Three Things

Simple, special BBQ chicken, stone fruits for breakfast, a feminist high seas adventure

Greetings eaters and readers! Hope you enjoyed the long weekend. I took the week off — you missed me, right? — and headed up to the Berkshires for a family barbecue at my brother-in-law’s, some golden-hour lake swims, and lots of reading on patios and hammocks. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. I meant to do lots of reading, but the rustling leaves were so hypnotically lulling, I succeeded in getting through only one short novel in between multiple outdoor naps. (NOT COMPLAINING!) The book was Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Have you read it? It’s a tense, emotional thriller about the relationship between an established actress and a younger man, who plays an unnerving role in her life that we don’t quite understand. Until we do…sort of? I’m still a bit confused! But I love Kitamura’s exacting and restrained writing, and as soon as I’m finished with this newsletter I’m gonna track down a copy of Intimacies, her novel that won all those awards back in 2021. In other news: EEEK, there was a lot of meat on the grill these past few days! So I’ll be getting back to my vegetarian basics this week with a Big Giant Dinner Salad, a batch of Lazy Man’s Ratatouille (God bless summer), and probably…

…the Farro Piccolo Bowls with Mushroom and Jammy Eggs from The Weekday Vegetarians: Get Simple. That’s all my throat-clearing for today, so with no further ado, here are Three Things I’m excited to tell you about this week…

1. Better Grilled BBQ Chicken

In this week’s episode of “From Simple to Special,” allow me to present your new favorite way to upgrade an everyday chicken dinner, i.e. by making your own barbecue sauce. And, may it please the court, not just any barbecue sauce, but Franklin’s famous, which hits all the right notes of sweet and vinegary and glazy and takes only a few minutes to stir up on the stovetop — provided you have the pantry-friendly ingredients, which is very likely. Then, all you have to do is use half of it as a marinade (let the chicken swim in it for about six hours), and the other half as a sauce to serve alongside a plate of the lacquered juicy pieces. We used boneless chicken thighs — which went right from the marinade onto a medium-hot grill for about 12 to 15 minutes total, flipping every few minutes — but you can of course use the sauce with drumsticks as well.

We also had a green salad with snap peas, along with an accidental couscous salad, the kind you make when you’re trying to stretch out whatever odds and ends you have left in the crisper. We did the five-minute prep thing on a Near East package, then mixed in corn, tomatoes, basil and feta. A little olive oil, salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon. Note to self: Don’t sleep on couscous.

P.S. Hey, Grilled Chicken, I’d like you to meet your best friend, Marinating.

2. An A+ Breakfast

I struck gold with some apricots last weekend — from Fairway, my local supermarket, of all places. They were deeply orange, sweet and juicy, the kind that you eat out of hand because you don’t want to interfere with the purity of the experience. As any fellow apricot obsessive knows, though, this is rare. More often than not, you’re making some kind of compromise with the stone fruit’s texture or flavor. (I like to think these lesser apricot experiences serve to raise the perfect ones to their highest relief.) And when this is the case, allow me to remind you about my go-to breakfast: Chopped up apricot on top of plain yogurt, drizzled with honey and sprinkled with pistachios. (Can we talk about how good honey stirred into plain yogurt is?) This is obviously also wonderful with just about any stone fruit, specifically nectarines, mangoes, and peaches.

3. A Marriage at Sea, by Sophie Elmhirst

Before I go off-roading a bit, I want to make sure I lead with the most important point here: I loved this book, A Marriage at Sea, the true story of a British couple stranded on a rubber raft in the Pacific for 118 days in 1972. It reads like a novel — the combination of an unconventional love story and a high seas adventure — but to me, the story is most notable for being a feminist’s entry into to the very male-dominated stranded-at-sea shipwreck genre. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love that genre as much as the next person, but can you think of a single memorable female character in The Wager or The Perfect Storm or Unbroken or The Wide Wide Sea or, lol imagine, The Old Man and the Sea? In Marriage at Sea, we get to know and root for the exceedingly memorable Maralyn Bailey, whose optimism and resilience somehow never wavers in the face of unimaginable terror at sea. Her husband Maurice? Not so much. When they set sail off the English coast to explore the world in a boat they built themselves, they share the same maverick sensibility and desire to leave everything behind. But their boat sinks after a breaching whale cracks a hole in its bottom, and they spend the next three and half months on a raft battling storms and blistering sun, starvation and soul-crushing isolation. Maurice is overwhelmed by hopelessness, but Maralyn never gives up, even describing in detail to her incredulous husband the next boat they’re going to build for the next ocean voyage they’ll take after they’re rescued. “This was their chosen existence,” she explains. “Not a hobby or an experiment. It was more manifesto than a lifestyle. You don’t walk away from a choice like that after one mishap.” One mishap!

One of the activities that gives Maralyn purpose and resolve is writing in her diary — presumably the main source for Elmhirst’s propulsive book, and so many other records of the Bailey’s adventure. Not surprisingly, this part above really got me. In a the most remarkable display of hope and determination, Maralyn plans all the parties she’ll have on their next boat — the first dinner party, the tea parties and lunch parties. As the two survive on turtles and sharks they often catch with their bare hands, she dreams of dinner parties with “multiple courses, each stuffed with various vegetables, feasts of pineapples and gammon, potatoes mashed and roasted, more potato, you’d think, than anyone was capable of consuming.” I love this woman, and I love that Elmhirst made her the hero of the story.

Have a great week,
Jenny

P.S. This week’s bonus newsletter will be all about lazy patio dinners for friends, i.e. easy ways to make sure you’re making the most of summer nights. Subscribe now if you don’t want to miss it.

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For more easy, approachable vegetarian recipes, check out my New York Times bestselling book The Weekday Vegetarians and the follow-up: The Weekday Vegetarians: Get Simple. 🍳🌿