Hello, Home Cooking

Introduction

For the longest time, I considered myself strictly a fine dining chef. I was in the phase many young cooks go through when first getting into fine dining: There is so much more to food! It must be innovative. It must be beautiful. It must be . . . art—that phase.

I never cooked at home during this phase. Why would I? I had already spent up to eighteen hours a day standing over something hot, standing next to something hot, or accidentally bumping into something hot. On the rare occasion that my wife, Sohla, an equally strained chef, and I would have the same day off, we would order in or eat out. On the even rarer occasion when we were game for a home-cooked meal, it was always an event: a 3-inch dry-aged rib eye, basted in as much butter as most people eat in two weeks; a salt-baked potato, piled high with crème fraîche; and a crisp wedge salad, smothered in creamy blue cheese dressing. During this phase, a part of me even looked down on home cooking. If it wasn’t plated with tweezers, I didn’t want it. (If I made something as “simple” as a hot dog at home, you best believe that frank was brought to temperature using the thermal immersion circulator we got as a wedding gift.)

Then the pandemic hit and brought the restaurant industry to an immediate halt. The indestructible New York City restaurant group I worked at closed all fifteen-ish of their stores. It was time for me to get reacquainted with home cooking.

Transitioning from restaurant chef to home cook came with some unexpected struggles. I was incapable of making food for fewer than ten people. Many people struggle with guessing the right portion of pasta to cook, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about double-digit egg omelets for the two of us and enough lentil soup for the entire building. I would baste everything in butter—not just steaks. And not just a little bit of butter—my wife was horrified when she caught me basting four asparagus spears with a quarter pound of the stuff. Those buttery fun times lasted about four months, before we started getting tired of spending every second of every day coexisting in a cramped studio apartment and cooking like the apocalypse was just around the corner.

It took me a long time to turn to the foods I grew up eating. I had turned off that part of my brain; I wanted to be a newer, better Ham with a blank slate ready to absorb all the culinary techniques coming my way. It was almost as if I felt like I had to replace what I knew about food with a new, modern style to be successful. I grew up in a diverse international community, experiencing comforting home cooking from all over the world. My dad left his village on the outskirts of Cairo to study at Howard University. My mom left tropical Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia to work on her English at the same school. They married in DC and moved to Doha, Qatar, where I was born and raised.

I moved to the United States, by myself, when I was nineteen. At the end of the first year my mom and sister came to visit me. When I welcomed them at my front door my mom was wheezing and clearly struggling to breathe. I took her to the emergency room and she was admitted into intensive care immediately. She passed less than two weeks later. Dealing with the grief of her sudden passing was something that I struggled with, and was probably the main reason I locked away the memories of her home cooking. Reliving the times we spent crimping empanadas or layering lasagna was simply too painful, and it was easier to just bury it deep. My dad had all our things shipped from Doha to a storage unit in Cairo after he and my sister moved to America—everything except one thing, my mom’s Madonna notebook, which I found hidden in a pile of my dad’s things in his attic. That tattered notebook, with its spine held together with black electrical tape, had one of the most nostalgic images on it: bleached-blonde-era Madonna in red lingerie holding a microphone. This book held a collection of all my mother’s favorite recipes. I carried that notebook with me, from apartment to apartment, without looking at it, hiding it away like my most prized treasure.

The need for comfort during the uncertainty of the pandemic caused me to dig deep and finally unlock those memories and recipes of my Mom’s home cooking. I found cooking those recipes to be the most fun and impactful time in the kitchen since I had first learned how to use a Thermomix at Wd~50. As I started cooking at home instead of in a restaurant, I started thinking thriftier, more streamlined, and in terms of how many pots will this dirty. I stopped cooking thinly sliced onions in barely bubbling butter before blending and passing them through a fine-mesh strainer to make the soubise to accompany sous vide chicken breast; instead, I started roasting a whole chicken over a bed of peeled whole shallots and butter. The results were more straightforward, often tastier, and more comforting. Combining vital home cooking skills with basic professional knowledge like how to season properly (it’s often more than you think), precise protein cookery, and exposure to a wide array of flavor combinations has made me the best version of myself as a cook.

Eventually, I developed versions of all kinds of fondly remembered dishes, using ingredients I could easily find and employing some tips and tricks I had learned along the way. These form most of the recipes in this book. You’ll find recipes for most any occasion, from an easy morning smoothie to a show-stopping turkey replacement for Thanksgiving. There are recipes for when you’re feeling lazy or when you’re looking to sink yourself into a project after a long week at work. More importantly, these are recipes for when you need the incomparable comfort of a home-cooked meal.