Three Things

A cabbage-onion galette, a Dutch baby, two simple rules for living a good life

Good morning eaters and readers! Hope you had an excellent long weekend. We didn’t do a whole lot, but we did make the sickest dinner on Saturday night. I feel I can say this without sounding braggy, because I credit Kenji entirely with the victory, specifically his book, The Wok, which will be published in early March. (More info coming soon, sorry for the tease, the meal was just so so good!) In other news, I think 90% of my texting this weekend, especially with Joanna, was about Family Life, the 2015 autobiographical novel by Akhil Sharma who wrote that parenting essay in The New Yorker I mentioned a few newsletters ago. (Attn: David Remnick, Please give this man a column!) Alas, your weekly Three Things…

1. An On-the-Fly Cabbage & Onion Tart

A few weekends ago, Abby was home from college for a mini-break, and right before dinner one night, she came into the kitchen to tell me her friend Alex was going to stop by. It’s dinnertime, I said. Will he be eating with us? She (somewhat annoyingly) couldn’t confirm one way or the other, but I decided to be prepared just in case — you know how I panic when feeding the Species Known as Teenage Boys — and an extra helping of what I was making (tofu with greens!) somehow didn’t seem like it was going to do the job. So I did a quick scan of the fridge. The above photo shows what I pulled out: Mustard, onions, shredded cheddar, half a Napa cabbage, frozen pie dough, thyme. Nothing very fancy, right? And yet, this was the result:

Right??? I ended up cooking down the onions and cabbage and wrapping it all up in a slightly-mustard-smeared pie dough. The sweet-and-sharp tart feeds about 3 people (maybe 2 teenage-boy people), and the crust is pretty rich, so just a simple green salad rounds it out for a meal. Alex ended up not staying for dinner, but I ate it for lunch the next day (like all galettes it’s just as good, if not better at room temperature) and it only took 30 minutes of my life anyway. You can get the recipe here or just check out the TLDR version on instagram to get the gist of it.

2. Are Dutch Babies Having a Moment?

I feel like all my favorite Substackers have been writing about Dutch babies lately and since you know I like to be on top of the trends (See: the 2015 book I recommended in first paragraph), I didn’t want to miss out! Here is my friend college friend Jenn’s tried-and-true, no-fail Dutch Baby recipe, written in her mother’s handwriting so you know it’s legit. I wish I was in her kitchen right now eating it. (I’m considering making one for the Spurs match this weekend. Did anyone watch them beat Man City last weekend? I couldn’t be more in love with Sonny and Harry.)

3. Fodder for The Dinner Table: How to Be a Good Person

Am I bad person if I love the spicy chicken sandwich at Chick-Fil-A even though I know the CEO is anti-gay marriage? I’m a vegetarian on moral grounds, but would it really be terrible if I had the single uneaten chicken nugget on my daughter’s plate, which will just go to waste anyway? I grew up on Michael Jackson and Woody Allen…I can just separate the art from the artist, right? Most of us try to be good people, we try to make morally upstanding decisions and live lives we can feel good about, but it can be hard, and what is being “good” anyway? Michael Schur’s new book How to Be Perfect takes on the somewhat ambitious goal of guiding us towards being better humans by applying 2400 years of Western philosophical thought towards everyday ethical dilemmas like the ones above. (Spoiler alert: There are no easy answers, but, he argues, there’s virtue in the struggle.) If this sounds super wonky, it somehow is not. Schur, creator of TV’s The Good Place and Parks & Rec (and so much more) is a philosophy nerd but knows how to hold an audience. I loved this section in the last chapter, a letter to his children, 12-year-old William and 10-year-old Ivy, where he writes about a “Quick-Start Guide” for living a good life, “a guide so pithy, you can have it tattooed on our arm.”

Thousands of years ago, in a part of Greece called Delphi, some people built a temple. They were worried about their kids too — all parents in history have been worried about their kids, it’s not just Mom and me — so they chiseled a couple of sayings into a column of that temple to tell their kids, and their grandkids, and their great-grandkids, in as few words as possible, how to try to pull off the nearly impossible task of living a good life on earth. Here’s what they wrote:

Know thyself.

and

Nothing in excess.

Honestly, as far as “guides to life” go, I don’t think anyone’s beaten that in the 2400 years since. Know thyself— think about who you are, check in with yourself when you do things to see if you’ve made good decisions, remember what you value and care about, understand your integrity, and live a life consistent with that integrity. Nothing in excess — because too much (or too little) of anything will screw you up. Practice virtues like kindness and generosity and courage, but not too much of them. Drink whiskey, when you’re old enough, but don’t drink too much whiskey. (Single malt, by the way. None of that blended junk.) Watch TV, but don’t watch too much TV. Don’t eat too many tacos, or exercise too much, or curse too much. (I struggle with that one.) Somewhere in the middle of every kind of virtue you can have, and everything you do, there’s a perfect amount of that thing, and your job is to find it.

Have a great week!
Jenny

P.S. Thank you…

Thank you for all the notes about my father-in-law’s eulogy on Kelly Corrigan’s new podcast series “Thanks for Being Here.” It meant a lot to know that so many people were thinking of him last week. Here is the link for anyone else who wants to listen.

Subscribers!

Later in the week, I’ll be sending out an invitation to the next DALS Zoom session. I have a few discussion topics in mind, but if you have thoughts, leave them in the comment field. And keep a lookout for that invite.