What a fifth season means

Out here we get four seasons, and none of them are subtle. Winter can run from the first hard frost in October to a last mean snow in April. Spring is three weeks of mud and then, suddenly, lilacs. Summer afternoons hit a hundred with a wind that comes off the fields like a hair dryer. Fall is the good one, and it's over before you've finished saying so.

When you cook in a place like this you cook against the weather. You learn to braise in January and grill in July not because a magazine told you to but because that's what the kitchen can stand. You learn that a tomato in February is a lie and a tomato in August is a religion. The calendar does a lot of your menu planning for you.

But the best meals of my life haven't been tied to any of the four. They've happened in the one that isn't on the calendar: the season you make inside. The table full, the stove on since noon, the windows fogged, somebody's coat still on because they came straight from the cold. It can be a Tuesday. It usually is.

The fifth season is the one you make inside. It doesn't care what month it is.

Restaurants are machines for producing that season on demand, every night, for strangers. That's what I learned to do in Boulder and San Francisco, and it's what I do now in Sioux Falls. It takes a lot of people and a lot of discipline. But the thing itself, the warm room and the good plate, is not complicated, and it's not a secret. It's a few techniques, a few decent tools, and the confidence to use them without a recipe open on your phone.

That's what this site is for. The recipes are the ones I'd hand a friend. The monthly class is where I can see your pan and tell you the heat's too low. The essentials list is short on purpose. None of it needs a restaurant kitchen. All of it is meant to help you make the fifth season happen in yours, more often, with less stress.

The first class is Monday, January 4. We'll make chicken and a pan sauce, and I'll teach you to stop touching the pan. Bring somebody.