Three Things

Shakshuka, my new host gift move, and dinner as church

Greetings eaters and readers! Hope you all enjoyed your weekends. We biked down to the West Village for lunch on Saturday, destination: L’Industrie, the Brooklyn-headquartered pizzeria that everyone has told me is not just TikTok hype. Well, I’ll have to let you know if I agree another time — I expected a line on a warm spring Saturday (plus the West Village factor), but this was a soul-crushing, afternoon-killing line, and as much as I Iove pizza, I love a sunny Saturday more, so we bailed pretty much immediately. Lucky for us, we were in New York City, and it took only one right turn to come upon Mama’s Too, where we scared up a few slices, including the Angry Nonna above, a square slice with Soppressata, Calabrian chili oil, and hot honey. You know what’s really f’ing good? Pizza with Soppressata, Calabrian chili oil, and hot honey! Holy moly, I might have to make this a ritual. In book news, I’m reading two wildly different things right now: The Hunger Games prequel for my YA book club, and The Gods of New York — a fascinating page-turning history of New York from 1986 to 1990 — coming out later in the summer. A lot more about that one soon, but here are Three Things I’m excited to tell you about TODAY and RIGHT EXACTLY NOW….

1. At Long Last, A Go-To Shakshuka

I’ve been a Weekday Vegetarian for about eight years now, and somehow I have only recently discovered Shakshuka, the North African dish that calls for poaching eggs in a chunky tomato and red pepper sauce. Or, maybe I should say I only recently discovered my love and appreciation for Shakshuka. Which, I agree with you, is crazy, because the meal checks every box on the Dinner: A Love Story Gold Star List: Quick ✅ Easy ✅ Vegetarian ✅ Pantry-Driven ✅ and it’s one of those 101 recipes that nearly every food writer — certainly every vegetarian food writer — has in their repertoire. One night during the pandemic, Andy decided to make Shakshuka, but the girls aren’t big egg lovers, to put it mildly, and, more to the point, even though I’m an egg lover of the highest order, undercooked whites give me the willies, and undercooked whites are a very real peril when making this dish. If you like your yolks runny, as I do, it’s tricky to balance that with completely cooked whites. Andy’s Shakshuka that night was solid (as were the whites), and yet I didn’t feel the need to make it again any time soon.

But, as Nick Lowe once warned us, people change, and after trying a few excellently executed restaurant versions, I decided it was time to nail down a go-to version at home — one that ensured cooked whites with runny eggs every time. I didn’t nail it on the first try…or even the fourth, but eventually I landed on a few moves that got me there: 1) I finish the dish covered on the stovetop (instead of uncovered in the oven), so I can monitor the whites easily. 2) I make my sauce divets wide and shallow, so it takes less time for the whites to cook through. 3) I lightly baste the whites with tomato juice as I go, which speeds along their cooking.

Here’s the how-to…

Shakshuka
You can also stir in a handful of spinach with the feta if you want to up the veg quotient. Serves 4.

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons harissa paste
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
6-8 eggs
3 ounces feta, crumbled (optional)
Chopped fresh herbs (dill, chives, parsley)
Crusty bread, optional

Add the olive oil to a large deep skillet set over medium heat. Add the onions, garlic, bell pepper, red pepper flakes, harissa, salt and pepper. Cook until vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in the diced tomatoes with their juices, raise heat and then simmer for 10 minutes until the sauce has thickened slightly.

Decrease heat to medium-low and stir in feta, if using. (It doesn’t have to melt into the tomatoes.) Then, using a wooden spoon, make 6 shallow divets (or more if using more eggs) in the sauce, gently cracking an egg into each. Cover the skillet and after about 3 minutes, baste the whites with a little tomato juice. Cover again and cook until the whites are solid but yolks are still runny (see notes for tips) about 7-9 minutes. Serve with fresh herbs and crusty bread.

