Three Things

Snow-day dinner soups, a Trader Joe's flower hack, a pitch-perfect definition of love

Greetings readers and eaters! I’ve just returned from a long weekend in England — visiting our daughter who is studying abroad this semester — and I can say with confidence that in a few short days, we absolutely left it all on the field. As usual, I’ll be sharing the Vacation Highlight Reel* later in the week, but for now, excuse me while I google “authentic pub chicken and leek pie recipe” and “gothic fan vaults” and “home swap new york london.” There was not a lot of lounging around, but I did manage to get lost in Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Oligarch’s Son” in The New Yorker which reads like a thriller. That is your long read (or listen) of the week, and here are Three Things I’m excited about on this snowy day before Valentine’s Day.

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1. Stewy Lentils for Snow Days

This morning in the elevator, I ran into my neighbor, a mom of two young kids, who immediately said “I’m so glad the city canceled school, it’s miserable out there!” I nodded in agreement, even though I had zero idea that school had even been canceled. As an empty nester, it’s been so long since I’ve had to think about snow days. And here I will conveniently gloss over the stressful childcare scrambling and go right to that feeling of It’s a snow day! Light the fire. Break out the flour and the Dutch oven! We’re binge-watching Gilmore Girls and baking cookies and stewing stews today. I might not have the kids around anymore (or the fireplace!), but I do still have those cravings, and the kitchen calls as always. Right now, in fact, chicken stock is on the stovetop — a pot of chicken bones (I freeze them to use for this exact purpose), celery, carrots, onions, a Parm rind hunk, salt, pepper, a bay leaf, water to cover it all, simmering for as long as I have…an hour? An afternoon? I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to do with it (Avgolemono? Tortilla Soup? Tomato-Rice?), until I fortuitously started flipping through The Farm Table, a new cookbook out today by Julius Roberts.

Maybe it’s because I have just returned from England, maybe it’s because I turned right to a recipe that began “It is rare for there not to be a pot of chicken stock gently boiling on the stovetop,” but I was immediately captivated by the book. It’s a collection of uncomplicated seasonal recipes from the English countryside. (That’s is the word used in the promo copy, and I find it so much more poetic than the straight, very American simple.) Roberts left the grind of London restaurant life after realizing he was envious of the restaurant’s suppliers. “Each morning,” he writes in the introduction, “twinkly eyed and smiling growers would turn up with their boxes and crates of glistening produce. The juiciest tomatoes you’ve ever seen, trays of thorny artichokes, blue skinned pumpkins sealed with red wax…It set a thought in motion: they’re outside all day, tanned and healthy, whereas I’m here, skin a shade somewhere between yellow and gray, living off coffee and spending my day stressed to the core in a windowless kitchen.” He started with four Mangalitsa pigs — who showed up in the backseat of the breeder’s Subaru — and eventually added chickens, goats, and sheep, starting his own farm in the English countryside, near the impossibly picturesque Dorset coast. The cookbook, shot over the course of a year to really capture the distinct rhythms of each season, transports you there, but Roberts is also careful not to overly romanticize life on a farm.

The recipes collectively tell the story of his years working the land and raising animals, with food at the center of it all. “This is simple home cooking made from a place of love, not only for the people eating it, but for the land it came from.” And I want to make all of it...the baked vacherin, the spinach soup, the chicken-leek pie (!!!), and especially the Puy Lentils with Spinach and Pancetta, which called for homemade chicken stock. (You can of course use store bought.) The Farm Table is out today — you can read more about it, and get the lentils recipe over on Dinner: A Love Story.

2. Try this at home [OR reason 442 I love Trader Joe’s]

Last week, my friend, Avideh and her husband Steve had us over for dinner. They cooked up an absolute feast: braised lamb, stewy beef, a golden tahdig, a bright salad made from greens procured from their local co-op, mango crisp for dessert (ok now I’m starving) and in the center of the table was this elegant flower arrangement. Doesn’t it look like something arranged by Urban Stems or one of those expensive flower delivery services? Much to my surprise, Avideh told me she arranged them herself, using only flowers from Trader Joe’s. The way to do it, according to Avideh, is to select two flowers that are the same color, crop their stems so the blossoms are only an inch or so above the rim of the vase (“Centerpieces should be low,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to cut short!”) and use an opaque vase — that way you can’t see the dirty water and all the messy leaves and stems below. So pretty, right?

3. As good a definition of love as I’ve ever heard

Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who died at age 51 in 2017, is probably more well known for her popular illustrated childrens’ books (Little Pea, OK, Spoon, Duck! Rabbit!) than her essays and “grown-up” books, but my first introduction to her was the latter, specifically Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, a sort-of memoir in alphabetical order, a a catalog of her very unique observations of the world. (She would’ve been amazing at TikTok.) This time of year, I always think of one of her entries under the letter “L,” which would make such a perfect Valentine:

LOVE – If you really love someone, you want to know what they ate for lunch or dinner without you. Hi, sweetie, how was your day, what did you have for lunch? Or if your mate was out of town on business: How was your trip, did the meeting go well, what did you do for dinner? [My husband] will stumble home in the wee hours from a bachelor party, and as he crawls into bed I’ll pry myself from sleep long enough to mumble, how was the party, how was the restaurant beforehand? The meal that has no bearing on the relationship appears to be breakfast. I can love you and not know that when you were in Cincinnati last Wednesday you had yogurt and a bagel.

Have a great week,

Jenny

P.S. I’d be remiss if I didn’t round up of some favorite chocolate desserts for Valentine’s Day: How about Abby’s No-Bake Chocolate Cheesecake? Or Chocolate Mousse topped with pink strawberry dust? Or Odette’s Chocolatey Chocolate Cake? Or Yossy’s Malted Chocolate Cookies? Hard to go wrong. xoxo

“This is the single most beautiful and accessible and helpful vegetarian cookbook I’ve ever seen.” — Mom