Three Things

Three pots worth the $$, a book about flavor pairings, and a few quick dinners you'll want to make tonight

Greetings readers and eaters! Hope you had a great weekend. Our neighbors Lori and Jon had us over for a barbecue on Friday and the menu was A-plus-summer-perfect: Lori’s mother’s burger recipe (which involved soft-grilled onions and Peter Lugar steak sauce), roasted potatoes, watermelon-feta-arugula salad, and some fancy ice cream sandwiches for dessert. (Meanwhile, on Saturday night, we went to a wedding where they served Chipwiches for dessert — two makes a trend, right?) In other news, I’m loving Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast Wiser Than Me where the actress interviews older women about their careers and so much more — I guess since we’re here on this newsletter, I’d suggest starting with Ruth Reichl, who talks about the complicated relationship she had with her mother and her process for food writing, which I naturally found fascinating. Also, PS, no one knows how to drop an F-Bomb quite like JLD. Here is your Three Things weekly dispatch…

1. This Week in Family Dinners

I was delighted to see that Hannah Che’s Vegan Chinese Kitchen won a James Beard Award in the Vegetable-Focused Cooking category — my favorite category — and it reminded me that it’s been way too long since I’ve made her 20-minute Cold Vermicelli and Cabbage Salad. (Congrats to all the winners!) Other recipes vying for family dinner honors this week: Soy-Maple Glazed Chicken Platter (above); or Savory Chickpea Pancakes (Socca) with Vegetables; Pizza Salad with Beans; or Korean Pancakes with Shrimp or Vegetables (scroll down for that one); or Braised Beans with Pesto and Burrata or the lovely little number in the next item below…

2. Three Pots Going Strong Since I Got Married in 1997

My brother Phil and I were talking about cookware over the weekend — it’s a favorite topic of his because he has a Manhattan kitchen with limited storage, so he needs his pots and pans to really earn their keep. This is probably why we both fell hard for the Always Pan when it came out a few years ago. That thing had such promise — I mean, who doesn’t want a pan that can do every kitchen task? The only problem, as I’ve noted here before, was that it didn’t do any one thing well, and I can’t be having that in my line of work, and frankly neither can he, since he is feeding a teenager, read: he’s cooking constantly. Anyway, our discussion and review of various fails over the years (how many nonsticks have we burned through!?) made me appreciate the stalwarts of my kitchen even more. I’m talking about the Le Creuset Dutch Oven, the Dansk Kobenstyle soup and rice pot, and the All-Clad deep skillet, shown above (with that beautiful patina!) doing its best work on Priya Krishna’s Matar Paneer. Between the three of those pots, plus a Lodge 10-inch cast-iron skillet, 90% of kitchen tasks are covered. Yes, they’re expensive (not the Lodge) but they last forever, they perform their respective tasks at a very high level, and I’ve grown very sentimentally attached to them, since, they are all pots I registered for when I got married 26 years ago, or inherited from my mom soon after.

3. What Goes with What? A Flavor Thesaurus

Niki Segnit’s 2010 The Flavor Thesaurus, an encyclopedia explaining why certain foods compliment each other, has been studied and praised by culinary students and enthusiasts the world over. And now, she’s come out with a second volume: The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors, which focuses primarily on “plant-led pairings” and the staples of a vegetarian diet, something I’m already finding incredibly helpful as I develop recipes for volume two of The Weekday Vegetarians. But you don’t have to be a cookbook writer or a culinary student to want Segnit’s book front-row center in the kitchen library. This weekend, after I picked up a pound of sunchokes at the market, I scanned the pages and learned that both lemon and Parm dance well with the tuber’s special brand of sweetness. It’s not just about vegetables. All the vegetarian’s VIPs are discussed here — lentils, tofu, every kind of bean, miso, grains — and as with Segnit’s first volume, this one draws on the collective wisdom of chefs, food writers, historians, and flavor scientists, “as well as adding my own tasting notes and recalling the times and places I’ve experienced some notable flavor pairings.” This might make it sound very homeworky, but Segnit, who writes for the London Times and The Guardian, has such an entertaining voice, that it feels almost like you’re reading a novel. An extremely practical novel. Here are a few examples:

A whipped feta & pomegranate eggplant dish I’m working on for the next book

On Pomegranate & Eggplant: If you’re an eggplant hawker and don’t carry around a drawstring bag of pomegranate arils [seeds], you’re missing a trick. The little jewels don’t exactly make eggplant pretty – what could? – but they do distract from the idea that you’re eating old slippers, in a way that green flecks of parsley and pine nuts can’t. Selin Kiazim, the chef-owner of Oklava, a Turkish- Cypriot restaurant in London, notes how well pomegranate molasses works with food cooked over charcoal: it both matches the bitter smokiness and takes it off in a fruitier, sweet-and- sour direction.

On Miso: Some leading authorities on miso maintain that the complexity of its flavor makes it hard for Westerners to describe. I’d beg to differ. It’s hard to describe the flavor of a zucchini, but miso is so flavorful that it’s hard to stop describing it – you might detect barnyard, nutty, brown-butter, caramelized, exotic-fruit (banana, mango, pineapple), olive, briny, boozy or chestnut-blossom notes.

On Chive & Tomato: Tomato is more frequently paired with headier, spicier herbs like basil and oregano. Chive makes a lighter pairing, which is ideal if you have gloriously ripe tomatoes. Make a salad as fetching as a cottage garden by adding the lightly onion-flavored purple blooms along with the snips of green. Chive is the cheery member of the allium family; it never makes you cry. In The Herbs, a children’s book by Michael Bond, all the characters, human and animal, are named after herbs. Dill is a scatty dog, Sage is a sleepy owl and the Chives are a gaggle of mischievous children, which is just right.

Even the table of contents reads like poetry: It’s organized by chapters like “Zesty Woody” and “Nutty Milky” and “Floral Fruity” and “Caramel Roasted” and “Flower Meadow.” You can get the gist from that flavor wheel shown up top. Check out the book here.

Photo: Jill Cavanagh

P.S. My Sicily round-up drops on Friday for subscribers, and meanwhile I am only ever eating homemade-right-in-front-of-me ricotta from now on. (Above, a farm in Vizzini in the Sicilian countryside.)

Have a great week!

Jenny

P.S.

Reminder! Every recipe you read about in this newsletter lives permanently in my searchable archive. («Please click that link if you never have before; you’ll love what you see!) You can also always email me, Jenny AT dinneralovestory DOT com if you can’t find what you’re looking for.