Three Things

A veggie burger date night, the power of homemade focaccia, expanding how we define friendship

Greetings eaters and readers! What’s for dinner tonight? Might I suggest fish cakes Okonomiyaki-style cabbage fritters or Carolina Gelen’s LAZY DAY white bean and miso soup that I’ve been dreaming about ever since my daughter forward it to me on instagram. Speaking of which: are you following me on instagram? As I ramp up to the publication of my next book (August) I plan on getting back to making those reels I know you all love — or so The Algorithm tells me. Lastly, in the reading department, I’m tearing through Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, which is like a real-life Succession in case you couldn’t tell by the cover. Here are your Three Things…

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1. Homemade Focaccia OR If You Bake it, They Will Come

An amazing thing happens when you decide to make Olivia Mack McCool’s focaccia, as I did over the weekend: You find yourself replying to any text: I made focaccia, come over for sandwiches. Part of the impulse, for me at least, is because I’m not a bread baker, so when I do it right — and my friend Olivia, the consummate teacher, makes it easy to do right — I want to show off my skills to anyone I can. But mostly it’s because golden, airy-crispy, rich, golden foccaccia is too good not to share. It does, however, take a tiny bit of a planning. The dough needs at least 1 night in the fridge plus 3 to 4 hours of resting time right before baking, but for novices like me, the return on investment is mind-blowing. One of our daughter’s college friends was in town, so she swung by on Saturday, just as my 9-by-9 slab was finishing its 30-minute bake. (“I followed the smell,” she said when she walked in to our apartment.) For her, I laid out a spread of fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, arugula, and balsamic vinaigrette, but that still-warm bread in the center was without question the star. Then on Sunday, my brother and nephew Nathan came over to watch some Premier League, so we used the remaining focaccia as an excuse to stretch out various leftovers — roasted broccoli with cheddar and pickled onions plus a classic meatball sandwich made with some Friday night leftovers. Is there a better Sunday? I don’t think so.

How to Have a Focaccia Weekend: A Step-by-Step

1) Friday Read Olivia’s recipe all the way through so you know the plan. Then get your focaccia dough into the fridge any time on Friday up until 8:00 pm. (But the earlier the better to allow for better rising.)

2) Saturday, 8:00 am Remove the dough from the fridge and transfer to your pan — I used a 9x9 cast iron — but follow Olivia’s instructions. Let rise for 3-4 hours.

3) Saturday am While the dough rises, shop or organize your sandwich fixings. You have a couple combo options:

• Prosciutto, Arugula, Mozzarella, Shredded Basil — This is the easiest option. It’s no-cook and can be anything to anyone — leave out the meat for the vegetarians, leave out the cheese to be dairy-free. Make a balsamic vinaigrette (balsamic + good olive oil) for drizzling.

• Roasted Broccoli, Cheddar, & Pickled Onions — Toss trimmed broccoli (2 cups of broccoli shrinks to one sandwich portion) in olive oil, salt and pepper and roast for 25 minutes at 400°F. Group the broccoli into sandwich-size clumps, top with sliced cheddar (or Manchego), and broil until the cheese melts. (When ready to serve, use a spatula to slide each clump onto its sandwich half.) Top with onions.

• Leftovers — If you’re lucky enough to have leftover braised meatballs in the fridge as I did, slice them thin, top with sauce, and sprinkle with Pecorino. Or, scan your fridge for other leftovers. I guarantee you there’s something good enough to stuff into your focaccia.

4) Saturday, noon. Bake your focaccia! Let cool before slicing horizontally, and then into sandwich size pieces. (If you’ve done it right, the bread will be rich with olive oil so you don’t need huge slabs.) If the focaccia has risen a lot, feel free to serve them open-face, like tartines, or slice out a center piece so they aren’t towering and impossible to bite.

The veggie burger at Superiority (credit: instagram)

2. A Superior Veggie Burger

We did something very uncharacteristic on Saturday night — we went out to dinner without a reservation. For me, this seemed about as reckless as throwing clothes into a suitcase without packing cubes, but New York clears out a bit during school vacation weeks, so we thought we’d try our luck walking in to the kind of restaurant that usually requires a way-in-advance-reservation or a too-long wait at the bar. This is how we found ourselves aglow in neon-sign diner light, eating the veggie burger (and then some) at Superiority Burger in the East Village. The restaurant, famously packed with a cult following since 2015, closed for a bit, then moved to larger greasy-spoon diner space last spring. It’s run by Brooks Headley, whose resumé — James Beard Award-winning pastry chef, former drummer for several punk bands — will make you feel like the most boring person on earth. (Like, I doubt he uses packing cubes.) But the burger! The patty with its craggy edges and ground-meat-adjacent texture, draped in Muenster on a squishy, slightly sweet, lightly-toasted bun, and topped with classic diner pickles plus just the right amount of tender shredded lettuce…well, it was about as good a veggie burger as I think I’ll ever eat. And before all the non-locals get mad at me for waxing poetic about something that is impossible to try yourself — don’t you know me by now? The recipe for the veggie burger is online, and also in Headley’s 2018 Superiority Burger Cookbook. If you can’t get to the East Village, it’s the next best thing.

photo credit: Christine Han

P.S. You could also just make the veggie burger from The Weekday Vegetarians, which doesn’t have a cult following but definitely has its fans.

3. Expanding the Definition of Friendships

I have not yet read The Other Significant Others, by Rhaina Cohen, but I am loving the conversations that have sprung up around it, particularly an interview with Cohen on Ezra Klein’s podcast. At its core, the book is about friendship, and challenges the notion that a conventional marriage (whether hetero or same-sex) has to be the most meaningful relationship in a person’s life. I think we’re all tired of hearing about the “friendship recession” and the “loneliness epidemic” and reading research that tells us we’d live longer/be happier if we had more friends — what Cohen succeeds in doing on the podcast (and presumably in the book), is profile unusually deep partnerships that illustrate alternate friendship models. Friends who co-own homes; who co-parent each other’s children; friends who plan their lives around each other, even moving across the country to be together, the way society expects us to do only with family. The author herself lives with her husband, close friends, and their close friends’ children. I laughed when I read the promotional copy for the book, saying Cohen’s stories prove “that orienting your world around friends isn't limited to daydreams and episodes of The Golden Girls, but actually possible in real life.” My friends and I — some scattered around the country, most of us empty nesters — fantasize about the Golden Girls model constantly, but always in the abstract. In another interview with Anne Helen Petersen, though, Cohen referred to many examples of this kind of living, including a kibbutz-like co-living community in Oakland and a “geographical friend cluster” of 20-and-30-somethings by “Priya in New York City.” Have you ever thought about this? Have you read Cohen’s book? Would love to know what you think.