Three Things

Game day sandwiches, non-fussy food, being real is a radical act

Greetings friends! Hope it was a good weekend. We were at my sister’s house on Long Island and even though it felt more like March than May, we took an invigorating walk to the water and my brother-in-law grilled up a fish taco feast* for nine, complete with mango salsa and foil-wrapped sweet potato halves charred right in the coals. (Nicely done, Nick!) Meanwhile back at the ranch, we are in the process of replacing our kitchen cabinet doors, and every time I look at my denuded shelves, I can only see the unused space above the pantry, which seems to be yelling at me What is wrong with you? How are you not optimizing those two precious square feet? Lastly, there are still some spots open in the Via Rosa food tour I am hosting in Western Sicily next year, and I’m pretty sure they belong to you and your best friend…or you and your mom…or just you, don’t you think? Please take a look at some of the previous trips and let me know if you have questions. And now, Three Things I’m thinking about this week…

*here’s my no-grill take on the same thing

1. Sandwiches for Dinner, OR What to Eat in Front of the Game

I always feel lucky to live in New York, but I’ve felt it more than ever this past week as the whole city gears up to watch the Knicks make their first appearance in the NBA finals since 1999. I love how these kinds of sporting events make huge cities feel small and how even people who haven’t ever watched a single game get swept up in the fever. (Yesterday when I asked my friend Matt if he was a fan, he replied “Well, I am now!”) The group chats are alight with Josh Hart memes; everyone in every neighborhood — including a sleek little Italian greyhound in Riverside Park this morning — seems to be sporting Knicks swag; the mayor issued an Executive Order “temporarily repealing bedtimes” to allow city kids to stay up as late as necessary to cheer on the home team; the lights on the Empire State Building, at least one subway stop (so cool!), and the sky itself are awash in blue and orange! I could go on here, but for the sake of my Cleveland readers, I will instead pivot to a more universal topic, namely Dinner Sandwiches, aka the ideal utensil-free food to eat in front of the game, whether you’re watching the Knicks, The World Cup, the French Open finals or…wow, it’s going to be a great few weeks.

On the roster: Crispy Fish Sandwich with Viet Pickle (shown up top); Veggie Burgers (left) which can (and should) be made ahead of time; Bean Burritos with or Without Chorizo, a wise game plan if you’re cooking for a flexitarian squad; Classic Subs, whether you want vegetarian or a more meat-lovers special kinda thing; and finally Grilled Sausage Rolls with Onions and Peppers, which would be just the thing for a crowd. Go New York, Go!

2. On a Tear

Samin Nosrat’s Good Things is almost a year old, and yet my enthusiasm for it shows no sign of waning. I can’t believe how often I use this book — her Slaw Everyone Asks For, the herby green sauce, stewed spring vegetables, sekanjabin and shoyu chicken. But beyond recipes, there’s so much else to learn from her, like this tip: “Take every opportunity you get to tear an ingredient instead of cutting it. Tear soft fruits, including figs, apricots, and dates, for fruit plates, salads, or crostini. Tear stale bread into croutons to create more nooks and crannies to nestle dressings and bits of cheese. Tear lettuces and herbs to avoid the straight lines slicing will yield. And tear fresh mozzarella and burrata into large, craggy bites before drizzling them with olive oil and flaky salt.” In addition to the culinary benefits of this strategy, I will also argue that tearing and breaking and in general not being too fussy with presentation usually makes food look more rustic and therefore more appealing in the way it telegraphs Oh this thing? I just threw it together.

