Illustration: Maanvi Kapur
Chef Ham El-Waylly wasn’t always an avid home cook. After his mother’s unexpected passing when he was 19, he inherited a tattered notebook she kept with annotated recipes and newspaper clippings from all over the world. For years, grief prevented him from cooking from the “Madonna Notebook” — it has an illustration of Madonna holding a microphone on the cover — but rediscovering these recipes during the pandemic turned out to be a revelation. Several of her greatest hits make cameos in his debut cookbook, Hello, Home Cooking, which he describes as “a collection of global comfort food recipes that are doable on any night of the week.” At home, he shares kitchen duties with his wife, Sohla; preparing simple meals for their 2-year-old daughter is a team effort. El-Waylly is also the chef and co-owner of Strange Delight in Fort Greene, which leaves little time for tweezering food at home. “I mostly do my restaurant-style cooking at the restaurant and my home-style cooking at home,” he says. “It’s nice to have an outlet for my chef brain, so those two styles don’t have to cross.”
Monday, March 9
Daylight saving time kicks my ass. Why are we still doing this? Breakfast was a gulp of water and a handful of pills (vitamins, statins, and other old-man things). Not just any water, though. I am about to reveal my worst habit: seltzer. I go through at least three gallons a day. It’s the only water I can drink, and it needs to be ice-cold. My wife, Sohla, and I took our daughter to school, I edited some social videos, and then I had a meeting with my publisher. The main takeaway was that I need to post more.
For dinner (yes, I inadvertently skipped both breakfast and lunch), we ordered from Uluh, which is our favorite Chinese spot in the city. We always get the stir-fried fatty beef with cilantro, sautéed string beans, and Sichuan chile fried chicken. This time, we tacked on some vegetable fried rice and pan-fried dumplings for the little one. Everything was fantastic. The ratio of crispy fried chicken nubbins to dried chile was especially generous. The vegetables in the fried rice were still vibrant and crunchy, and the fatty beef was tender and fiery.
Recently, we discovered a dessert there that I cannot stop thinking about: this creamy mango soup with different textures of mochi floating around and little cubes that seem to be some kind of panna-cotta situation. It feels both refreshing and slightly chaotic, which I appreciate in a dessert.
I did some Substack writing and emailing in bed while snacking on Undercover chocolate quinoa crisps. I can’t decide whether I like the milk chocolate or the dark chocolate more, so I always get both and alternate bites.
Tuesday, March 10
I made oatmeal for the child. First, I toast the oats in ghee; then I season it with cinnamon, cardamom, and dried ginger before cooking in milk and sweetening it with this incredible apple butter Sohla made. My daughter eats it like it’s the greatest thing that has ever happened to her. I accidentally made too much, which means I ate the rest of it standing over the sink. That is one of the main ways parents get calories.
She wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home from school, and we watched Zootopia 2 together. She liked it so much that we watched it twice in a row.
For lunch, I made chicken-and-crouton soup. I pull apart some cooked chicken, add frozen vegetables, pour in a container of Brodo chicken bone broth, and finish it with a huge amount of finely chopped chives, dill, and parsley. Here’s another secret about me: I don’t really like soup. I actively avoid it in my life. But, with this, I have found a way to make a soup that even I like. The key is the croutons. I cut Japanese milk bread into very small cubes and toast it in a ton of ghee until golden and crisp. When you drop handfuls of those croutons into the soup, they absorb the broth and turn into little stuffing bombs.
In the afternoon, I recorded a podcast with Hot Stove Radio to talk about my upcoming book. To keep my daughter entertained, I opened a fresh pack of Play-Doh. This bought me about 30 minutes before she asked if we could watch Zootopia again.
For dinner, I made a version of a recipe from my book. When I was working at Empellón, I made a lot of sopa seca, a.k.a. dry soup or pasta cooked in less liquid than you would normally use. It is one of my favorite quick weeknight dinners. I break thin spaghetti into small pieces, toast it in butter until golden brown, cook it risotto-style with chicken bone broth, and finish with butter, Parm, frozen corn, and canned cannellini beans. Toasting the pasta helps it retain some bite, and its starch makes a beautifully, naturally creamy sauce. My hot parenting tip is that kids will always eat pasta, so I like to use it to sneak all kinds of fiber-packed things in.
Later that night, I made my mom’s lemon-loaf recipe. She kept all her recipes and recipe clippings in a Madonna notebook (she was a huge Madonna fan), which is a cherished keepsake I inherited when she passed away years ago. The cake is finished with a quick lemon syrup, which keeps it impossibly moist for way longer than other loaf cakes, so I don’t feel the pressure to eat it all before it gets stale.
