Three Things

Steamed fish with coconut-curry sauce, my new go-to dinner party menu, the first reading round-up of 2024

Greetings eaters and readers. Thank you to everyone who reached out to me about my father — I was overwhelmed by the support and even though I haven’t gotten back to all of you yet, please know that I read and appreciated every single note, every email, every comment written beneath his eulogy. It’s been a slow ramp-up to the new year and after a few weeks of not having any energy to cook, I’m slowly getting back to the kitchen, which feels good and steadying. Also fortuitous: The newest season of All Creatures Great and Small premiered on Sunday, and it feels a little like divine intervention; the British PBS series follows a young veterinarian in the bucolic English countryside in the years leading up to World War II, and Andy once wrote that watching it was “like stepping into a warm bath.” Let me just say this is exactly the kind of screen time I am craving right now. Here is your weekly Three Things dispatch…

1. Fish Presents, All Grown Up

Thirteen years ago on The Blog, we wrote about “fish presents” because we discovered the method was a sneaky way to convince young skeptics to like seafood. This is what Andy wrote in 2010, when our daughters were 6 and 8:

Our latest venture in rebranding involved the kind of intimidating-sounding fish en papillote, which is just a fancy way of saying fish steamed in parchment paper. Neither description had a chance of flying with our kids. So we came up with something a little more intriguing. (Notice I did not say misleading.) Fish Presents, is what we decided on. Tonight we’re having fish presents! “Presents?” they asked. I gave them no further information.

When I read this back, I have two questions. The first: Where TF does time go? The second: Why has it been so long since I’ve made fish presents? They are exactly the kind of dinner I’m always in the mood for, but especially so on a winter weekend like last one, where the “official” grieving period was behind me and I was craving a comforting, nourishing, and above all, low-stress dinner. Fish en papillote might actually be the most low-stress fish cooking method out there — you just wrap up a piece of fish in parchment paper or foil (I used flounder, but other favorites are salmon, sole, cod, trout, snapper) alongside aromatics and vegetables (here: ginger, shallots, lime slices, sweet potatoes and spinach), place everything on a baking sheet, and 20 minutes later you have the tenderest, flakiest, hard-to-overcookiest fish you’ve ever made. A pot of rice and a drizzle sauce can be cheffed up (or not) while your fish bakes, the perfect dance. Head over to Dinner: A Love Story for the complete recipe, Flounder with Spinach, Sweet Potatoes and Coconut-Curry Sauce.

Other super easy fish dinners: Pan-Fried Fish with Smoky Brown-Butter (above), Shrimp with Feta, and cozy Maine-Style Fish Chowder.

2. My New Favorite Main for Entertaining

Back in mid-December, what feels like a hundred years ago, we had our friends Taffy and Claude over for dinner along with their two teenage boys, and I was struggling to figure out what to make them. I could’ve just phoned in the ole winter dinner party menu or my go-to Vegetarian line-up, the one with the Diane Kochilas pasta; I could’ve done my mom’s crowd-pleasing lasagna with a big green salad, but for whatever reason I really wanted to make something new. Lucky for me, I had a coffee date scheduled the same morning with with my friend Sarah, who I met back in May on the DALS Sicily trip, and who I remembered was a great cook and entertainer. So I asked her over lattes: What would you make? She gave me a ton of good ideas, and then as an afterthought sort of threw in “Oh, and you can always make that shawarma from the Times” as if I knew what she was talking about. Um, which one? I tried to play it cool, but not really. Turns out the oven-roasted chicken shawarma has over 17,000 reviews and is one of the newspaper’s most popular recipes ever. I think this is for two main reasons: For starters, the recipe is so easy! You can do 99% of the work ahead of time — the chicken marinates anywhere from 1 to 12 hours and all you have to do when people come over is transfer the pieces to a baking sheet and roast in the oven for 30-40 minutes. The other reason? It’s so freaking good! Especially when you surround it with various sauces and salads. The Times suggests things like pita, hummus, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes, olives, feta, etc. — but I’d say one non-negotiable is some kind of yogurt sauce. A store-bought tzatziki would work, or do what I did: blend about 2/3 cup Greek yogurt with juice from 1/2 a lemon, 1 tablespoon za’atar, pinch of sugar, 1 tablespoon olive oil, salt, pepper, and a handful of fresh mint. (In a mini food processor.) I served the chicken with our trusty kale salad and the lemony-oregano Greek potatoes from The Weekday Vegetarians. I’ll be cutting-and-pasting that menu again very soon!

P.S. Later that week, one of my oldest friends, Laurie texted me, “Help! Tomorrow night I’m having a dinner party and I want to ‘wow’ my guests. They’re all pretty health-conscious and I need something that (a) is not super time-consuming to make but kind of a slam-dunk and (b) is on the healthier side/not fried.” Very casually I texted back, Well you could always make that shawarma from the Times.

(And she did, with great success.)

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3. Holiday Reading Round-up

Andy and I had grand plans to sink into a few big books over the holidays (as a book editor, he can only “read for pleasure” a few times a year), but that got derailed for obvious reasons. This past weekend, though, I did manage to finally get going on The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray, which has gotten fabulous reviews — especially from my sister’s friend, Amy, who told me she isn’t in a book club because she’s too particular. (Why does that make me want to be in a book club with her?) Luckily my daughters had better luck than we did, and managed to secure solid reading time in between the services and shivas. Here’s the lightning-round run-down: Both girls loved the 1979 cult classic Princess of 72nd Street (above) which you can presently find on Amazon, but is also about to be reissued by Random House. They caught up on many books we’ve already discussed on this newsletter — both tore through Chain Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, which Abby described as so visual and cinematic, she felt like she was picturing the movie as she was reading it. Phoebe read Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the book club pick for pretty much every book club in 2023 including mine. Abby also read The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut (one of Andy’s top 3 book picks for the year. “If you loved Oppenheimer…”) as well as Love and Other Ways of Dying, a 2016 essay collection by the legendary magazine feature writer Michael Paterniti. Lastly, Phoebe, read Envelope Poems, a collection of Emily Dickinson’s random poetry scribbles — apparently Dickinson scribbled her genius on scraps of paper everywhere, including the backs of envelopes. (My daughter insists that you don’t have to be writing a senior thesis on Dickinson to be moved by it!) P.S. Phoebe also managed to get her hands on an advance copy* of Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler which she called “maybe the funniest novel I’ve ever read.” It’s not out for a little while but you can pre-order here. Did you get lost in any good books over the break? Please share.

*perks of being a book editor’s daughter

Was one of your New Year’s Resolutions “Eat Less Meat?” Have I got a book for you.

Thanks for reading, supporting, commenting…all of it. xx
Jenny