Three Things
Healthy rice bowls, cheater's mac and cheese, and the first reading round-up of 2025
Thank you for subscribing to Dinner: A Love Story. If you’re new, here is what you can expect: Every Tuesday you’ll receive my Three Things dispatch like the one that follows, a trio of reading and eating recs I’m excited about. Paying subscribers get a second newsletter on most Fridays with bonus recipes, personal essays, meal plans, travel itineraries, “surprise-and-delights,” and more. This Friday you can expect Week 2’s installment for The Weekday Vegetarian Challenge. If you missed the first, you can find it here. Welcome!
Greetings eaters and readers! I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays. Here in DALS land, the whole family was under one roof for almost a month (unheard of lately!), which meant that for the first time since we moved to the city, I felt like the four of us could really settle into a rhythm that resembled everyday living, as opposed to pack-it-all-in vacation living. Most days unfolded like this: Long coffee walks in the morning, then some sort of city “adventure” in the afternoon, even if that meant just going to the movies or Barney Greengrass or one of the local bookstores, then reading and/or napping with the dog on the couch, and finally, bien sûr, cooking dinner. (Shown up top, Abby adding shredded Brussels sprouts into my Miso-Mushroom Tacos.) In between, we cooked for friends, saw pretty much every family member, and, to quote Anne Helen Petersen’s latest newsletter, “somehow did everything and nothing…precisely the vibe I was going for.” In other newsletter news, I hope everyone saw Suleika Jaouad’s post on The Five Lists, exactly the kind of non-resolution resolution exercise I can get behind. The prompt for the fifth list — What are your wildest dreams? — was my favorite, and along with an end-of-the-year question someone asked Ezra Klein (“What have you changed your mind about this year?”) has become our go-to dinner table conversation starter. OK, enough throat-clearing! Here are Three Things I’m excited to tell you about on this chilly January Tuesday…
1. My New Favorite Move: Rice Bowls for a Crowd
Well, the results are in! The first recipe in my Weekday Vegetarians Challenge packet, Smoky Black Beans with Tomato Rice, is a hit! Or well, it is at least for one enthusiastic commenter. (Thanks, Anita!) I knew people would love this recipe for its ease, and its bold, vibrant flavor, but I love the meal for a separate reason: It’s a bowl, making it a stress-free recipe to cook for a crowd. As I’ve mentioned many times in this space, since we moved to the city, there seems to be a constant stream of young guests swinging though the apartment, which means two things: 1) The air mattress is getting quite a workout and 2) I’m feeding a lot of people with a lot of different dietary needs and preferences. Rice bowls are the kind of meal that accommodate almost any eater — it’s so easy to make a big pot of (gluten-free) jasmine or brown or white rice, then set out proteins (vegetarian or otherwise) and various (dairy-free) add-ins. Just this month, I’ve turned Chicken Shawarma into serve-a-crowd bowls, which you could also do with Tofu Shawarma or falafel (add-ins: hummus, pickled onions, sliced cucumbers and yogurt sauce) as well as Sara Forte’s Tropical Salmon Bowls with Coconut Rice (add-ins: avocado, pico, cilantro). I also appreciate how rice bowls create a relaxing dinner vibe for visitors — they’re nothing fussy, but in that I-thought-about-you way, still somehow special.
2. Cheater’s Mac and Cheese
It wasn’t only our daughters’ friends swinging by for dinner. When we found out that Andy’s cousin Sicily and her husband Jason (plus their 6-year-old Vivi and 3-year-old twins Lily and Emma) were planning a family visit to the Museum of Natural History, we begged them to drop off the girls with us afterwards, so they could have a proper adult dinner at Cafe Lux…and, more to the point, so I could cook up, or um, eat up, a proper kids’ meal in our apartment, i.e. Mac and Cheese. (We didn’t have to spend a lot of time convincing Sicily and Jason that this was an excellent idea.) I’ve written a lot of recipes for Mac and Cheese in my career, and my favorite is probably the one from The Weekday Vegetarians, made with protein-packed chickpea pasta and topped with a chopped tomato salad. (That recipe is also here.) But there’s also a shortcut Mac and Cheese I used to make all the time when the kids were little, which calls simply for whole milk instead of the traditional béchamel. I picked up that trick from Sam Sifton’s recipe in Thanksgiving — and that’s the one I made for Sicily’s kids. Here’s the recipe for those of you lucky enough to be cooking for littles:
If you like a crunchy topping, this recipe suggests mixing bread crumbs with potato chips before baking, but I skipped that this time, topping only with the extra cheese before baking.
We also made friendship bracelets (even Bean got in on the fun) and…
…held a First Mallomar Ever Ceremony, hoping to communicate the sanctity of the experience by giving them strict rules not to touch the cookie* until they got the go-ahead from Andy. Each of the girls took turns crunching into that distinct crackly chocolate-covered marshmallow filling. Then an hour later, when I kissed them all goodbye, I collapsed on the couch like a grandmother, talking about how exhausted I was. The best.
*please don’t tell me you’ve never tried a Mallomar.
3. Vacation Reading Round-Up
I know we are only seven days into 2025, but I feel confident saying that I have just finished the most compelling magazine story I’ll read all year: Rachel Aviv’s investigation into Alice Munro and the decades of silence surrounding the short story writer’s husband’s abuse of her daughter, Andrea. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a story that needed to be told, the reporting is exhaustive and compassionate, and I can’t stop thinking about it. As for books, unlike previous vacation reading round-ups, you might be surprised to hear that no one in my family read a single book that topped the end-of-year lists or was all the rage in 2024...or one that was even published in this decade. Instead, without even realizing it, we went shopping in our own bookshelves, pulling titles that fell into what I’d call the Oh!-I’ve-been-meaning-to-read-this category. (Try it!) Collectively we read Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker, the chilling story about a family of twelve kids, six of whom suffered from schizophrenia; Lena Dunham’s 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl; A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the essay collection by David Foster Wallace; and two Philip Roth novels: American Pastoral (without question one of my Top 5 all time novels) and his weirdly prescient The Plot Against America. Read anything good over break that was published in this century? (I just pre-ordered this.) I’d love to know.
Have a great week,
Jenny
P.S. News…
ICYMI! After seven years of writing my column for Cup of Jo, I said goodbye…or, well, farewell. (I’ll still be contributing now and again, just not every week.) Here was my last post: 10 Things I’ve Learned Writing This Column.
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Forgive me for identifying one of the most famous short story writers of the past century a “novelist”
Your line "...for those of you lucky enough to be cooking for littles" just hit me square in the heart, Jenny! It often feels never-ending, and yet, is such a privilege. Thank you for the reminder.