A Few Good Meals: Summer Edition

from the lazy to the overachieving

We are deep in the depths of summer. I still haven’t gotten a sunburn, which by August is a good omen. I ate a near-perfect fried fish sandwich on the beach last weekend, the water was cold and forceful, I went for my annual rockaways jog and then my knee felt weird all week. Time passes! I am trying to keep my head above water book wise, work wise, life wise, all we can really ask of ourselves in this month of indolence. I have been cooking, yes, but I’ve also been cooking less. My cookbook diet is nonexistent, something I’m eager to change once September brings its stacks of galleys to my coffee table. Tonight a friend is going to make Eric Kim’s soy sauce fried chicken from Korean American, and I am going to scream !!

Before we get into it, I must tell you that I wrote another column for Gothamist, this time about the olive oil-soaked focaccia barese at Bread & Salt in Jersey City. (You can find the first installment of the column here.) Rick Easton, the baker-owner at Bread & Salt, just came out with a cookbook called Bread and How to Eat It, which I’m excited to dig into. He’s an obsessive, highly opinionated verging on crotchety. Andrew Janjigian recently wrote, from a home baker’s point of view in his wonderful Substack Wordloaf, about Easton’s polemical stance against home baking. It’s a striking and, for home bakers, frustrating stance, but there’s something endearing to me about Easton’s dramatic opinions. When you eat his bread you can taste them; they are his taste. I have no patience for chefs whose blind obsession turns them into awful megalomaniacal bosses but if your obsession means you have some funny opinions on home baking and you sell really incredible bread and cookies—well—cool! But then again I’m a bread eater, not a bread baker, so you can see where my skin lies in this game.

burst tomatoes and olives and LOTS of oregano….

This week I’m starting a new semi-regular (monthly? seasonal? who knows) series for paid subscribers called A Few Good Meals, where I’ll be writing about, well, some good things I’ve cooked (or maybe just eaten) in recent memory. Sometimes there will be a recipe, sometimes there won’t. This takes big inspiration from Rebecca May Johnson’s Dinner Document and Fran Magazine’s Sunday Dispatch, both of which I recommend highly. I hope you enjoy :)