I love what Barbara Kafka terms the ‘continuous kitchen’ in her book Roasting: a Simple Art. I was talking with Ana Sortun about this – when our babies were littler and we spent time talking about food and drinking mint tea while they played together on the floor – and she loved the term too. It is how things work in a restaurant for sure, she mentioned. Always thinking ahead, always thinking what you can use something for in the next recipe. I am grateful to Ana and Farmer Chris, her husband, for providing me with many ideas in the kitchen and many nutrient-rich, local, sparkling veggies to work with. I’ve told Chris for years that opening my CSA box is like Christmas morning EVERY WEEK. I still feel that way. Thank you Siena Farms for your beautiful veggies!

Here’s Barbara’s quote:

It seems to me that less cooking is done today than used to be and that when it is done, it is so much more work because we have lost the habit of the continuous kitchen. We start each meal from scratch with fresh shopping and a brand-new independent recipe. Our predecessors didn’t, and we can save ourselves a great deal of work and have better, more economical food with greater depth of flavor by seeing cooking as an ongoing process. …Leftovers have gotten a bad name . … Having good leftovers is like having a good sous-chef in the kitchen, someone who has done half the work before I turn up for the finishing touches.