Three Things

Spring dinners, the happiest coffee mugs, the perfect novel

Greetings eaters and readers and a question: Are we still in stew season? Or: Is stew ever out of season? Just tell me whatever answer allows me to enjoy the above Moroccan Chickpea Stew for as long as possible. It’s the one I linked to last week, along with Pilar Guzmán’s instruction (call to arms?) to invite your friends for soup, and let me just say that it will not be hard to get people to your dinner table if this is what’s on the menu. Last week, we had plans to go out to dinner with some old friends, but once I saw how easy the recipe was, I pivoted at the last minute, telling them to just come over for a home-cooked meal instead, scraping up a few nuts for starters and passing around a bag of Quadratini cookies for dessert. Speaking of un-fussy entertaining, I implore you to read Lukas Volger’s excellent collection of dinner party tips which, he confesses, were “heavily informed” by the fact that he’s never owned a dishwasher. He, too, talks about how the compulsion to enterta…