In One Good Meal, we ask cooking-inclined creative people to share the story behind a favorite dish they actually make and eat at home on a regular basis — and not just when they’re trying to impress.

The fashion designer Batsheva Hay used to be a horrendous cook. A vegetarian since high school, she could barely scramble eggs; when Shabbat dinner rolled around on Friday nights, the best she could muster was a cookie sheet of roasted produce: “It was like, ‘Shabbat Shalom, here’s some sweet potato,’” she says. But in her early 30s, everything changed. She quit her grueling job as a New York litigator, where her nightly ritual was ordering delivery to the office. She also started a family and began to have pregnancy cravings: When Hay, now 38, would visit her husband’s grandmother, she couldn’t resist one particular stovetop brisket. “It seemed too simple to mess up,” Hay remembers. “So I tried it, too.” And then brisket became (and remains) basically the only meat she eats.