Three Things

A long weekend in Vermont, a sandwich to brighten up cold nights, a cookbook to keep close

Good morning eaters and readers! Hope you all enjoyed the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day however you celebrated (or ignored) them. For Valentine’s Day we had grand plans for pasta with Marcella’s famous ragu, but ended up just making prepared cheese ravioli from the freezer. (It was a weekday after all.) Before we get to Three Things I’m (extremely) excited about this week, I wanted to remind you that on the right side of my home page there’s a rotating list of 10 quick dinners that might just save you on those nights when you’re thinking I know I read about something easy in Jenny’s newsletter but where the heck is it? Hope that helps! And now: Today’s Trifecta…

1. A Long Weekend in Vermont

Our daughter goes to college in Vermont, and we usually round-trip a drop-off (or visit), stopping just long enough to grab a quick lunch, or watch a soccer game, or stock up on our favorite Vermont foods. But this past weekend, we wised up a bit and made a long weekend out of the drive, staying (and dining) at The Tillerman, a charming new inn and restaurant in Bristol, and skiing nearby. (From Bristol, it’s a quick drive to Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, and The Middlebury Snow Bowl.) I can’t overstate how nice it was to get away, to be breathing mountain air and exploring a new place after being holed up in my dining room staring at a screen for what feels like years. The Tillerman was the ideal landing spot, offering crackling fires in every room…

…stunning cocktails, and the most Vermont menu you’ve ever seen. It is the way I would eat every night if I could: Chilled, briny, crispy-clean-tasting oysters, brothy gigante beans cut with a sharp local cheddar, a shredded green-goddess-dressed red slaw that was extra crunchy with the addition of quinoa clusters; wood-fired mushrooms; a spinach-apple-cheddar salad. There were the pizzas, of course. The one shown above was topped with smoked pepperoni, cheddar, and honey; the next night we ordered a pie with trumpet mushrooms and blue cheese. And do I even need to say it? We were in Vermont so the grains for the pizza crust, all the produce, the eggs, the almost-everything was from a farm or a greenhouse or a bakery or a mill right up or down the road. Here is a lot more about the hotel and the weekend if you want to read more.

Or follow them on instagram for more info.

Wait til you hear about breakfast!

2. A Bright Sandwich for Cold Nights

If you’ve been eating stewy, warm-your-bones kind of food for six straight weeks like I have, you might appreciate Andrea Nguyen’s Bánh mì recipe I turn to again and again in the summer, but also the dead of winter when I’m starving for a hit of brightness amidst the beige-and-brown braises. I have a Nguyen-inspired version in The Weekday Vegetarians, but this recipe is from her must-own Vietnamese Food Any Day.

3. A Book To Keep Close

The premise of the book Extra Helping, by Janet Reich Elsbach, grabbed me instantly: How to take care of people you love through food. This covers occasions from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, from grief (supporting someone who has lost a loved one) all the way to pure, life-defining joy (the birth of a child, your child’s first birthday party). It contains over 70 recipes, from Cinnamon-Apple Muffins (in “Food for Expanding Families”) to Little Meatballs (in the “Food for Solace” chapter), but the dishes are almost beside the point. If there is one thing you get from Elsbach’s manifesto, it’s the inspiration and the motivation to do what is maybe the most important thing in life: Show Up. (One quote that I’ll never forget, from grief counselor, Maria Sirois: All that is needed to support the grieving is the ability to “bear witness without flinching from darkness.”) The remarkable thing about Extra Helping is that it sounds like the kind of book that could be finger-waggy or overly earnest or depressing, but it’s the absolute opposite. Elsbach, who lost her sister to cancer, is a warm, witty writer, the pages fly, and in the end you feel like a better human even just having read the thing. Here are some of my favorite pieces of advice:

On Being a Caregiver
”When my older sister was first diagnosed with cancer, a wise advisor reminded me: your sister is a statistic of one. The things you read about the cancer she has, and about how patients respond to the treatments she selects, or how they fare when they don’t have the treatments she declines, is informative but not wholly so. The holy truth for her is her own experience. I think this was the most valuable line of thinking I took away from the two years of her illness. When you are feeding the patient, feed that patient. Accept what you rules you must from outside sources, but above all, find a way to connect to the patient’s pleasure and comfort and appetite, and work toward that. That is true sustenance.”

On Doing Something — Anything — for Someone In Need
”One beautifully liberating thing I can testify to is that the scale of the delivery is unimportant. The bar of chocolate in an envelope, the bowl of hand-arranged seeds festooned with flowers, the homemade gingerbread people and the store-bought bagels, the pocket-sized gestures and the trunk-loads of food all make indelible impressions. Each one was a strand that tethered me to the land of the living and together they eventually pulled me to my feet again, altered, but upright.”

On Your Childrens’ Birthday Cakes:
”Inevitably, no matter what I have told myself in advance, I break out in the Birthday Sweats. I forget that it doesn’t matter whether the mother of one of my children’ friends can make an edible, nay, utterly delicious scale reproduction of Buckingham Palace with teeny little Beefeaters marching around it, or whether my own reach has exceeded my grasp in ways that will be obvious to onlookers. What matters is how the birthday human receives it…My son looked at his first birthday cake, a disk of plain cake with plain pureed apricots on top, like it was the most shockingly beautiful thing he had seen in all his twelve months of life. I have a favorite photo of him, jaw dropped, as a slice of it was presented. It is clear that he cannot believe his good fortune. That’s generally the reaction I’m going for: ‘How lucky and loved am I?’”

On Feeding Someone Who is Sick:
”Tiny little normal things, as minor as a folded napkin, are easy to overlook when the going gets rough...But they matter so much. I learned that it’s important to make sickroom food look presentable not only because it is more appetizing, but also because maybe beauty and dining and other pleasures of upright, regular life have been lost in the sauce of sickness. I learned that the unbearable is made bearable by gestures like these, gestures that have more to do with love and insight than medicine or other practical considerations.”

See what I mean? This is a book that I’m going to keep close. You can find more of Elsbach’s writing (and recipes) at a Raisin + a Porpoise, and on instagram.

Thanks for being here, have a great week!

Jenny

P.S. Subscribers!

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