caramelized brown sugar oranges with yogurt

Just in case there was anyone still out there mistaking me for some sort of domestic diva, or even a moderately skilled at being domestic, you should know that it has taken until the spring of the year 2016, nearly a full decade after starting a food website where I’ve had the brass to coax others along in the kitchen as if I had some sort of innate greater understanding of it, for me to learn how to use my broiler. Prior to ~~consulting experts~~ ~~reading my oven’s manual~~ um, Googling it a few months ago, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why other people managed to broil things whenever they needed for as long as they needed but mine shut off after 4 minutes. It turns out that cracking open the oven door keeps the temperature from getting so high in the oven that it goes into a panic a shuts off, freeing me fulfill my lifelong fantasy of setting all my food on fire.

I’m only a little bit joking. Last summer, trying to return to a level of normalcy in the weeks after bringing the sweetest potato home from the hospital, Alex and I spent a week Netflix binging on the first season of Chef’s Table and I fell head over heels for cooking I will probably never experience in my life, that from Francis Mallmann, the Argentine chef whose specialty is wild, open-fire cooking — everything over wood fire, usually in an open pit, on cast iron planchas and parrillas, and sometimes in the ashes too. And his food looks out of this world — even something as simple as a cheese toast made with a log of goat cheese you can get at your local Stop & Shop is transformed in a griddle over open flames into a crisp, golden-brown crusted melt that I would climb through a television screen to get at. The episode ended and I declared it time to get a fire pit. My husband cited fire codes and other pesky side effects of living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I sulked.