Jamming Solo or with Friends?

Cooking with friends and neighbors is always an adventure, though exhausting and at times nail-biting for control freaks (ahem). In New York City, it is an extreme sport. Avoiding bodily harm while dancing around knives, boiling pots and spitting woks, is an art form that begs for the virtues of patience and grace. But how better to truly know one another, than to make things that nourish together?

While making a recent batch of marmalade, WKCR Sunday Jazz played on the radio. Peeling the blood oranges, I took great pleasure in my halcyon winter kitchen. But an hour later, clawing my lonely way through blood orange pith, I recalled how fun it is to make jam with a crew of jammers. Conversation and sharing balance the laborious minutiae.

Cooking together and sharing makes food better. Brooklyn is full of people cooking together. My friend Kara Masi hosts the Ted and Amy Supper Club in her kitchen in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where she (and a friend or two) make a four-course meal once a month for a group of ten friends/neighbors/strangers. Not Eating Out in NY is a website where Cathy posts recipes and anecdotes from her year+ of not eating out in NYC. Hopefully we can all do more of this, enjoy one another and the fruits of the earth while chasing away the winter blues.

Come on over and make some chutney with me this weekend!