Three Things

How to turn honeynut (or butternut) squash into dinner, a fritter trick, 5 tips for designing a beautiful kitchen

Nov 01, 2022

Greetings eaters and readers! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by this “antipasto-themed pasta salad” which, I’ll remind you, is just the make-ahead thing to bring to a college soccer game tailgate, as I did last week, even though when I did so, the good guys lost and I’m now tempted to blame the pasta. (I am definitely not still mad about that loss. Definitely not channeling all my anxiety and rage over Elon Musk/the elections/the world towards that loss.) In dinner news, I made a baked version of Bianca Cruz’s pinto bean empanadas last night (instead of frying, bake at 350°F for 30 minutes) and they killed. Here are your Three Things.

1. Vegetarian Dinner of the Week

Honeynut squash is like a butternut squash’s best version of itself—sweeter and more intensely flavored. This recipe, Rigatoni with Honeynut Squash, Chard & Hazelnuts, which essentially adds vegetables to a peppery cacio e pepe–style sauce, is a simple, healthy, warm-your-bones way to enjoy it. If you can’t find honeynut, butternut or kabocha would be a fine swap-in, and the pre-cubed varieties you can find in most produce aisles are your weeknight self’s best friend. Here’s the recipe.

2. Picky Eater Strategy #284: Just Fritter It

Reminder: If you want kids to eat more vegetables, consider turning whatever offensive produce aisle item you are confronting into the hard-to-hate fritter. When our kids were little, we did this with zucchini and broccoli, and later, cauliflower. The Spicy Cauliflower Fritters and Pea Shoots from The Weekday Vegetarians (above, page 129) are adorned with yogurt and tamarind sauce, and are still in the dinner rotation today, even as those onetime picky eaters sit at their own dining hall tables, hundreds of miles away. 😫

3. Five Tips for Designing a Beautiful Kitchen

Pilar Guzman and I met at my first magazine job in 2002. She was the one who convinced me to cook with anchovies, to make Bugialli’s minestrone, to trust my cooking instincts and ditch the recipes, to order the spinach at New York’s Bar Pitti, to add more salt to the guacamole FFS!, and who, years later, as editor of her first magazine (there would be more) hired me on the spot when I called her and said I needed a new job. She’s a great cook and a great friend, but more important for our purposes today, a great source of advice, especially when it comes to design. Lucky for all of us, she and her husband, Chris Mitchell, have written Patina Modern, part personal narrative and part decorating playbook and I thought that was as good an excuse as any to ask her to weigh in with advice on how to design a beautiful kitchen. Here’s what she said…

1. Treat the kitchen like a living room. Because we spend most of our time in the kitchen, we furnish it like the family room it is with comfortable seating and lots of points of low light. (My favorite kitchens don’t actually feel like kitchens.) Of course, you always need task lighting over the workspace, but when the kitchen turns into the lounge after prep, lots of lights on dimmers can change the mood of the room instantly.

2. The kitchen is where we spend 95% of our time as a family. And to that end, if at all possible, have workspaces or even cooktops face out so you can talk to your family and friends during prep. The cook gets lonely and misses out on all sorts of things if he/she/they are toiling away in obscurity!

3. Do you need those upper cabinets? We have abandoned upper cabinets entirely from our our kitchen design. Why? Because they close in a room and we like our glasses and dishes and want to see them. It’s an idea that originated from necessity from our first kitchen renovation in our first New York City apartment. We ran out of money for cabinetry and instead put up a long shelf. It forced us to weed through our existing dishes and only use the stuff we wanted to look at and live with.

4. Choose a neutral palette (or if you are a color person, choose a limited palette) because a unifying color scheme allows you to mix and match different styles of cookware and ceramics. We like to collect everything from European fine china to hippy, chunky textured ceramics from Brazil. A palette of grays, whites, tans and with black as an accent, allows us to mix different styles, eras, and textures.

5. Use the good stuff. We are big believers in not saving things for company. It’s an antiquated notion and means that you will probably use your wedding china or crystal once a year. We never registered for any wedding china, instead, we started collecting Raymond Loewy “script” dishes in our twenties. It’s not gilded wedding China, but it is china and a cut above the all white “My First Apartment” china. It’s hard working yet feels special, which means we use it every day and also for special occasions.

Thanks Pilar! Congrats on your beautiful book.

P.S. Deal Alert!

Reminder that DALS partner Nakano, makers of quality, affordable Japanese Knives, many of which I use and love in my own kitchen, is offering 20% off all products with code DINNER, only through November 6. Check out the AUS series, which includes an 8-inch chef knife, 8-inch slicing knife, and 6-inch santoku — a really amazing deal.

P.P.S. It’s Menu Plan Week

Subscribers, check your inboxes on Friday! You’ll be receiving your downloadable, printable five-day menu plan — including shopping list. You’re very welcome!! Reminder that menu plans are for paying subscribers only. You can subscribe here if you don’t want to miss out — or if you don’t want to wait until Friday, just check out the archive: Here’s last month’s, and here’s one from October 2021. See you Friday!

Have a great week,

Jenny