It’s finally summer. The green has settled in, no longer neon but a richer, deeper version of itself. Despite the water still being on the cooler side, pond swims have commenced. Gardens have been planted, windows are open, and peonies are unfurling. There’s a very good chance that you’ve bitten into your first in-season strawberry, and peaches now feel like a less faraway dream.
Trinity Mouzon Wofford, co-founder of the popular wellness brand Golde and author of Eating at Home, is cooking for her family, as she does every day. The idea of sitting around a table is central to her culinary philosophy.
“Protecting mealtimes matters more than the recipe,” she says. “I don’t care if you live alone: Get your neighbors in the house—it could be anyone—but come together, set the table, sit down, and eat something in community. Just that takeaway, more than anything else, is the thing that can unlock so much for us.”
Mouzon Wofford, a fourth-generation New York state-er through and through, grew up in Saratoga Springs, an hour north of Chatham, where she and her husband, Issey Kobori-Hotchkiss, now live with their two daughters. Their kitchen, unsurprisingly, feels like the nexus of the home and vibrates with the quiet hum and muscle memory of past meals.
Part kitchen, part food lab, the space is crowded with very good things: Drying herbs hang from the ceiling and across windows; cupboards and drawers jostle with blue-tape-labeled mason jars of various ingredients; cookbooks keep company with gardening, foraging, homesteading, and herbology books; peeking behind an ochre curtain that hangs like a broad swath of warm sunlight reveals a cluster of happily growing plants: mint, rosemary, oregano, and marjoram.
There is a warmth and familiarity to both Mouzon Wofford and her home—it’s this that the pages of her book hold for the reader. Flipping through it feels like reading a journal of well-worn family recipes. Issey’s linocuts are peppered among recipes like “$0 Scrap Stock,” and “Easiest Rice”—their lives, their family, their world fill the pages.
At the center of this world is an enormous kitchen table, the one they found at a vintage warehouse, covered with a topographic map of scribbles that meander here and there across the surface of the table, evidence of its past lives. Big, sturdy wooden chairs surround it, castoffs from Hudson Valley Community College and another time altogether.
Mouzon Wofford wants us to spend more time sitting around tables like this. “I think I always had this real romantic notion of mealtimes. In my household, it was really just me and my mom most of the time, and so there weren’t a lot of meals together at the table. It was a lot of ‘food’s-on-the-stove-grab-it-when-you-want-it.’ It was about convenience. It was about ease. I think there’s always been, for me, a sense of wanting to create this family moment together at the table, and I feel so grateful that in my adult life I have access to that.”
The thing that brings people to the table—cooking—has been the practice that allows her to slow down and be present. “I’m gonna slice the cucumbers, and I’m gonna do a nice job of it because if I rush, rush, rush through everything then I’m never really in the moment, which makes it harder also for me to show up as the kind of parent that I know my kids need.”
So, Mouzon Wofford and Kobori-Hotchkiss make a point of pausing, taking a beat, and spending time making a meal for their family, even in the midst of the world’s busyness (or maybe especially because of it).
Food memories figure strongly for Mouzon Wofford, as does cooking with seasonal ingredients. When she lived in Brooklyn, she and Kobori-Hotchkiss would wake up early on Saturdays to take the subway to the Union Square farmers’ market.
“We’d go into town with our bags then lug everything all the way back to Bed-Stuy,” Mouzon Wofford recounts. And now upstate, it’s more of the same but with an even deeper connection to the farmers and the sources. “What I think is really special now is that you’re truly in community with the farmers and the growers—I mean, you know where your eggs come from, you know who reared the pig for the pork chop that you’re eating. It’s just a different level of visibility.”
Ask Mouzon Wofford about what fruit/vegetable she looks forward to each season, and she’ll tell you about apricots and how she and Kobori-Hotchkiss bought some a couple of days before she went into labor with their first daughter. “There’s that really delightful season up here in the summer when you can mark the week by what produce happens to come up. Ruby was born on July 26th, and the apricots had just really started to come into full force.”
The pre-labor apricots quickly became softening post-labor apricots, so the two new parents sliced the fruit up, macerated it, and made some fast-and-dirty rustic tarts, throwing polenta into the mix. “I have such a memory of that moment, so to me that’s very much summer,” she says. Those tarts evolved into the Apricot Cornmeal Galette recipe, which, should you be so inclined, can be made with last summer’s frozen fruit whenever you please. She’ll also implore you to hold off till summer to partake in tomatoes, and she’s not wrong—an in-season tomato is like nothing else—slicing a wedge of an early-August heirloom, drizzling it with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt is a truly transportive experience.
“I think that we sort of collectively allowed things like tomatoes to end up being that sad thing that lives in a salad all year round,” Mouzon Wofford says. “Tomatoes, to me, are pure summer.” Her Heirloom Tomato and Sweet Corn Salad is a celebration of the ephemeral nature of the seasons and a reflection of the reverence she has for the beauty available to us in the everyday, noting that, “Choosing to eat the thing that’s in season, marking that moment matters, and there’s something beautiful about that.”
