Mom's Minestrone

Of All the Skills My Mother Taught Me, The Most Important One Was How to Cook

Growing up, my mom insisted that her children learn how to cook. It was a basic and essential life skill, akin to learning how to drive a car or fold a fitted sheet (just kidding—no one knows how to fold a fitted sheet). While I vaguely remember terms like "cell wall" and "cytoplasm" from my high school biology class, I have quite distinct memories of my mom teaching me how to bread a chicken cutlet in flour, egg and breadcrumbs, and how to make a quick tomato sauce in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta.

These are skills I used over and over again in my younger days: to feed my friends (or maybe make friends) in college, to form a sense of community with my adult friends in my 20s and early 30s, and eventually to woo my wife. But most importantly, perhaps, these skills were used to keep myself well fed while other kids my age were resorting to cheap fast food or expensive, mediocre delivery.

I think back on those lessons a lot. I am perhaps an outlier who cared too much, who eventually turned my love of cooking into a career as a chef and cookbook author—but that was never the plan. Long before any of us ever imagined that my Mom's Minestrone would end up in a cookbook—let alone one from A.A. Knopf, who published legendary authors like Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Lidia Bastianich and Edna Lewis—it was this minestrone that I would bring to office potlucks, feed friendly neighbors with, or make a giant pot of and then eat throughout the week. It was the food of my childhood, created by my mom, who learned it from her mom and tweaked her own versions over the years. And my daughter Sierra, who celebrated her first birthday in January 2023, has eaten her fair share of Mom's Minestrone too.

The older I get, the more important these lifelong skills and recipes are to me. I believe that everyone, everywhere, should know how to cook for themselves food that they are willing to eat. And I will look upon it as a failure of my own parenting if my daughter cannot fend for herself one day, while digging through her pantry on a lonely Monday night.

During the early stages of the pandemic, my wife—brilliant stand-up comedian and writer Iliza Shlesinger—had to suspend her tour. We were, like everyone else, stuck at home. So we began a livestreamed cooking show called Don't Panic Pantry. The goal of the show was to help people "flatten the curve," to limit trips to the grocery store, and to learn how to cook with what they had. What we thought would be about two weeks of livestreams turned into 250 episodes, helping my wife's fans (and us) to find a sense of community and, more importantly, to cook a meal for themselves and find some form of comfort. They ate and cooked my Mom's Minestrone, and it has become a staple in many of their homes too.

Creating that show reminded me over and over of the value of a home-cooked meal, of the joy that comes from the smell of garlic, butter, leeks and olive oil gently wafting from the pot and filling the home. Because of my mom, and the support of all of those new home cooks, we now get to release The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook: Mostly Vegetarian Comfort Food That Happens to Be Pretty Good for You. This is the food that I cook for my family, with so much of it passed down from my mother and grandmother, and it will pass down, hopefully, to my daughter too. You don't have to learn these things from your own mother—many people don't have that option. But you can find recipes that you love (like hopefully this one) and then start new traditions for yourself and the people around you. I can't wait until my daughter can stand on a chair and start cooking it with me.