As long as we are on the subject of a Weeknight Vegetarian’s Proper Pantry Repertoire, let me remind you that my Spicy Chickpeas with Tomatoes and Greens (page 139 The Weekday Vegetarians) works with any green — green beans, broccoli, peas — not just greens.

2. Breakfast Gifts for Dinner Hosts

Since I moved to New York, my default food gift move has become babka. The neighborhood has no shortage of excellent options — from Kossar’s to Zabar’s to Barney Greengrass (above) — and it always seems to be just the right treat to pick up on the way to visit my mom or an out-of-towner or a dinner host. Who doesn’t love a sweet buttery bread swirled with chocolate or cinnamon twists? (Sorry, GFers 😞) Last weekend, I handed a loaf to my dinner host, Claudia, with the instructions “not for tonight, for breakfast tomorrow,” and I’m pretty sure she loved the idea of that more than the babka itself, because there was no pressure to serve it with the menu she had planned. Then another guest said, Oh, it’s like the little jar of homemade granola that Eleven Madison sends home with its diners, a way to make sure they are still thinking about their lovely dinner the next morning at breakfast. I’ve never been to Eleven Madison, but I certainly appreciated that take! In summation: Give a breakfast treat to your dinner host — Cream Cheese and Rhubarb Swirl Muffins? Sour Cream Loaf Cake with Strawberries? — it’s a nice touch that keeps the good vibes going.

3. Dinner is Church

I had the great good fortune to attend the New York Times Well Festival last week, a star-studded line-up of thought leaders discussing, among other things, happiness and community and loneliness and aging and nutrition. There was almost too much takeaway to keep up with, but here are a few thoughts I scribbled in my Moleskine:

*From Tracee Ellis Ross, a definition of meditation that felt like good marching orders for living in general: “Do what you’re doing while you’re doing it.”
*From Suleika Jaouad: The reason why journaling in longhand is more effective than typing on your laptop is because there is no delete button. You just have to keep going without revising, which is the key to feeling liberated.
*From Charlamagne Tha God: “Apologize to your kids when you get it wrong.” (I’m terrible at this.)
*From Appstinence founder Gabriela Nguyen: The term “attention fracking,” which Google later told me is “the aggressive extraction and monetization of human attention through manipulative digital design, often at the expense of mental well-being.” Nguyen’s mission is convincing kids that they can break up with social media. She was riveting.

It should not come as a surprise to a single person reading this newsletter that I was most rapt during the talk called “Food as Nourishment, Connection, and Happiness” between Samin Nosrat, author of the mega-selling Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (and the upcoming Good Things), UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, and Times journalist Kim Severson. You can watch a recording of the whole conversation yourself, but the part that stayed with me was Samin’s description of a sacred weekly dinner ritual — she calls it “church” — that she’s kept up with friends for five years. The amazing thing, said Samin, who lives alone, is that the group was “one-and-a-half rings out from the favorites list on my phone” but now they’ve really become family, simply because of proximity and time together. She also said that it takes work to execute something seemingly simple, and she’s thought a lot about why they’ve been able to keep it up. First, dinner is always at the same house at the same time, so there is one less decision to make and correspond about. Next, and most important, the cooking is usually shared but there’s no pressure to cook anything “impressive” or even anything at all. Takeout pizza and empanadas count, so does rice and beans. She describes the ritual as the “heart of their world.”

I found this inspiring. Along the same lines, over on the Chat today, we’re talking about community — where and how to find it, how to nurture it, and whether you feel like you have enough of it in your life. So far there are some wonderful suggestions. And P.S. I’ve been writing Dinner: A Love Story for fifteen years and I somehow don’t have a solid rice and beans recipe in my rotation. If you have one, please share in the comments.

Thanks so much for reading!
Jenny

If you like what you read, would you take a sec to hit the ❤️ button at the top left or bottom left of this newsletter? It helps spread the word about Dinner: A Love Story and also really makes my day.