Instead of giving up on cooking at home, I doubled down on it. No one does.… Friends who’d had children before me promised a future of takeout and cereal for dinner. Kids, work, life…I just don’t have the time I used to spend dreaming up dinner. ![]() “In the old days,” she writes in the first chapter, “before the kids, I might have leisurely pulled a cookbook from the shelf, browsed through for inspiration, and hit the store for ingredients.… But it’s different now. How could they be expressions of surrender? Especially since Battilana is clear from its opening pages that Repertoire is an extended prompt for getting a grip on everyday cooking, when making dinner has to compete with half a dozen other daily imperatives, each demanding attention like a series of all-caps texts popping up on your phone screen. The meaning of his advice (surrender) shades the rest of Repertoire like a koan, a paradox to roll around the mind as you flip through recipes for duck rillettes and rustic seafood stew and tarte tatin: lovely, conquerable dishes all, the well-worn index cards in Battilana’s Rolodex of go-tos. The fattoush that Mogannam inspired is only recipe number two in Battilana’s book of 75. “He grabbed my hand,” Battilana writes, “looked straight into my eyes, and said simply, ‘Surrender.’” ![]() One day she runs into Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite Market, who offers a single word of parenting advice. ![]() In the intro to Sam’s Spring Fattoush Salad, a recipe in her new book Repertoire, Jessica Battilana serves a riddle. She recalls the time, soon after her wife has given birth to their first child, when exhaustion has frayed Battilana’s edges.
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