A ROSTI by any other name — Arielle Giusto

I used to be an over-coordinator. Maybe it's too soon to use the past tense so casually. I am less often an over-coordinator with every year that passes. It could be the influence of being around so many friends with small children who fly in the face of your planning. Or that I'm simply chilling out as I age. Whatever the reason, it feels good to loosen the reigns a little bit, or "go with the flow" as hippies such as myself like to say.

All reforms aside, when I throw a party, large or small, I want people to get really really full (satiated would be a much more polite term) and I want them to be really really happy. So although I may be getting lax on some of the details, I have to make at least one knockout dish. I can pick a fine piece of cheese, and lord knows we always have beautiful breads hanging around, but I gotta give more than that. Enter the Sweet Potato Rosti.

There is a magic sweet spot in food. You never know which dish is going to hit it just right, but when it does, shit goes crazy. This is one of my top five recipes for making people lose their minds. They look at it - it's cute, nice colors, ok - they eat it, it gets quiet, conversations stop, then they lose it. I am not exaggerating when I say that this little unassuming bite sends people to ecstasy. You will never know until you try...

Find the recipe: Sweet Potato Rosti with Smoked Trout

May 11, 2020

Mating Dance

April 1st and it is the 23rd anniversary of my mother’s death. Usually I go walk the beach, to the place where we scattered her ashes and where she spent her last years, but it’s 2020 and the beaches are closed so instead I go for a walk around the block. In my seventh month of pregnancy now and my feet have started to ache from the extra weight, so the walk starts out slowly, gingerly. I conjure her here, in step beside me - Suzanne Segal, born on Friday the 13th and died on April Fool’s Day. Was that her ridiculous way of encouraging us to see some of the humor, the lightness of life? Those deep dimples and that shrieking laugh are with me as much today as they were decades ago.

February 20, 2020

santa fe, NM 1995

My mom and I got off the plane in Albuquerque and headed for the white Isuzu Trooper we kept parked at the airport. After our first few visits to New Mexico, when my mom had properly fallen in love with the landscape and started buying property – all sagebrush and pink dirt – she decided we needed our own car there. This one was properly beat up enough to fit in, as I learned after my eyes had adjusted from the bombastic wealth of the Bay Area to this perennially poor state. But the colors! Even on the license plates! The flamboyant yellow, red and turquoise delighted me, set as they were against the glow of the high desert. I suppose we both were in love with this new frontier.

December 15, 2019

Peeking through the Back Door

I have always felt most at home in restaurant kitchens. No matter how glossy the paint or how shiny the brass door handle on the imposing front door to the dining room, there is always a dinged up, unmarked back door that leads to the real heart of the beast. It took a few weeks into my first cooking job at The Olema Inn to get used to the complete lack of glamour of it all. Only now do I see how the paucity of it helped to form our psyches, ordained us cooks with the chips on our shoulders and the swagger in our steps. We’re here to do the real work. We don’t need no fancy door.