This week’s The New York Times food section has an amusing story by Keith Dixon a foodie father who had to alter his cooking habits to avoid waking his light-sleeping baby. “I am the silent chef,” he begins, and then goes on to detail modifications to his evening cooking routine that both allowed baby to sleep and yielded culinary satisfaction for him and his wife: do noisy prep work ahead of time, use silicone not metal utensils, embrace quiet techniques like braising, use the exhaust fan as a white noise generator (we’ve done that), and, while he doesn’t write this, presumably no cocktail shaking. The acoustics of cooking, plus low-decibel recipes for fennel and fish soup with pernod and roast chicken with shallots, thyme, garlic, and bacon confit. Good stuff. You never know where foodie fatherdom will take you.
—Hugh
