Hello friends! We have been fully embroiled in summer joy over here and have lapsed in the meal planning department. An embarrassment of activities has meant that things are more up in the air and it’s harder to plan ahead. While I’ve found that meal planning does usually save time and money in the long run, from time to time it’s ok to let go of the process and live a little more in the moment. It’s a privilege to be able to do that. I live a few blocks away from a supermarket, so popping over to the store at the last second isn’t a big deal, but I’ve lived in places where the closest decent supermarket was an hour away and meal planning was imperative. There are trade-offs to living in a city, but I’ll admit that I don’t miss driving an hour to get groceries.
Today I want to share a bit of what we’ve been cooking and eating lately. As befits residents of a place where it rains a solid six, maybe seven, months out of the year, we have been grilling almost every night. Our herb garden is finally producing enough green goodness that we are showering our meals with cilantro, savory, chives, and rau ram (also called Vietnamese coriander). I don’t think most of my gardening efforts make sense from a financial perspective, but the herb garden absolutely does. After a few years of desultory tending we have more perennial rosemary, sage, thyme, mint, summer and winter savory, oregano, fresh bay leaf, and salad burnet than we could ever consume (salad burnet is a tender herb that tastes of cucumbers). The annual herbs like cilantro, rau ram, and shiso round things out nicely. So we rely heavily on these aromatic garden denizens to flavor our meals.
I hope you all are staying cool (in more ways than one) as much as you can. These are wild times. Be good to one another and to yourselves.
This is Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce with a little cream stirred in (because we had some and needed to use it - the sauce really doesn’t need it) served on cascatelli with an ungodly amount of parsley. On the side there’s Utica greens, which is a braised escarole dish we added to the new edition (page 234), replete with pickled peppers, some form of cured meat (I diced up a nubbin of Boar’s Head pepperoni that I found in the back of the fridge), and (heavily) Parmesan-inflected bread crumbs.
Tofu banh mi are a summer staple for us. I’ll usually marinate the tofu in whatever I have condiment-wise in the fridge (this time it was the brine from a jar of pickled peppers and the dregs of a bottle of Bachan’s Japanese barbecue sauce), then air fry it. It’s almost impossible for me not to overstuff my banh mi (even though I hollow out the baguette), but you’ve got to get all that goodness in there. We garnish our banh mi with sambal oelek (sambal oelek > sriracha in our household), Golden Mountain sauce, and Duke’s mayo. You can’t see the pickled daikon and carrot in this photo but it’s in there.
Another extremely important summer dish: the bún bowl, or bún thịt nướng in this case because we used grilled pork (bún is the Vietnamese word for noodles, and thịt nướng means grilled meat but implies pork), but we have used other proteins here, like shrimp, chicken, tofu, or tempeh. Honestly, for me the key is not necessarily what protein you use. It’s all about the herbs and veggies and nước chấm that gets drizzled over everything. Pictured above we’ve got mint, cilantro, rau ram, and shiso, charred shishito peppers, some pickled carrot and daikon from our banh mi dinner, shredded iceberg lettuce, and fried shallots and peanuts to top everything off. The fried shallots pictured are homemade but you can certainly buy them (or even use French’s fried onions). The homemade variety are going to taste so much better but we get it, frying is a drag.
I spotted a really great deal on chicken breasts at the grocery store so I made a big batch of chicken tinga. Sometimes we’ll double a recipe of something and then freeze half for later. It means we don’t get bored eating the same thing for four days and we also have something delicious we can pull out of the freezer later, when we don’t feel like cooking. We piled the tinga on tostadas with pinto beans, avocado, sour cream, pickled red onion, and cilantro. Pickled onions are a great enlivener for meals. I’ll make a batch once every few weeks and then we have them around for sandwiches, tacos, tuna salad, fried eggs on toast, and so on.
I’ve been making a smoothie every day for breakfast and have been playing around with combinations. This is one of my favorites so far: frozen strawberries and banana, fresh watermelon, and oatmilk, maybe some vanilla protein powder. Not sure why I never considered watermelon as a smoothie candidate until this year!
Back in 2020, in early pandemic times, cocktail historian David Wondrich did a delightful Twitter series wherein he shared a cocktail recipe every day in his distinctively jaunty prose. This one is the Barbadian gin swizzle, and we have been making it since April 2020. The recipe involves a demarara rich simple syrup (2:1 sugar to water), but we have been known to swap in agave syrup from time to time. In my opinion, the drink hinges on an ample float of Angostura bitters, which infuses each sip with a richly spiced bitterness.