I make it again, photograph it, and eat it for lunch.

By the time dinner rolls around I have the vaguest stomachache. Remembering that my four-year-old had a 102-degree fever a few days prior, I start to fear the worst. It’s like the under toad in The World According to Garp—that bad feeling that something awful is about to happen. So instead of the crunchy, herb-packed fattoush I was dreaming of, I make miso chicken using this recipe from The New York Times, because it requires five ingredients and takes five minutes to put together, and instead of fattoush I make white rice.

Does everyone out there know about “new crop” rice? I didn’t know about it until this year, and now I look for that on the label, because obviously fresher rice is going to be better rice. I get the short-grain white rice from Koda Farms. It’s delicious. I make it in my rice cooker, which plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when you turn it on. And I serve it with sautéed sugar snap peas. I forget about my stomachache and eat a leftover brownie for dessert.

Vermicelli Noodles with Lemongrass Pork Meatballs

Photo by Ed Anderson

TUESDAY

We wake up, and I am not sick, Praise Be! It’s an early-rising situation at our house—our kids usually climb into bed with my wife and me around 6:30am. I can’t remember what we made them for breakfast but I’m sure it was either oatmeal, yogurt with fruit and homemade jam, or toast. My wife takes them to school and I have a few slices of Josey Baker’s nut-packed “adventure bread” with almond butter and yogurt with apricot jam and granola. I don’t even need to mention I have a lot of cups of coffee, do I?

I decide today is the day that I am going to tackle some freezer projects, so I start a batch of chicken stock, starting with the bag of bones I’ve been amassing for a month or so. I also come across a few bags of citrus peels that I intended to turn into candied citrus back in…January? I think I was going to give them as New Year’s gifts. Oh, well. I’ve never made them before so I turn to this recipe. I do not read the recipe all the way through—don’t be like me—and so I only realize once I’ve begun that it takes 72 HOURS to make them, accounting for all the resting time. I am not a person that has 72 hours to devote to candied citrus. Nevertheless, I persist.

I find some Hatch chiles I roasted and froze back in September, and I find some frozen tomatoes, and decide that a chicken–green chile stew is what we’ll have for dinner. I have a couple raw chicken thighs leftover from the night before, so shortly before the stock is done I toss them in to poach, then I shred the meat. I sauté onions and garlic and add cumin and then the green chiles, then I ladle in the broth and shredded meat. While the stock was cooking I also cooked some Rancho Gordo beans (they’re so fresh they don’t even need to be soaked) and so those go in the stew, too. Sarah brings home tortillas and cilantro. It’s the kind of delicious meal that you can never replicate.

Before bed, I boil the citrus peels in their sugar syrup for the second time. I’m a slave to the peels. Are there brownies left? If so, I definitely ate one.

WEDNESDAY

My wife wakes up thinking it’s the weekend. This is a terrible thing to have happen to you on hump day. We’re up early, more coffee. I boil my citrus peels again, and now I am running late so the kids have cereal and I don’t eat anything. On Wednesday, Thursdays, and Fridays I cook lunch at my kids’ school, and I try to get there by 8am. Whew! So, in my role as part-time lunch lady I’m responsible for feeding 220 people—kids and staff—a wholesome, made-from-scratch lunch. Before starting the job last fall I’d never cooked for more than, say, 40 people, so the learning curve was a bit steep. But now I’m in the groove, and the menu today is lasagna and green salad and fresh fruit.

Usually by the time I finish making all that food I don’t really feel like eating it, and today is no exception. I make a salad of grated carrots with feta, parsley and some pitted kalamata olives and top it with a scoop of tuna.

For dinner we finally return to that fattoush salad that I planned to make earlier in the week, with some bratwurst alongside, a combination that doesn’t really make sense but is just fine. I boil the peels one last time in their sticky syrup, then lay the strips on a cooling rack to dry.

Sam's Spring Fattoush Salad

Photo by Ed Anderson

THURSDAY

It’s oatmeal, it's yogurt, it's coffee, it's my usual good cop-bad cop morning routine as I try both kindness and sternness to encourage my children to keep moving please keep moving. We arrive at school, find a parking spot despite the dreaded street cleaning in the neighborhood and I get started making school lunch. Today it’s bean-and-chorizo chili, so by mid-morning I’ve got three giant pots of the stuff bubbling away. We serve it with coleslaw and cornbread. My kids are happy to have me in the kitchen at school and they’re pretty good eaters, for which I’m thankful. But on the car ride to school when I tell my boys that we’re having chili for lunch, my four-year-old starts crying. “It’s too spicy!” he yells, even though it'll be hours before he tastes it. Kids, man.

I eat a bowlful for lunch. N.B. it is not spicy.

By Thursday afternoon I am very tired of cooking and thinking about food but guess what! It’s time to think about dinner. My wife is a good cook, but she works later hours and so I usually make supper. But yesterday she cooked a pot of chana dal so that’s more or less ready to go. I cook some onions and cumin in ghee until they’re browned and then dump that into the dal to flavor it. I make a little salad of the leftover cucumbers that didn’t make their way into the fattoush, tossed with some Greek yogurt. I cook basmati rice, and thaw some naan from the freezer. This is a meal I could eat weekly and never tire of, so it’s in frequent rotation in our house. I didn’t include it in my cookbook, though it’s certainly part of my repertoire. Guess I’ll have to put it in my second book.

We are a dessert every night kind of family, but we’re coming up short today. The kids scrounge for some old gummi candy, and I eat a handful of Guittard chocolate chips, along with a few of my candied citrus peels, which are now ready to coat in sugar. They are wildly delicious, so I’m feeling less resentful about the whole thing.

FRIDAY

My six-year-old requests a breakfast of peanut butter and jelly on a hot dog bun. My four-year-old requests a fried egg, along with cereal and oatmeal and a jelly sandwich, and some candied orange peel. Growth spurt? Off to school we go.

I make quesadillas for school lunch. It comes with the cook’s reward: I trim (and later eat) all the lacy bits of fried cheese that ooze out of the quesadillas as they cook. The kids also get some big, juicy first-of-the-season strawberries alongside, so I eat some of those, and I make a green salad with Little Gem lettuce and Dijon vinaigrette, which I also eat some of.

I’m doing a book signing tonight, so I head out early to avoid crazy traffic. The signing is in San Rafael, which is north of the city, and I get there a few hours before I need to, which gives me time to eat a fried shrimp sandwich and tostones at Sol Food. I plan to only eat half of the sandwich but I devour the entire, perfect thing. And then I eat the tostones, pausing only briefly to consider the wisdom of eating garlicky mojo sauce before greeting and talking to strangers.

The signing is at Copperfield’s, which is a beautiful independent bookstore. They’ve made a smattering of the recipes from the book, including the Fancy Toasts, The Greenest Green Salad and the Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’ve also printed cocktail napkins with the Repertoire cover image printed on them. So sweet. After the signing I eat half of a cookie and then head next door for a nightcap, by which I mean a strawberry ice cream cone with chocolate sprinkles. I drive back to San Francisco. When you’re driving South on 101 just before you reach the Golden Gate Bridge you’re treated to the most exquisite view of San Francisco. I’ve lived out here for 15 years but man, it still gets me every time.