Three Things

Dinner ideas for tonight, egg sandwich trickery, the great Laurie Colwin

Greetings eaters and readers! Hope you had a nice weekend. On Saturday, we had our friends Hisham and Diana over for dinner and made them our old-school red-wine braised short ribs along with a springy slivered snap pea salad and chickpea fries. Breaking news: Short ribs are f’ing great! Then Sunday — omg Sunday! I don’t know about you, but I’m still not quite over that Succession episode! No spoilers, don’t worry, but I just simply cannot believe how stunning the acting was across the board. My Monday ritual during Succession season is to listen to The Ringer’s recap on my morning run, and it’s saying something that the podcast actually makes me enjoy those painful (and painfully slow) three miles — or it at least keeps me sufficiently distracted from them.

In other news: Happy publication day to More Than Cake, by New York pastry chef and food-world darling Natasha Pickowicz — Tri-State readers, are you going to her Big Bake Sale in Brooklyn this Sunday, April 16? Seems like every major player in the city (or at least those who work with sugar and flour everyday) will be serving up goods that will make it worth the trip. You can get tickets here. And now, enough with the wind-up, your Three Things…

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1. A Few Ideas for Dinner

I’ll be making Priya Krishna’s Matar Paneer tonight (minus paneer, plus tofu, perhaps) and just the thought of it is powering me through the work day. But if that’s not your thing consider Jeanine Donofrio’s Coconut Rice Bowl with Brussels and Avocado, which is so easy to throw together; or Hannah Che’s Cold Noodle & Cabbage Salad, which, here in New York at least, sounds just about right for our first week that really feels like spring; or Orecchiette with Peas, Beans (and OK a Little Sausage) if you’re squabbling with any vegetarian hold-outs at the table; there’s also my no-cream Creamy Asparagus Soup with Croutons on page 74 of The Weekday Vegetarians; or simple butter-fried salmon with roasted vegetables; Or lastly, bestly, maybe you left Easter dinner with the world’s greatest doggie bag like I did, i.e. a few slices of baked ham wrapped in foil? It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to dice into small cubes and scramble into eggs with Parmesan and chives. Dinner worthy? Absolutely! Though I can’t promise you I won’t pivot and go for a classic split pea soup with ham, the un-toppable recipe for which is on the back of every sack of split green peas sold at every Main Street supermarket.

2. Three Egg-and-Cheese Tricks

When I was an editor at Real Simple a hundred years ago, a big part of the job was solving everyday problems for our readers. Problem: I can’t find a pair of black pants that fit. (Solution: Here are five affordable options organized by body type!) Problem: I don’t want entertain because it’s too much trouble to clean the house. (Solution: Crash-clean all your clutter into the closets!) This was delicate, cerebral stuff, and we had to be very careful never to present a problem that the reader didn’t know she had in the first place. I bring this up because…Is it just me? Or have you been searching (and searching!) for the exact techniques to optimize your egg-and-cheese breakfasts? Only recently have I discovered these three crucial moves…

Problem: How do you do everything in one pan? No broiler, no toaster, no baking sheets, just a skillet.
Solution: From Molly Yeh’s book Home is Where The Eggs Are, I learned that you can sprinkle grated cheese onto your single whisked egg (left photo), which, once melted, will act as an adhesive for the tortilla that you press on top (center photo), then you can flip the whole thing over (right photo) to get the tortilla nice and crispy. The tortilla acts as a buffer, which allows you to turn the heat up and get it crispy without affecting the tenderness of the eggs. Remove everything from the pan, add your salt, pepper, and hot sauce on top, if desired, and fold it in half. (Note: The pan only needs the smallest bit of oil — use cooking spray if you have it, or a drop or two of canola oil, spread around the pan with a pastry brush.) P.S. I love the size and pliability of Trader Joe’s Corn-and-Wheat tortillas, which is what you see in the photo.

Problem: How do you make sure the egg and cheese don’t spill out the sides when you slice or bite into the sandwich?
Solution: Wrap it in parchment paper, NYC deli-style (as shown), and slice the whole thing in half (in its parchment wrapping) using a serrated edge knife.

Problem: How do you time it so the cheese is melted and the egg is cooked exactly to desired tenderness? As you might’ve learned the hard way, the difference between tender eggs and uncooked eggs can sometimes be only a few nano seconds.
Solution: The “crepe” technique. When the egg is that thin, it’s easy to eyeball and therefore easier to control.

Did I just make your life easier or harder? Maybe don’t answer.

3. From the Laurie Colwin Archive

The legendary novelist and food essayist Laurie Colwin, who died suddenly at age 48 in 1992, has a never-before-published (apparently autobiographical) short story in The New Yorker this week. While I enjoyed the piece, I was mostly grateful that it inspired me to bust out my old copy of Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, which is how I was first introduced to Colwin — and how you should introduce yourself to her if you’ve never met before. The book is a collection of humorous essays about real cooking — think kitchen fails, picky dinner guests, small apartment cooking — and each essay ends with an unpretentious, highly cookable recipe. For anyone who has a read a food blog in the last two decades, this probably doesn’t sound terribly innovative, but let’s consider the fact that Colwin wrote Home Cooking in 1988, when dinner parties still meant candelabras and white linen tablecloths, and almost 15 years before Julie Powell decided to keep a web-log (let’s call it a blog!) setting the stage for aspiring “everyday” food writers (including yours truly) everywhere. In other words, Colwin was way ahead of her time. Here are a few favorite Home Cooking quotes I was reminded of in my re-read:

“Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.”

“How depressing it is to open a cookbook whose first chapter is devoted to equipment?”

“Many of my closest friends are sick of my baked chicken and even when I point out that I now a million variations on this theme, they rightly point out that they have had them all, and more than once. But when the chips are down, the spirit is exhausted, and the body hungry, the same old thing is a great consolation.”

And probably her most well-known: “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” If I was the tattooing type, I’d have that first sentence emblazoned on my forearm.

Have a great week!

Love,

Jenny