Three Things

Fish cakes, my new nonstick pan, and tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes

Greetings eaters and readers, this week’s newsletter comes at you from beautiful Vermont, where we hope to squeeze a few more vacation days out of summer. Would you look at that golden late summer light!? (Photo taken at Philo Ridge Farm, and as always, subscribers will get the full itinerary download on where we’re staying and wine-ing and dining). For those of you, who like me, are sending off kids to school in the next week or two, I love this ritual to ease whatever jitters there may be. (Or there’s always cake!) Lastly, I talked with Peter Barrett about the evolution of my family dinner table, being a Weekday Vegetarian, and the one vegetable I think people need to eat more of. (How about that for a teaser?) Here are your weekly Three Things…

1. At the risk of over-tomato-ing you…

Over 1300 posts acrosss ten years on Dinner: A Love Story, and somehow, not until now have I ever written up the most classic, most satisfying thing you can do with tomatoes this time of year: Make a fresh tomato sauce and toss with pasta. Do you even need a recipe so simple? I don’t know, but not giving it to you after all these years feels a little like I’ve handed you a bunch of jewelry to wear to the party, but never a black dress. (Paying subscribers already got this “recipe” as part of their Meal Plan for the Week, but I wanted to make sure the wider world had access to it as well.) I also wrote up five more ideas for corn and tomato recipes over at Cup of Jo. In summation: You should be covered on the tomato front.

Or ignore everything I just wrote and just caprese-on-repeat for as long as you can.(Add a crusty baguette and that’s dinner.)

2. Fish Cakes for The Win

No breaking news on this one except to say that once I realized I could make fish cakes out of leftover flounder or sole, I started buying too much fish on purpose. The recipe was in my flagship book, Dinner: A Love Story (but also here!) and I served them last week with super fresh market greens and (surprise!) tomatoes. Other easy fish dinners: Butter-fried salmon, 10-minute spicy shrimp with yogurt, and pan-fried fish with slaw.

3. Since I know you’ll ask…which nonstick?

Someone gave me the Always Pan last year as a gift, and while I loved the idea of it — one pan to suit all kitchen tasks — it just…didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped. I imagine the poor pan feels the way a lot of new mothers feel: Like they are doing a hundred things at once but not doing any of it at 100%. Initially I loved it for eggs, but the honeymoon was short, a mere five or six months later, I was breaking out the abrasives to clean up a round of migas tacos. A month ago I replaced it with the Tramontina 10-inch recommended by Wirecutter and so far so good. I will report back on this one.

Reminder

Paying subscribers have access to bonus content like menu plans for entertaining and weeknight dinner line-ups (I always include shopping lists), travel itineraries, live discussion threads and bonus recipes, like the above summer pizza landing in inboxes later this week. Just press this button to join the fun…

Have a great week!
Jenny