008: To learn more about the Real Housewives, go to Digestivo
Eggs are the perfect food
(SB) Sweet readers, since I really can’t stand to misrepresent myself to you, I have to come clean about my soft slide into some bad habits over the past few weeks. Perhaps it’s because that I sometimes feel like a cooped up teenager subject to the arbitrary rules of authority figures who don’t get it or are drunk with power, but I’ve been rediscovering some old vices that hit differently in this body-approaching-30. Sweaty and restless, I stayed up til 3 AM reading Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age from start to finish one night. Despite knowing better, I reach for my phone in the middle of online yoga, tapping out responses to texts that can wait under the desk, trying to be subtle. I just savored a can of cold Arizona Iced Tea.
I love my butcher, what can I say?
Prompted by an answer on Jeopardy, I’ve been reflecting on the dual meaning of the word "doldrums" -- meaning “a state or period of inactivity, stagnation," or "depression." The word has also come to be a colloquial term for the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone of the Atlantic Ocean along the equator where hurricanes quietly form, prone to “calms, sudden storms, and light unpredictable winds.” Sailors who passed through tended to languish for weeks, giving the region its nickname. At the risk of overextending this metaphor (I’ll take "Toking with Trebek" for $600), it feels like I’ve been living in the doldrums for a little while: a little stagnant, a little blue, and occasionally subject to a sudden storm or bowled over by an unpredictable wind.
With the season settling into the dog days, I’m considering completing this return to adolescence by grounding myself from my phone and trying to re-wire my internet broken brain. Here’s what I’ve made this week:
Curd Rice, or thayar sadam in the style of my great grandmother. Sadly, I’m out of Kerala red rice. Thank god curry leaves freeze well.
From the Santa Monica Farmers Market Cookbook (a text I bought shortly before coming to New York and take a look semi-annually when the weather is truly horrible and I want to be mean to myself): Amy Sweeney’s shaved zucchini, mint, and olive salad.
Jamaican Curry Chicken, courtesy of Lazarus Lynch. Except, this household only had ground turkey, so we subbed in some zucchini-turkey-meatballs. And doctored it with a can of coconut milk the next day. Please do not tell LL’s mother. I promise to go to the butcher next time.
(JS) Co-signing Salonee to say that I, too, feel like a pile of hot Jeopardy-viewing garbage. Even that familiar reprieve failed me this week, when Alex did me dirty with a sudden and unexpected video category focused on alumni of The Harvard Lampoon. I don’t really want to get into it but suffice it to say, asking me to identify a photograph of Colin Jost in college is violence. I feel like I’ve been whining a lot lately, so instead of my usual kvetching, I want to use this space to draw your attention to a couple food developments that are bringing me joy. (SB: wow, way to be the moral compass of this letter.)
Sweet little berries/sweet little miss
Community fridges are popping up all over the city, offering healthy sustenance for those in need at a moment when our government fumbles to provide the most basic services, adding insult to injury with the creeping threat of eviction. Dayna Evans traces the movement back to Berlin (naja, klar), where an organization called Foodsharing has experimented with peer-to-peer food saving since 2012, hampered only by intervention from food safety regulators (a government that prioritizes the health of its citizens, can you imagine?). Here in Brooklyn, Playground Coffee Shop is stocking and servicing three fridges, and they are happily accepting donations for fresh fruit, veggies, and eggs. In Our Hearts is rapidly expanding their purview, with twelve community fridges across Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Los Angeles-based readers might check out The Peoples Bodega, and if you’re kind of lazy and/or into beautiful and delicious cakes, enter Elise Fields’ raffle with a quick $10 donation via Venmo to support the cause.
Speaking of women we love (lmao lest we forget my tenure at Esquire) culinary artistes you should support, Kia Damon of Cherry Bombe (formerly, executive chef at the late great Lalito) is developing a test kitchen and grocery space in Downtown Brooklyn with the mission to combat food apartheid. Seeking to address both access and education, the Kia Feeds the People Program will supply produce and pantry items for the Black and QTPOC community, as well as offer cooking and nutrition classes. For more information on the launch and how to donate, sign up for her email list here.
Here’s what I’ve been eating:
Libby Willis’ caramelized bacon and tomato spread, arguably the favorite item from my Totes Gay haul. Schmear it on a bagel. Stir some into refried beans. Eat it by the spoonful with reckless abandon.
Some improvised chiles rellenos, stuffed with the aforementioned beans and cheese, fried in egg batter, and simmered in Gabriela Camara’s salsa verde.
Missy Robbins’ Briermere farms-inspired raspberry cream pie, using fresh berries from my yard.
TRASH TALK: Panna Rot-ta
(SB) Feeling weird about food waste? Me too, always. A couple of weeks ago, I thought I had met my match: slightly off smelling milk set to expire that very day. It wasn’t fully rotten, but I certainly didn’t want to eat it with cereal. There was too much to effectively use it up in morning coffee without courting disaster. In a less unhinged time, I might have just poured it down the drain (or, played my favorite game, “refuse to throw this away but also refuse to eat it until it is unimpeachably spoiled”). Instead, I googled “spoiled milk recipes” and came up with a bit of a bounty: amish sour milk cake! Cornbread! A whole bevy of baked goods! Unfortunately, drinking that sour milk straight up was more appealing than turning on my oven.
