A Few Good Meals: June

on economical riffing, plus crazy canned wine and cold noodle salad

Hello from California, where after celebrating Stef and Ethan’s beautiful wedding and dancing with my cousins, we have contracted a classic Summer Cold!¹ Mess Hall is late for all those reasons, and the publishing schedule may get a little funny over the next two weeks—but hopefully you’ll be rewarded for your patience with a review of one of Los Angeles’ most exclusive…..most MAGICAL…..dining experiences…….

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For better or worse, travel always gets my cooking-mind focused on efficiency. How to build a temporary kitchen in a new place, how to use things up before I leave, how to avoid the dreaded waste of leaving a rental and throwing out uneaten lettuce. In June I spent ten days up at Bennington, partly to listen to lectures on punctuation and research and structure, partly to drink wine with my friends on the lawn and cry at graduation and eat three meals a day at the dining hall. I’m always thinking it would be fun to do some sort of rundown/ode to the Bennington dining hall and the many ways it has fed me during my stints there, but writing or recording anything meaningful while I am essentially in a socio-pedagogical k-hole for ten days is impossible. So I will simply express my gratitude to the dining staff at Bennington College and move on.

Preparing to leave for—and coming back from—school did inspire two of the recent meals I’m most proud of, though. In my last days in Brooklyn, I scrounged through pantry and fridge to use up all I could, each day casting a little stink eye at the plate of CSA potatoes on my dining table. I love potatoes, I would never disrespect them—I read Say Nothing cover to cover!—but for some reason they always languish in my home, unless I’m chopping them up really tiny for breakfast. (An oldie but a goodie!) Finally I had to do something with them, and landed on some scrounged-up brilliance, hearty but low key, smeared in some distant relative of pesto or chimichurri. Potatoes, bacon, beans, all the green stuff you need to use up. A very good dinner, eaten so quickly I forgot the task of photography. My dining companion licked the bowl. Here’s how to make it: