gastrophiles. jenny & zach.

Zach and Jenny always try to keep it local – local music, local beer, local ingredients, and recipes from deep in the family archives. Biking, bass playing, dog walking, twittering, home decorating, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking are among their hobbies. By day, Zach peers from behind thick-rimmed glasses at two large computer screens, plotting silently for the Internet generation’s coup d’etat. Jenny spends a great deal of time buried beneath a pile of dense legal reading, emerging every so often to catch up on the news and cook something extravagant. While their out-to-eat choices generally revolve around Thai, Indian, and the many culinary offerings of the deep South, they try not to stray from the simple joys of butter and ancient scotch. Though not necessarily at the same time, mind you.

Lori: Who’s the Alpha cook?

Zach: Jenny!!!

Lori: Wow, you answered without hesitation.

Zach: A lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s always home much earlier than I am…so it makes sense for her to get started with dinner, and I do the clean up.

Jenny: And I grew up with cooking. My mom did not “play with toys” with us, we cooked. It’s just more in my nature.

Lori: Was your cooking heavily influenced by your Jewish heritage?

Jenny: It’s a mix between Jewish heritage and my mom raising us in Santa Monica in the eighties. That was when the first real co-op’s started. She stopped eating meat. There weren’t packaged cookies in our house. It wasn’t a health food craze, but it was a homemade focus. She owned a cooking store when my sister was born and she ran a light catering business when I was a kid. And then there’s my grandma…

Lori: That sounds interesting. Tell me about her.

Jenny: I’m referring to my mom’s mom. 95 lbs, 5-foot three, grew up in the projects of north Minneapolis. She loves gin. Thinks butter is a food group. She eats a ridiculous breakfast every day – pancakes, eggs, and bacon. Every day! It’s not very Jewish of her.

Zach: She and I have bonded over her love of bacon.

Jenny: She’s really about taste over principle. My whole family is that way - very culturally Jewish, but not overly religious.

Lori: Given all the family history, are there other influences?

Jenny: I just started using cookbooks this year. I’ve been really liking Julia Child because she does a good job of teaching you the basics.

Justin: Sure, the fundamentals of cooking.

Zach: You’ve been reading it in bed before you go to sleep

Jenny: It’s true - I read cookbooks like they’re real books.

Justin: Me, too. I like to geek-out with my cookbooks.

Lori: What about you, Zach? With your father being a doctor, was he strict nutritionally?

Zach: Yes, that’s an understatement. He’s not a foodie. He treats food as nutrients he puts into his system. It’s very clinical.

Lori: So did you go through a crazy period when you left the house, eating everything?

Zach: Yes, as soon as I got my driver’s license.

Jenny: It’s called Taco Bell! He loves it.

Lori: What have you learned about each other through cooking?

Jenny: I want Zach to answer this question.

Lori: Well, you both get to answer it. If it helps, Justin and I learned, especially earlier in our relationship, that we do things differently. I personally had to learn to not be a control freak and to embrace that I may do it this way and he may do it that way, but it’s going to taste good either way.

Justin: Unconditional trust in the kitchen relates to broader things in life.

Zach: Probably what I’ve learned, to echo what you were saying, is about being open to experimentation. Cooking with butter is one thing I had never even considered. I didn’t even know how to do it, and it seemed very foreign to me. At first I was not quite open to it. I would think, “Are you seriously going to put a giant pad of butter into a pan?”

Jenny: Let’s be honest – were talking about more than one pad. You put one in there to start and one to finish.

Justin: Exactly!

Zach: And this may sound ridiculous, but the thought of salt and peppering things after you put them on your plate…I never did that in my entire life. I never even tried it. And it wasn’t like I was all of a sudden putting salt and pepper on everything, but more that I was paying attention to when I took the first bite of something to think “does this taste right to me, or would I like more seasoning?”

Lori: You were learning to trust your palate.

Zach: Yes, and I’ve been able to become more aware of how things taste as a result of that. Before I would just read a recipe and follow it to the letter. I’m really good at following directions. I could always get it to turn out right, but I never thought to take liberties to satisfy how I like things to taste.

Lori: So what have you learned about Zach?

Justin: I think Zach’s cooking is a lot like the way he does the rest of the things around the house which is…he reads a lot about it, and he takes in all the information, he makes a plan and then he executes the plan. He’s super methodical about it. It’s like the same way he’ll work on a stereo…he’ll read the directions, he’ll think about it, he’ll research it, then he’ll make something…it’s like a straight line.

Lori: It sounds strategic for you, Zach, and creative for you, Jenny.

Zach: I’m totally strategic about it.

Jenny: And I’m about just throwing stuff in.

Zach: I have to say, Jenny, that I’ve been very inspired by your lack of process.

Jenny: You mean my rabid chaos.

Zach: It’s complete chaos, but in a way that I never would have been comfortable with cooking on my own. And it takes the experience of seeing someone doing that and being successful at it consistently to think that it is a good thing…that you could walk into a set of ingredients and make something wonderful without thinking too hard about it. That you can trust your instincts. That you can say, “I like this much garlic,” because you’ve cooked with garlic forty times before.

Justin: You never get good at cooking if you don’t cook. It’s all about intuition through repetition.

Food connects us to our roots, the essence of our being. Cooking together connects us to our relationship, the nature of our partnership. As Zach and Jenny so perfectly exemplify, the kitchen is a perfect forum to learn about each other, and to learn from each other.