Three Things

Tonight's "accidentally" vegan dinner, movie & book recs, my only real resolution for 2023

Happy New Year, eaters and readers! I have a confession to make: I was a terrible Weekday Vegetarian for the past few weeks! We were lucky enough to head out to Utah for a big family ski trip with my brother-in-law’s family of five, and other than the above gorgeous vegan number I ordered at Five5eeds (here’s the DALS take), dinner was all about the après, feed-a-crowd, warm-your-bones kind of food: carnitas, spaghetti bolognese, pepperoni pizza, short-order smash burgers with cheese and special sauce. Do I feel bad about this? No, I do not. As my astute editor Raquel noted on instagram when I posted something similar, the holidays are really just a marathon of weekends strung together so I haven’t broken any rules. Plus, need I remind you that the whole concept behind the “program” is flexibility, which is another way of saying that we are human and, as we most certainly know by now, humans go astray. Thankfully, the infrastructure is already in place to get back to more plant-based cooking and eating, so I know I can do it. I know my family can do it. And I know you and your family can do it, too, should you feel motivated. (Here’s a starter pack of tips if you’re at the beginning of your adventure.) And with that, Three Things I’m excited to tell you about this first week in 2023….

credit: Christine Han

1. Tonight’s Accidentally Vegan Dinner

I know you’re not going to believe me, but I didn’t even realize these tacos were vegan until maybe the fourth or fifth time we made them. To give you an idea of how easy and thrifty the meal is, Andy scraped them together on one of those end-of-the-week nights when it felt like we had no food in the house, and we’ve been making and improving on the recipe ever since. Since going more plant-based, we have learned to lean on all mushrooms for their meaty consistency and deep umami, but this is doubly true for shiitake mushrooms. When you cook them long enough to release their liquid and get crispy, they taste like little bites of pork or beef. (Just don’t do a side-by-side taste test!) The recipe is in The Weekday Vegetarians, but I also just posted it on Dinner: A Love Story so everyone here can start off 2023 with a taste of the good life. You’re very very welcome!

2. The Conspicuous Consumption Report

Home-from-college days, cross-country flights, and late afternoon lounging around a rental house fireplace equals one thing: Lots of media consumption. (And lots of humans going astray!) Here is the lightning-round rundown of what the family read and watched these past two weeks.

The age range of the five “kids” on our trip was 17 to 22 which pretty much meant that we could watch anything, including Jack Nicholson deliver his genius, so-deranged-it’s-comical performance in The Shining, which 100% holds up in case you need me to tell you that. The Departed - I watched the Scorsese thriller twice, once on the plane, once with the kids and, breaking news, Leo is a freaking star. Mad Max - the original with Mel Gibson; Blow Up - I guess it’s inevitable that if you have a kid who just took a college film class, you’re gonna end up watching an Antonioni film; I liked it as much for the fashion as for the trippy mystery; Parasite - Why are horror movies so fun to watch with a big group? Lost in Translation - That feeling when we realize a week into the girls’ break that we hadn’t watched a single movie directed by a woman (eek); I have always loved how the Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson friendship is more romantic than an actual romance; The Limey - Terence Stamp is awesome if disturbingly violent, and on that toxic male note: Raging Bull, Prisoners (the 2013 Hugh Jackman thriller), Do The Right Thing, and Phantom Thread. (That same film-class daughter is deep, deep down the rabbit hole on Paul Thomas Anderson, and also watched Licorice Pizza, Boogie Nights, and There Will Be Blood, which I think might be my second most favorite movie of all time. Do you even have to ask what’s first?)

And now for the reading potion the program: It’s always fun to see what my editor husband Andy chooses to pick up when he’s not reading for work, and this time it was All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, in his words “about complicity and denial, set in east Prussia in 1942, as the Russians are advancing, and one aristocratic German family’s is about to be changed forever. It takes on a moment in history I knew almost nothing about, and does so with devastating humanity and pathos. Read the title again: that’s what it’s about.” He also re-read (or maybe re-re-read; he’s obsessed) Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a disturbingly prescient novel, also set in the 1940s, that seems to predict almost all of today’s nightmarish political situation, and pinpoint exactly how tenuous our democracy really is; In one sitting, I read Small Things Like These, a novella about empathy that reads like a fable, and now I want to read everything by Claire Keegan; I’m just about finished tearing through Trespasses* by Louise Kennedy, about a Catholic woman living in a small town outside of Belfast during The Troubles who has an affair with a married, Protestant lawyer for the IRA; Abby is reading A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders, and reports that she’s learned so much about writing that she’ll never read another novel the same way again. And lastly, Phoebe read A Manual for Cleaning Women, a 2015 collection by the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.

* I got this book rec from Michael Ruhlman’s newsletter which is one of my favorites on substack; he’s a food writer and cookbook author who is married to the novelist Ann Hood and she always weighs in with trustworthy book recommendations. (All she had to say was “astonishing” about Trespasses to convince me to read it.) So the newsletter is two writers for the price of one! Actually, it’s two for the price of zero since his newsletter is twice a month and FREE.

3. Resolved: Cook More for My Friends (+ a survey)

I don’t have any major resolutions this year, but of course this hasn’t stopped me from reading everyone else’s takes, and as usual the one that resonates the most is being better at nurturing friendships. The Times is running a Happiness Challenge series and in the first installment, they cited a famous, decades-long Harvard study on the topic: “From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.” The good news, according to the study, is that it’s never too late to develop relationships and also “It’s not just your bonds with friends and family that are crucial to happiness…It’s the friendly conversation with your mail carrier or the acquaintance you see at the dog run.” You might not be surprised to hear that as soon as I finished the article, I clicked over to my Google calendar and started almost pathologically plotting dinners with friends and family over the next few weeks. Last year at this time, I remember doing the same thing, mostly because I was still getting used to the empty nest and I wanted to distract myself from the pit of nausea I felt thinking about January without my kids around. (It worked.) There are easier ways to connect with people, of course — FaceTimes, walks, coffee dates, etc — but cooking for people has always been my go-to move (the name of this whole operation is DINNER A LOVE STORY after all) and I’m guessing a lot of you out there feel the same. Also, I feel I need to repeat this even though I’m sure you know me by now: when I say “entertaining,” somehow a fussy-sounding word, I’m not talking expensive four-course extravaganzas served on pressed white linen — quite the opposite. One of my most favorite dinners for friends was a scraped-together chicken pot pie on a recent Thursday night around the kitchen table; there are nights we just order BBQ take-out for everyone and the only creative energy expended is plunking a bag of tortillas on the table alongside a bowl of salsa; there is that $60 dinner party I wrote up in pre-pandemic times that I still execute on the regular. The name of the game is easy, un-pretentious, doable.

All this to say, over the next few weeks, I’ll be offering subscribers a series of complete Dinner Party Game Plans — including menu, recipes, and shopping list — and the goal to make the whole thing as easy as possible, so you can focus on what matters: connecting. Who are you going to invite first?

But First: A Survey…

What kind of entertainer are you? Or, I should ask, What kind of entertainer do you want to be? Please answer four quick questions on this anonymous survey so I can create the right kinds of menus for you.

Thanks so much, everyone, and have a great week!

Jenny

P.S. What makes a meaningful day?