A small kitchen in Pittsburgh
Madison
Four burners, one dented sheet pan, and a grocery budget that does not forgive mistakes. Everything on this site has been cooked in that kitchen more than once.
See Madison's recipesIn her words
I cook in a galley kitchen with counter space roughly the size of a cutting board, which has made me very good at recipes that use one pan and very bad at recipes that use three. Pittsburgh winters do the rest of the convincing — from November to March I want the oven on and something braising.
I started writing these down because I kept texting the same six recipes to friends and getting the quantities wrong every time. Now they live here. No stories about my grandmother's farmhouse, no fourteen paragraphs before the ingredients. Just the thing, the way I actually make it.
Always in this kitchen
- Anchovy paste
- A tube lasts months and makes a pan sauce taste like it took an hour.
- Sheet pan
- Half sheet, rimmed, scratched to hell. Dinner four nights a week.
- Dried beans
- Cheaper, better texture, and the cooking liquid is free stock.
- Sherry vinegar
- The bottle I reach for when something tastes flat and I can't say why.
Madison's recipes
- Dinner
Sheet pan sausage and cabbage
The dinner I make when it's dark at four-thirty and I have no plan. Cabbage goes sweet and lacy at the edges; the sausage fat does all the seasoning.
40 minutes · Serves 2 generously, 3 politely - Dinner
White beans with too much garlic
A pot of beans that becomes lunch for three days. The garlic amount is not a typo and I will not be revising it.
2 hours, mostly unattended · Serves 4 to 6 - Basics
The only vinaigrette I make anymore
I stopped buying dressing in 2023. This takes ninety seconds in the jar you'll store it in.
5 minutes · Serves About 3/4 cup