How To Cook Mushrooms Until Everybody In Your Family Likes You The Best

I’m in Bon Appétit this week with a piece about competitive usefulness and making dinner in a three-parent household, if you’d care to read it.

“Our biggest challenge is that we are all old first-time parents, each with very decided ideas about what we like to eat, and when. Collectively we have over 120 years of ingrained habits that none of us want to alter. Grace can’t eat eggs or dairy and loves a roasted haunch of animal. Lily prefers vegetarian food. I am allergic to shrimp, although this allergy is merely physical (spiritually I can handle it perfectly well).

Worse yet, I’m the type who has to eat breakfast within an hour of rising or I start chewing the countertops, and I could happily eat dinner at 5 p.m. or earlier. Meanwhile, Grace and Lily hold a monstrous sort of European attitude toward meals. Breakfast they could either take or leave, and they often leave it. I don’t even want to tell you what time they start talking about making dinner…

Lily bounced back shockingly well from childbirth, and is always taking the baby out on hikes, lashed to her back like a shipping container. Under ordinary circumstances she cooks quite a lot, but in our newfound parenthood, she gets crowded out between my and Grace’s bids for helpful one-upmanship. “I’m making STEW,” I’ll text the group at 9 a.m.

And since Grace can’t compete with that directly, she’ll counter with, “Don’t forget—this Sunday I want to have so-and-so over for dinner and roast something in hay,” and so on. I counter with leeks à la grecque, goulash the color of bricks, pork chops with anchovy butter, zucchini rice, braised cabbage. It’s very simple why: I want to be the baby’s favorite. I want both Lily and Grace to privately think of me as the best one. I want our dogs to always sleep on my feet in bed and nobody else’s. And I want everyone to find this obsession with being adored to be a likable quality in itself, instead of off-putting and suffocating.”

Not too long ago – after the writing of this piece, but before its being published — Lily and Grace asked me, kindly but firmly, to knock it off with jokes about being everybody’s favorite, particularly the baby’s favorite. A sensible request, I think. Having lost one family, it is perhaps unsurprising that I should be anxious about securing an advantageous position in the second, but as we are not the Diadochi after the death of Alexander, jockeying for security is not strictly necessary. Also that’s a lot of pressure to put on a baby, who just wants to circumnavigate all the furniture in the living room and pull everything from the bookshelves onto the floor in peace. Presumably once upon a time so did I. In the meantime, mushrooms for everybody.