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Food People, Parent Picks: we ask our favorite chefs, food writers, and industry insiders who we interview in our Order Up! Series to share the products, books, and bites they can’t live without.
Earlier this week, we sat down with Danny Freeman (cookbook author, stay-at-home dad, and the voice behind @dannylovespasta) for an Order Up! conversation about grief, second careers, raising kids who eat vegetables on their own terms, and the bowl of handmade pappardelle his grandmother used to slip him at family dinners. You can check out that interview right here.
Today, we’re getting practical. Below, Danny shares the three pantry staples he always keeps stocked, the appliance he’d defend forever (it’s a bread machine, and yes, it’s back), the comfort meal he makes when someone in the family is having a hard day, and the one thing he tells Italian-American purists they’re allowed to buy in a jar. These are the picks of a guy cooking for two young daughters and a vegetarian husband in real time: useful, opinionated, and refreshingly free of “from-scratch or bust” energy.
One dish from your grandmother that you make exactly her way, no changes?
I make several different tomato sauces. The Marcella Hazan butter-and-onion sauce for a quick weeknight pasta. A cherry tomato sauce in the summer. But on the weekend, I make my grandmother’s. You cook sausage right in the pot with the tomato sauce and basil and let it simmer for hours. That’s the one I don’t change.
Three pantry staples you always keep on hand?
Kosher salt and flaky salt, always both. Balsamic vinegar, for dressing vegetables, sandwiches, anything. And yeast, because I like to make bread at night when I’m not driving to the store.
The obvious ones (flour, sugar) are always there too. But yeast is the one I’d panic without.
The one dried pasta shape you always have on hand, and the sauce you most often pair with it?
Rigatoni. I always buy rigatoni. I pair it with that same Marcella Hazan butter-and-onion sauce, or just butter and cheese, fettuccine-style. [Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking Bookshop, Amazon]
Kitchen tool worth having around all the time?
A food processor. I use it constantly, including for pasta dough. I don’t always mix by hand the old-fashioned way; I throw it in the food processor.
And a garlic press. I know some chefs are against them. I use mine all the time.
One big kitchen appliance splurge?
A bread maker. They were peak in the ‘90s and fell out of favor, but I love mine. I have the Zojirushi: really good quality, really good bread. Dump it in, two hours later you have a loaf.
Store-bought item you don’t apologize for?
Frozen vegetables. I always have bags of them in the freezer. And the taco seasoning packets. I know I could mix my own spices, but the little packets are easy.
Weeknight dinner everyone will eat without negotiation?
Minestrone soup, especially in cold weather. I make a vegetarian version so my husband can eat it too. It’s a use-up-whatever-vegetables-you-have meal: I throw in pasta, rice, barley, whatever I’ve got.
Thing you tell people they don’t have to make from scratch, even though Italian food culture says they should?
People will disagree with me on this, but I think it’s totally fine to use a jar of pasta sauce when you need something quick. A homemade tomato sauce is easy to make. But if you’re making lasagna, stuffed shells, anything with a lot of other components, just use a jar. It’s fine.
A favorite cookbook besides your own?
Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian [Bookshop, Amazon]. Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking [Bookshop, Amazon]. Those big encyclopedia-style cookbooks where you can look up basically anything and it’s there.
For inspiration, I love Frankie Gaw’s First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home [Bookshop, Amazon]. Beautiful, creative, very personal.
When someone in your family is sick, sad, or had a hard day, what’s the comfort meal?
For everyone except my husband, chicken noodle soup. I make my own broth using a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Since the chicken is already cooked, you can get a really flavorful stock in a couple of hours of simmering. So much better than buying broth in a carton.
One thing you’d tell your 2020 self?
Just embrace it. I spent a lot of time then (and a few years after) being really nervous. Did I throw away my life as a lawyer? Am I going to fall on my face? Being a content creator is precarious in a lot of ways. You can be successful one day and flop the next. But I’d say: embrace whatever comes. It’s all part of the process.