Wednesday, March 11
I stopped at La Cabra for pain suisse and a canelé. The pain suisse is laminated dough filled with pastry cream and chocolate chips, the kind of pastry that makes you stop talking for a moment. The canelé is the best version I’ve found in New York, shatteringly crisp on the outside and custardy on the inside. I rarely walk by La Cabra without getting one.
I had to watch Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery for a podcast called Cabbages that I was recording later. The show is usually about rappers and hip-hop, but for some reason, this season is dedicated to movies with wrestlers in them. I’m not the biggest Scooby-Doo fan, but who wouldn’t want to see (or not see) John Cena join the Scooby gang?
At some point during the movie, I ate a Jeni’s key lime pie frozen-dessert sandwich. It has the perfect texture of an ice-cream cookie, soft and almost fudgey. Later, for lunch, I reheated leftover curry that I had made on Sunday with squash, chicken thighs, coconut milk, and Floyd Cardoz’s Goan masala blend. I finished it with garlic and frizzled onions and served it with rice and a cucumber salad.
After picking up our daughter, I made some dinner: a chicken quesadilla with queso Oaxaca, diced chicken thighs, and avocado. I ran to the bodega to get a bag of tortilla chips, a container of salsa, and sour cream. This is a meal that is very easy to accidentally eat too much of. After putting our daughter to bed, I went into the closet (options are limited in a New York City apartment) to record the podcast.
Thursday, March 12
I spent most of the day at Strange Delight. I met with Amanda Perdomo and discussed the café and brunch service we’re about to launch. We still had to develop and taste a Dutch baby, so we worked on that. It turns out the deck oven we inherited is the perfect vessel for cooking a Dutch baby. They bubble and puff and crackle and char in all the right places. Topped with whipped cream and blackberry jam Amanda made, it was like a crêpe with a lot more personality.
The newest addition to our team, Truman Parsons, made our family meal: dirty rice with homemade sausage, a cheesy black-bean casserole, and a big dilly salad (my favorite). It’s exactly the type of thing I like eating before service. I also love the red beans and collards we serve at the restaurant for lunch. The prep team had just finished making a batch, so I packed up some to take home for dinner later.
Back home, Sohla had been testing a bran-muffin recipe, so I ate one that was left sitting on the counter. I can’t wait for her to share the recipe.
Later, I warmed up the beans and greens, seared off some skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs seasoned with Pardi Gras, and fired up the Zojirushi with some rice. Our daughter loves beans, so it was a successful dinner by all counts. After putting her down, I cut a thick slice of lemon loaf and topped it with a scoop of McConnell’s Golden State Vanilla. The dreamiest combination.
I should say that just because I haven’t been mentioning seltzer, don’t think that I haven’t been consuming any. It is safe to assume that in between every paragraph, a quart of seltzer had been consumed. I drink a lot of water. I like my urine to be clear.
Friday, March 13
After my usual morning routine of pills, seltzer, and taking our daughter to school, I recorded an episode of the Food Friends podcast and had a glass of matcha that Sohla made with her brand-new matcha whisk. It was a very good matcha.
Sohla and I had a big shooting day. She made a cheesy chipotle-chicken soup for a brand video with Knorr bouillon. The soup had shredded chicken, chipotle, heaps of cheese (practically a fundido), and a big spoonful of Knorr. We use so much Knorr, I’m surprised it took this long for them to come knocking. We had this soup for lunch with a bunch of tortillas charred directly on our burners. For someone who claims not to like soup, it’s ironic that I ended up having it twice this week and enjoyed it both times.
Later, Sohla and I recorded a Hot Ones–style pretend press-tour video. We went straight to the Last Dab, the hottest hot sauce they make. I emerged somehow unfazed, which kind of disappointed me. Maybe my taste buds are broken from having too many blistering red beans directly out of the pot?
After picking up our daughter from school, we constructed houses for various animals with Magna-Tiles, then it was time for dinner. We ordered pizza from our go-to local spot, Motorino. We get the same thing every time. The Don Dom (a riff on the classic Di Fara pie), the Amatriciana (a red pie with sweet Italian sausage, scallions, and fresh chiles), and the Pugliese (with broccoli rabe, sausage, and Stracciatella). I eat full slices; Sohla and the child like their slices cut in half with scissors. I have to say, the broccoli rabe can sometimes be stringy and tough, but this time it was so tender you could take a bite without the entire stalk dragging into your mouth.
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