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 recipes

In 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.