Three Things
Five-ingredient dinners, An A+ family cookout, and scrapbook-style wallpaper that kind of makes me weepy
Greetings eaters and readers! Anyone else plan on making Ina Garten’s simple summer menu for friends at some point in the very near future? As she wrote on instagram: “For me, it's too stressful to cook an entire dinner just before people arrive (yes, even for me!) so I chose dishes that could mostly be prepared in advance and then finished at the last minute.” Ina! She’s just like us! In listening news, two podcasts to queue up this week: The Retrievals, produced by Susan Burton, a riveting five-part series about the nurse who was replacing fentanyl with saline at a Yale IVF clinic in 2020, and the unimaginable suffering that resulted from it. Next, if you weren’t already fascinated by Barbara Kingsolver and her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead (the best book I’ve read all year), you will be after her interview with Ezra Klein, titled “Barbara Kingsolver Thinks Urban Liberals Have It All Wrong on Appalachia.” (There’s never been a novel that’s done more to rearrange the way I think about the polarization of this country.) Lastly: Happy Corn-and-Tomatoes Season — here are five excellent ways to ingest/celebrate this very sacred time of year. And now, your Three Things…
1. An A-Plus Friday Night Family Dinner
It’s always a bit of a heart tug this time of year when I spy the angle of the sun creating that sharper, more autumnal light, so to optimize warm-weather, outdoor family dinners, we’ve been trying to grill out as much as possible. Friday night’s meal, to call my own number, was a particularly excellent line-up. To start, we made a batch of Cucalyptus Punch (perfect for those of you currently experiencing cucumber overload); then Andy grilled some Soy-Braised Pork Chops, while I made our old stand-by Double Mustard Potato Salad alongside our new stand-by: the slaw version of Spicy Peanutty Cabbage (see introduction/headnote for slaw instructions). For dessert: Strawberry Shortcake Good Humor Bars, naturally. (It would’ve been Toasted Almond, but they recently discontinued that flavor, and I apologize if you are hearing that for the first time from me and not someone close to you.) I encourage you to cut and paste this menu before summer is over.
2. Five-Ingredient Dinners
Of course, it’s not very long until those end-of-the-summer carefree grill-outs give way to the fast-and-furious back-to-school grind. Enter: Cup of Jo’s Five-Ingredient Dinner series. In my mind, late August-Early September is the optimal time of year to run the series, because all the farm-market MVPs right now (corn, tomatoes) are so their-best-selves, that dinner is pretty much half way there before you even reach for your chef’s knife. Exhibit A: Hetty McKinnon’s One-Bowl Dumpling Salad, the recipe that kicks off this year’s series. Would you look at those market greens and heirloom tomatoes? Summer, don’t leave me!
3. A Living, Breathing Scrapbook
When Phoebe was about six, we decorated one wall of her bedroom with Graham & Brown’s Frames wallpaper. The idea was that it would lend a little controlled chaos to the things that kids like to pin up in their room, like school art, photos, and magazine clippings. We gave her carte blanche with the project — whatever she wanted to tape, paste, paint was up to her, which worked out nicely because the frames somehow made everything look cool. Something I had not really planned on, though, was that as the years went on, the space became almost like an art installation, a living breathing scrapbook of her childhood. What she chose to place inside those frames evolved from Winnie the Pooh drawings to dog pictures to Wallace Stevens poems and McNulty quotes from The Wire. Last week, in advance of our move and leaving all his behind, Phoebe wrote an ode to the project on her cartoon account. (“It’s a mosaic of cringe, but it’s my mosaic of cringe.”) Do you think it would be too much to take a chainsaw to the wall and transport the entire thing to our new apartment?
P.S. Back-to-School Meal Planning
When people subscribe to Dinner: A Love Story, they often send along messages about what they’d like to see more of, and needless to say, it is my most favorite thing ever. From reader Molly this week:
Hi! I subscribed to this for your meal plans and shopping lists for my family - kids are 12, 10 and 6 and we've got to get a handle on dinners! We won't eat dinner together but hoping to get your meal plans and shopping lists and do some advanced prep to have a more sane year with sports and school. Thanks, Molly.”
I’ve addressed this with weeknight meal plans many times before, but the next bonus post will be devoted to a very specific solution: one-pot dinners that can sit on the stove for hours and be ready to go no matter who is eating when. Subscribe now if you don’t want to miss it. Thanks for the idea, Molly!
Have a great week,
Jenny
Sweet Jenny, I feel you so much on wanting to take the wallpaper with you (and there are legit no rules, you could always take large-scale photos of it and re-print it if you want!) This reminds me of my very sweet uncle. When he and his wife were divorcing after many years of marriage and several children together, he kept the house. His wife was devastated to leave behind the plank of wood on the wall near the kitchen, which had the measurements of each child growing over time. So, as a surprise, he removed the plank of wood and copied it with a laser cutter onto another piece of wood, making an exact copy. He installed the copy in his kitchen, and gave her the original as a Christmas gift. To me, that was one of the highest testaments to what love can be, even after divorce. A love that is ever changing and evolving, but also grounded in mutual care and respect. So special.
Ordered Demon Copperhead - thanks for the reminder. She gives me so much pride in being from Kentucky!