Three Things

Solo dinners for beginners, my book talk with Patrick Ryan, and how to actually enjoy cooking

Nov 11, 2025

Greetings, friends! Thank you to everyone who sent along recipes for buckeyes in honor of my book talk with Buckeye author Patrick Ryan, which is happening this Thursday, November 13, at 7:00pm ET. (Who knew there were so many different ways to make such a simple dessert?) Please join us! Patrick and I will be hanging out in my kitchen, dipping peanut butter balls into melted chocolate, and talking about his novel (it’s so good!) and anything else that comes up. Don’t forget you’ll need the Substack app to watch it live. In other pressing news, I was on jury duty last week downtown which gave me just the excuse I needed to try the hot and sour wontons at Chinatown’s Deluxe Green Bo, and to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. Here are your Three Things…

1. A Quick, Healthy Solo Dinner

My nieces came over for dinner last night — I made them a big pot of hearty harira, which turned out to be a good call for the first legitimately chilly night of fall here in New York. Both of them are in their early twenties and live on their own in the city — one is a first-year med student, the other is a teacher — and in between tales of third-grade antics and pig heart dissections, the topic, naturally, came around to dinner. Namely, how do they cook healthy meals for themselves when they have limited time to even think about dinner, let alone execute it when they come home after a long, exhausting day? Sadly, I know way more about this topic than human anatomy or phonetics, so I promised I’d devote the next entry in my Weekly Meal Plan series to this exact dilemma. But in the meantime, I wanted to share a recipe for the solo meal shown above that I’ve been favoring lately: Curried Lentils with Yogurt and Tamarind Sauce. It has three important elements: A quick-cooking protein (red lentils); a no-chop, no-wash, ready-to-go green side dish (the avocado); and a store-bought flavor hero (Maggi tamarind sauce, available at H Mart or online), which takes the whole operation from solid to special. P.S. There is a more official recipe in The Weekday Vegetarians (page 162), written to serve four. Definitely stay tuned for more on this topic.

Curried Red Lentils with Yogurt & Tamarind Sauce

Double this if you want to pack leftovers for lunch.

In a medium soup pot, add 1 tablespoon neutral oil over medium-low heat. Add 2 tablespoons onion (chopped), 1 teaspoon fresh ginger (minced), 1 small garlic clove (minced), salt, and pepper to taste, and cook until the vegetables have softened, about 2 minutes. Stir in 1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder (regular or hot) and cook until aromatic and toasty, another minute. Add 3/4 cup dried red lentils, stirring until they are coated with oil. Add enough vegetable or chicken stock to cover the lentils by about an inch and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, stirring occasionally, and cook until the lentils are just softened and starting to lose their shape, 10 to 12 minutes. If they look too gloppy, add a tablespoon or so of water to loosen. Serve topped with plain yogurt, sliced avocado, and Maggi tamarind sauce.

If you’re cooking for more than one this week, how about: Vegetarian Pot Pie (above), Cheater’s Mac & Cheese, or my addictive Peanutty Cabbage and Tofu, which has a more-than-decent shot of turning tofu skeptics into fans?

2. Forget Half Birthdays, Happy 19/365th Birthday!

Last week, I scripted this fractional birthday message onto a store-bought seven-layer cake for a friend because I had forgotten her birthday 19 days earlier, and felt incredibly guilty about it. She was delighted, and is super easygoing anyway, so didn’t even care that I missed it. (Or so she claimed!) The takeaway here is not that you should forget a dear friend’s big day — it’s more a doubling-down on my belief (er, justification) that there is no deadline on expressing birthday appreciation for someone, no matter how late you are, and it certainly helps when that expression of appreciation is delivered via baked good. Remember: Cake is an edible greeting card. P.S. New Yorkers: William Greenberg makes an A-plus, old-school, nothing fancy, perfect seven-layer cake, if that’s your thing. IT IS SO MY THING.

3. Weekend Food Adventures OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cooking

We didn’t have plans on Friday night — at least none that involved reservations or tickets or seeing other people — so I took the opportunity to ask myself: What kind of dinner project have I been meaning to undertake? As you know by now, simple weeknight cooking has always been my bread-and-butter (hahaha), but I really believe that project cooking — weekend cooking — has been a crucial part of why I still actually enjoy making dinner all these years later. Like more than almost anything else I can think of. It reminded me of something I wrote in my second book, in a chapter called “Keep-the-Spark-Alive Dinners.”

For a second here, I want you to think of your daily commute to work. The kind of commute when you have a nine-o’clock meeting and the freeway is backed up. Or think about the after-school pinball-driving to ballet then soccer then back to ballet again. In other words, think about when your traveling is not at all about the journey. It is singularly about the destination—and getting to your destination as efficiently as possible. Maybe even with the right cleats, leotard, and hairbands on the right kids.
Now compare that kind of driving to the kind where you get in the car for a summer road trip and set off to explore a new town: Maybe you’ll pull into a scenic overlook to take in a mountain view; or uncover a dilapidated seafood shack down a dune road that you just know by its hand-painted sign will be home to the best lobster rolls in New England; or maybe you’ll find a great old bookstore—one with some vintage Donald Duck comics—when really, all you were really searching for was a single espresso to power you through the rest of the afternoon.
Technically speaking, both of these scenarios can be slotted under the category of “driving,” just as preparing weeknight dinners and weekend dinners both fall under the category of “cooking.” But only the off-roading scenario has the power to remind you how freaking fantastic— how restorative—it can be to take your time, to open yourself up to exploration and discovery, to switch up the routine every now and then. That is how I want you to think of cooking on a Saturday or Sunday. If the goal of weeknight cooking is to get food to the table as fast as possible so that you can sit down unscathed, ready to listen to your children regale you with tales of who won wall ball (and, even more salacious, who cheated!), then the goal of weekend recipes is to remind you that dinner is not just about eating. It’s about the process of making dinner, of a reminder that dinner doesn’t only have to be a soulless slog; it can be enjoyable, and it can be savored. I’m convinced this is how you prevent falling out of love with cooking when kids come along—how you keep the spark alive.

What do you think? For me, on this particular Friday, I wanted to try replicating the cavatelli I learned how to make from scratch in Puglia. I’d serve it with Marcella’s Bolognese, because what is better than having Marcella’s Bolognese simmering down for a few hours on a fall afternoon? The punchline of course is that It took for-f’ing-ever to make just one portion of the cavatelli, so the two of us ended up supplementing with a bowl of store-bought fusilli, then traded back and forth when it came time to eat. But still! That one bowl was divine, probably because I made the pasta from an Italian durum wheat flour I tracked down at Eataly — and I dare you to take a field trip to Eataly (or choose-your-own specialty market) and not be motivated to really cook. So what are you making this weekend?

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?