ABOUT FAIRWAY
Fairway Food Update with Steve Jenkins >> COOK MORE AT HOME by Steve Jenkins
SEPTEMBER 2013
I
’m at the age where one begins to get wistful. How tiresome. I am not the wistful type. My insouciance has been one of the cardinal traits by which my friends and detractors, some of whom are both, identify me. Lately, I have found myself counting the startlingly high number of restaurants I have patronized more than once. I am leading myself to believe there is an even higher number of restaurants I have been to only once, but I am trying to elide those one-night stands from my tote-log.
this musing is much more than a walk down memory lane. It is more a cosmic slap up-side of my head. I figure conservatively that the amount of money I have spent on these more-than-once restaurants over the last two decades alone would have put my son through four years of NYU at least twice. Or the equivalent of a fine arts bachelor’s degree plus a master’s.
I tend to muse when I am in transit around the metropolitan and tri-state area in those frequent means of conveyance when a book is unwieldy if not unsafe. The sum-total of
Well, of course I enjoyed myself at all these joints. Many of the chefs and waitstaff and sommeliers were or became friends of mine. Perhaps I learned a couple of things about
38 | FLAVORS MAGAZINE
This makes me sick to my stomach.
food, and perhaps my wife took away some wonderful ideas about her own repertoire, which certainly would fall to my own rapture of being served her meals. The point I am trying to make to you is that my peripatetic musing has not just helped me pass the time. It has lit up the fact that I have spent umpteen thousands upon thousands of dollars on an exercise upon which I probably should have exerted considerably more restraint. Let’s stop beating around the Bush’s baked beans. You ought to be cooking at home more often instead of going out to some dumb restaurant and spending four times the money you could have spent at your Like No Other Market. You ought to be entertaining at home more often, too, as well as cooking at home. The payoff is much more than having saved a boatload of simoleons. You will feel much better about yourself. Noble. Your friends will more than likely be shamed into reciprocality. If you clean up as these evenings proceed, rather than waiting until your guests have gone home, you
will find the evening’s effort much less bothersome. Don’t forget to add in the taxi fares you will have saved, if not the garage fees, or the wear-and-tear on your own vehicle. You will have gotten rid of a few bottles of beverages that were burning a hole in your pantry or wine rack. You will have dazzled your friends with some serious ingredients and methods of their employment. You will have lingered at table without having gotten the stink-eye from people who have been serving you all night. You will not have ordered wrong. I hate that – when I realize I made a dumb choice off a menu. You will not leave your glasses, or your credit card in the restaurant. You will not get a DUI on the way home. Plus, best of all, your bed is just steps away. Your Fairway Market is the repository of all the ingredients for the best nights of your life. Not to mention there are so many of us here who truly want to talk to you about what you’re serving for dinner tonight.
FAIRWAYMARKET.COM | 39