Einat Admony - Balaboosta

With Joel Chasnoff and Dhale Pomes

Photography by Quentin Bacon

New York

To Stefan

Long before I won Chopped or appeared on Throwdown with Bobby Flay, before there was cooking school, a husband, a better husband, and a couple of kids, before I ever imagined running three restaurants of my own in New York City, there were Friday afternoons with my mother.

Oh, those unforgettable Fridays. They were hellat least at first. Me: eight years old, in shorts and a tank top, sweating on my hands and knees as I scrubbed the kitchen floor with a dishrag. My mom: flying from stove to counter to fridge as she sliced vegetables, basted a chicken, and kneaded dough for the Sabbath challah. Then, just as suddenly, shed move on to the living room, where shed vacuum the rug with one hand and iron my fathers shirt with the other. Around three oclock on these Fridays, my friends would show up on the sidewalk outside our tiny Bnei Brak apartment. Admohhhhneeee! theyd scream. Id look at my mother. Please, my eyes would beg. Without missing a beat, shed click her tongueIsraeli for Dont even think about it!and send me to the bathroom to fetch a mop.

After four years of slave labor, my mother finally promoted me from indentured servant to sous-chef. Standing side by side at the stove, we plucked feathers out of raw chickens and scoured lettuce for microscopic worms. We roasted potatoes, fried fish, sauted lamb, baked cakes, and ground our own hummusall without the aid of a cookbook, measuring spoon, or timer. Instead, we relied on my mothers Persian instincts and the knowledge shed inherited from generations of Jewish housewives before her. It was there, in my childhood kitchen, that I learned the trust-your-gut, balaboosta style of cooking that I rely on to this day.

When I was a kid, I heard the word balaboosta all the time. Im told its derived from the Yiddish expression baal habayitowner of the house. Kind of ironic, since it was the men, not the women, who held the deeds to their shtetl homes. But also revealing, because we all know that, even today, its the mothers who truly run the home.

balaboosta (n.)a perfect housewife (Yiddish).

Still, balaboosta didnt refer just to any ol run-of-the-mill, hyperefficient housewife. It was a term of respect and endearment, reserved for the most energetic of women who tirelessly cooked and cleaned while taking charge of the spiritual and emotional well-being of their husbands and kids. A balaboosta made sure her table was crowded not just with food but also with laughter.

I come from a long line of balaboostas. Theres my mom, Ziona, of course. Theres her sister, Chanaa divorced mother of five who still spends eighteen hours a day making meatballs, rice, couscous, lamb stew, and chicken schnitzel for her kids, grandkids, neighbors, mailman, the old woman in the wheelchair across the hall, and whoever else might drop by for a bite.

Like my mom, my aunt Chana, and the generations of balaboostas before them, I cook from the gut: no measuring cups, no scales. But unlike them, I see being a balaboosta not just as a way to run a home but as a way of life. To be a twenty-first-century balaboosta means navigating the pitfalls of life with a courageous heart, a head filled with determination, and a spirit of risk and adventure. The modern balaboosta can be anyoneyoung or old, male or female, religious or notwho lives life with gusto, shuns fear, and relies on instinct over precision.

Im thinking of my pal Amira man who left Israel in his twenties to pursue a career as a financial adviser in the States, working eighty hours a week and still managing to cook amazing dinners for friends a few times a month. I always look forward to his dinner partiesnot just because of our friendship, but because hes the best nonprofessional chef I know and his passion for food is unreal. Hes a true balaboosta.

And my dear friend Amya mother of two who launched a business whose mission is to empower women entrepreneurs. She was struck with breast cancer at age thirty-seven. But one mastectomy and four months of chemotherapy later, Amy has survived, her business is thriving, and shes even found the time to write a book. A modern balaboosta if ever there was one.

As for me

I have two children under age seven, I run three restaurants in Manhattan (Balaboosta, Tam and Tam Mobile, and Bar Bolonat), I have a pretty good marriage, and I love to invite close friends for dinner several times a week. Like my aunt Chana, I pride myself on being the one who feeds everybody without asking anything in return except to see them happy. To me, thats what being a balaboosta is all about: emotion expressed through food. Not exactly my great-grandmothers definition of a perfect housewife, but a balaboosta all the same.

Its for these twenty-first-century balaboostas that I have written Balaboosta.

Casual Dinner Party Dishes

Im the only chef I know who cooks at home.

Okay, maybe not the only one.

But among my circle of chef friends, none go home after a long day at the restaurant and cook as elaboratelyor as oftenas I do.

And with good reason. Who needs the hassle? Who wants to spend fourteen hours in a piping-hot kitchen, chopping, dicing, and slaving over a stove, only to go home and do it all over again?

But for me, cooking is more than a profession, or even a passion. Its my oxygen. My obsession. It is my window to creation, the linchpin of every relationship I have. And its the best, and possibly only, way I know to truly give and receive love.

When my husband, Stefan, and I were first married, he was a waiter at Balthazar, a beloved French bistro in New Yorks SoHo. Most nights he wouldnt get home until two or three in the morning, and he would always be starving. (Its one of the ironies of the restaurant businessyou leave work famished.) So Id roll out of bed at whatever ungodly hour it was and make him a sandwich.