3. Read of the Week

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend a Substack “Summit” in New York featuring all-day panel discussions between some of the platform’s leading writers and thinkers. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie moderated a conversation between Homeward’s Amanda Hesser and Caroline Chambers about building a community-minded business from scratch; Priya Parker turned her TED-esque talk into group therapy to illustrate various points from her upcoming book The Art of Fighting. There were the usual tech and business journalists who were all interesting, even if I had to google things in real time to understand what they were talking about. If there was a common (and self-serving) theme it was this: AI is coming no matter what, which means our careers depend on the counter-programming that we writers are in a unique position to provide. It’s never been more important to write human-centered stories, to have our own distinct perspective, our own specific taste and voice. To quote speaker and must-read AI-journalist Jasmine Sun “[AI] can’t see stuff. It can’t feel stuff. It can’t break news.”

On the first page of the little branded notebook they handed out to attendees, I scribbled this quote from one of the speakers: “Being real is a radical act.” I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but maybe doing what I’ve been doing since 2010 — cooking real food for real people, reading books by real people, writing real words for real people — makes me a revolutionary? I guess that’s…good news? But also: WTF this where we are now?

In the same notebook, I scribbled “Sam Kriss manifesto,” which came up a few times in conversation as though everyone had been discussing nothing else for weeks. After reading it I now know why. It’s called “If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you” and was the best thing I’ve read on the topic of AI and creativity, if only because of how viscerally angry he was weighing in with what I think is an incredibly obvious take: Machine-generated prose is terrible, all of it “meaningless, total mangled garbage from one end to the other.” I implore you to read the whole essay, but here are two highlights:

A while ago, my girlfriend wanted to watch a show called The Littlest Wife, about a wife that gets hit by a shrinking ray until she’s little, because it had Matthew Macfadyen in it and it looked like campy good fun. The pilot begins with a monologue by the titular littlest wife. She complains: ‘I’m literally the size of a dry martini—shaken, stirred, and nursing the burn of every sip.’ And that was it, that was all I could take; the dead cadences of the machine had invaded my evening and I had to turn it off. Hopefully by this point you’re familiar enough with AI writing to know why I’m not hedging here. In the same way that no human mathematician would have thought to use Golod-Shafarevich class field towers to generate point sets, no human writer would ever write that sentence.

And this:

“People whose brains have been eaten by LLMs still maintain that ‘It’s not gradient, it’s texture’ or whatever is still their idea, expressed by the machine, but there is almost never any idea there at all. If your ideas were any good, you wouldn’t need to use the machine; as it stands your sub-literate scrawlings are the best thing about you. At least they’re yours.”

As someone who has always been on the execution side of the “Which wins: Good Ideas or Good Execution” argument, this last point really resonated. Yes, I know it’s naive to pretend AI isn’t here for good, but that is not what I am doing here — all I want to say is that the strongest personal argument I have against using Chat and Claude for creative work does not even relate to the actual end-product prose. To me, it’s more dangerous in the way it interferes with the practice of writing, which usually involves — I can’t even believe I have to say this — the thinking part of writing. The ruminating, the synthesizing, the processing of the physical world around us, even if the real world means figuring out what to eat in front of the Knicks game. You know how, in more conventional industries, we hear about AI threatening the middle man? To me, in my line of work, that middle man is my brain, and I guess I’d just like to keep it employed for as long as I can.

Support your writers.

Have a great week,
Jenny

Don’t you want to know what he’s working on?

P.S. Attention Book Lovers!

Here’s something fun: My guest for next week’s Substack Live will be none other than Andy Ward, Executive VP and Publisher of Random House, who some of you might know in this space as “my husband.” It will take place on June 11 at 2:00pm ET and we’ll be talking Father’s Day books, what he reads for pleasure when he’s not reading for work, what it’s like to edit writers as diverse as Yuval Harari, Lena Dunham, Elizabeth Strout, Ben Rhodes, Hisham Matar, and Eric Ripert, and anything else that comes up from your own brilliant questions. Please note this conversation (and the recording of the conversation) will be for paying subscribers only, so if you don’t want to miss it, you’ll need to pull the trigger on a subscription some time before we go live on June 11. Like, perhaps…now…?

Send me questions to ask Andy (jenny@dinneralovestory.com) or just comment below.

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