Three Things

A sheet pan dinner I can't stop thinking about, an easy upgrade for boring salads, capturing the magic of everyday objects

Greetings eaters and readers! Here is your daily reminder that Odette Williams’s Almond Gató* from Simple Cake is almost always the correct answer. (Especially when the question is: What can I make for Passover?) AND, in this week’s episode of “How Lucky Are We?” Jenny attempts to keep track of all the truly excellent cookbooks coming down the pike at record speed! My Top Three, should you be scratching your head about Mother’s Day gifts: Around Our Table, by Sara Forte, one of my all-time favorite (mostly) plant-based recipe developers and a mother of two who just gets it when it comes to family cooking. Koreaworld, by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard (yes, Matt Rodbard, host of what should by now be your favorite food podcast), a crazy cool book about modern Korean food around the world which I plan to cook through over the next few weeks. (This afternoon: Kimchi Popcorn); and Le Sud, by the well-known stylist Rebekah Peppler. I haven’t cooked from this highly gift-able one yet, but as far as I’m concerned, its already earned its keep in my house simply reminding me what life could be like for someone somewhere in the south of France. And now Three Things I’m excited to share with you this week…

*here is the framework for the recipe, just swap in almond flour for the hazelnut flour and toasted, slivered almonds for the toasted, chopped hazelnuts on top. (And don’t add any chopped nuts to the cake batter, just use them for topping.)

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1. Fast Weeknight Dinners for Your Consideration

I wrote about Yasmin Fahr’s new cookbook Cook Simply, Live Fully for Cup of Jo last week, and I can’t stop thinking about the strategically on-point weeknight recipe we chose to excerpt from it: Sausage Meatballs with Tomatoes and Halloumi. The “meatballs” are just sausage meat rolled up (I used sweet Italian chicken sausage), the tomatoes are poured right from their pint container, the greens (I used spinach) are just folded in at the end — the heat from the whole thing makes it wilt accordingly. If you are serving a vegetarian, the halloumi is filling enough on its own without the sausage and the whole thing comes together on a sheet pan in under 30 minutes. Read more about Yasmin’s cookbook and get the recipe over at Cup of Jo.

A few more contenders for the high honor of YOU CAN MAKE THIS FAST: Bucatini with Pea Pesto and Asparagus, Tofu Shawarma, Pizza Salad with White Beans, Chicken-Tofu Meatballs, Pasta Con Ceci.

2. Toasted Buckwheat For the Win!

When I was at a restaurant in Lisbon last week, I ordered what was listed as “pleurotus, massa de pimentão e trigo sarraceno,” aka oyster mushrooms with pepper paste and toasted buckwheat (above) and it was maybe the best thing I ate in Portugal. (Maybe! More details this Friday when the official Lisbon round-up drops.) I haven’t quite figured out how to reverse engineer that pepper paste, but the toasted buckwheat, which added an addictive, candy-bar crunch to the mushrooms? That was simple. And the kind of move I love, offering such maximum flavor returns on minimum investment. To make: Just add hulled buckwheat grains to a dry cast iron skillet set over medium-high heat. Shake the pan a little as they toast, then scoop out of the skillet once the grains start smelling nutty and look golden brown. Let cool, then add to roasted vegetables and green salads.

You could also just add crushed nuts (sorry), like you see here in my Strawberry-Beet-Feta Salad with Pistachios from The Weekday Vegetarians. That’s such an excellent late-April dinner, wow.

3. Memory Preservation, Part 999

I started packing up the house for my big move to New York just about a year ago. And a year later, I can still say with absolute clarity that downsizing a home where you’ve lived for twenty years and raised two kids is not for the emotionally weak. I’m not even really talking about watching a slow stream of Facebook Marketplacers haul my lamps and bookshelves and desks and Phoebe’s framed “Ceçi n’est pas une pipe” poster — the one she asked for after reading about Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” in The Fault in Our Stars — out my front door, though, hmmm, I’m now spiraling a little thinking about that. No, I’m mostly talking about the stuff that can’t be one-clicked on Amazon. Grade school science projects, medals from athletic events, giant “poster-board dollhouses” that the girls and I would spend hours crafting together, my restaurant matchbook collection. My grand solution was to take photos of all of the things I knew I didn’t have room for, promising myself I’d make some kind of album once I got settled. Most of those photos are still sitting in my phone.

But thanks to Shana Novak, aka

The Heirloomist

, that is not the case for my matchbook collection. A few months after I moved, I posted about them on instagram, and right away Novak reached out to ask if she could memorialize the collection in an official, professional photograph. (How nice are people? I mean, seriously.) Novak has made a career of photographing objects that hold special significance to their owners and her new book captures images and stories behind the most commonplace things, instantly infusing in them a sentimental magic.

Like these dirty, scuffed-up tennis balls, photographed in memory of a beloved fetch-adoring dog whose companionship helped his owner get through cancer. And a note, written on a restaurant pad, that marked the first profession of love between a couple that has now been married for 18 years. “Looking at it on the subway platform,” the recipient of that note, Marissa, says, “I did the thing you read about in books, see in movies — an immediate suck-in-the-air gasp.”

I had amassed most of my matchbooks when I was in my 20s living in Brooklyn, and collectively they told the story of the 1990s restaurant scene (Yaffa Cafe…Quilty’s…Soho Kitchen and Bar, iykyk) and provided long-forgotten snapshots of my social life and pre-kid adventures. Inside the flaps of many of them are handwritten notes reminding me of the date I was there and who I ate with. See that that crimson Cafe Des Artistes matchbook on the lower right? Inside is scribbled “Engagement dinner, 12/15/96,” which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who devoured their Zagat guide the way I did back then. (Cafe Des Artistes on the Upper West Side was perennially the highest scorer in the “Most Romantic” category.) And of course now that we’ve moved back to the city, exploring the radically different restaurant scene, and regularly walking the dog by that old engagement dinner spot, my photographed collection is doing exactly what art should be doing: It’s transformed something everyday into something beautiful, and, most important, it’s made me unspeakably happy.

What would you frame?

For more stories and more Shana, check out her instagram and her new book.

Pre-Order My New Book: Penguin Random House | Amazon | Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Hudson Booksellers | Books A Million | Powell’s | Target | Walmart |

(🥬🌿Or pick up a copy of the first Weekday Vegetarians if you’re behind on your homework. Thanks for the support! 🌺🥬💚 )