Allegedly the Talk of the Town at King Henry VIII's Garter Feast (Relatedly: What is a Garter Feast? Does it involve killing your wives? Asking for a friend)
Luckily for me, this 2014 throwback in The Guardian packed some inspiration: a recipe for the intriguingly named “Medieval milk pudding” called “whyte leach.” (JS: I’ve also been called a white leech.) The recipe is pretty much a panna cotta, served chilled, inverted, and cut into squares. The article notes that English jellies are traditionally dusted with edible gold. I assume they traditionally sourced that from all the colonialism. Since this recipe didn’t technically call for sour milk and I was feeling finicky, I boiled the milk for an extra long time and steeped some Earl Grey in it (JS: a little gay tbh). The results were tasty, felt dangerous, and kept for a few days without making me violently ill. Your mileage may vary. Please don’t try this at home if you are lactose intolerant and/or litigious.
HOT IN HERRE: Coffee Granita
(JS) Real fans may recall that we began this little project with some hot Italian summer cosplay. Because our country remains simultaneously plagued by coronavirus and fragile masculinity, the EU will likely soon shut its borders to Americans (and before y’all gas up the Gulfstream, please note that includes Sardinia), so we’ll have no choice but to stew stateside in our embarrassment and Supergas. New York remains blisteringly hot, the sweltering days punctuated only by thunderstorms, like some sort of comedic warmup for the nightly cacophony which continues to haunt our dear city. I swear by iced coffee year round (as is my gay right), but this fresh hell calls for something different.
Mamma mia!!!
Granita di caffè both looks and sounds fancy, but with only a freezer and a fork, you too can enjoy this Roman sweet treat in a couple of hours. Brew your coffee however you’d like (shoutout to my Moka heads), adding sugar to taste, and allow it to cool for at least twenty minutes. If you’re starting with cold brew, use simple syrup instead. Pour your cooled coffee onto a rimmed baking sheet or shallow tupperware -- basically anything that will maximize surface area -- and place it in the freezer for about 30 minutes, until crystals begin to form. Scrape the surface all over with a fork, then place back in the freezer. Repeat this process every fifteen minutes, six to eight times total, until your coffee has become a fluffy caffeinated ice.
You could flavor your coffee with spices like cardamom, cinnamon, or perhaps a pinch of chile flakes. Throw in some cocoa to make it a mocha. Think of this as a Coolatta that just returned from study abroad. The granita is refreshing on its own, but I wouldn’t fault you for layering it with some fresh whipped cream. I prefer my panna unsweetened, but Katie Parla adds sugar and a splash of Pernod, which might help you get through the day. I don’t judge!
USE A CONDIMENT: Monosodium Glutamate
(SB) I’ll say it: MSG could be the MVP of your spice rack, if only you’d let it. In case you’re not wise to the fact that most of the hoopla around MSG “giving you a headache” is actually xenophobic hysteria drummed up in the American press, I strongly advise you to let your old feelings fall by the wayside and join me in umami heaven.
Would gum this
MSG is a commonly occurring compound (tomatoes! Mushrooms! Seaweed! asparagus!) discovered by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1907. I was first introduced to MSG in India as “ajinomoto”, the name of the main company that synthesizes and distributes these salty-but-not-salt crystals around the world. It was an essential ingredient in most recipes within Sanjeev Kapoor’s Indo-Chinese cookbook, the height of flavor and taste in my young mind. When I moved to the US, the scuttlebut seemed to be that MSG was to be avoided at all costs, lest you wanted a headache, restless limbs, or whatever mild malady was trending with the WW of Los Angeles that month. (JS: At the risk of giving you a headache, *I* will flex my once-proficient-now-party-trick knowledge of of Chinese to tell you the the Mandarin name for MSG is 味精/wei4jing1, literally, “flavor essence”.)
Luckily, MSG is available at most Asian grocery stores and I strongly recommend you purchase some. It’s a great addition to cold salads (my friend Tiff makes a great cucumber, corn, tomato salad topped with some MSG), stews, beans, or basically anything that needs a little savoring-up. In fact, you’re likely familiar with the way it tastes: nutritional yeast is basically gentrified MSG. Try some in your next peanut dressing. I particularly enjoy a sprinkling on grilled vegetables and cold tofu.
PERMANENT ROTATION: Should you feel some sadistic urge to crank up your oven, make the most of zucchini season with this summer squash pizza from Smitten Kitchen. You can easily sub cheddar for gruyere. Err on the side of overbaking. No one in their right mind ever complained about burnt cheese and extra crispy crust.
WISH LIST
(JS) As mentioned in my roundup, a raspberry patch grows in Brooklyn. If you live nearby and would like to relieve me of this embarrassment of riches, please get in touch. In the meantime, I’m planning to jam, and hope to get my hands on a copy of Jessica Koslow’s latest, The Sqirl Jam Book.
(SB) I want a hydroponic wall garden!!!!!
(JS & SB) Shoutout to friend of the newsletter Sewa, who first introduced us to the delights of Pacific Northwest hot smoked salmon. What we really want is to mainline free samples from a couple of Seattle's saltiest fishmongers, but in the interim we'll settle for some candied sockeye via Fedex.