Three Things

A bright winter salad, a hearty vegetarian tart, the virtues of boredom

Jan 21, 2025

Greetings eaters and readers! How’s everyone doing? Would anyone like to bake a batch of peanut butter cookies with me and eat every last one of them while watching Season 5 of All Creatures Great and Small? It is cold in New York and I spent the long weekend in a state of glorious hibernation, catching up with all the New Yorkers piling up on the coffee table (loved this profile of Lorne Michaels) as well as thinking about, shopping for, and cheffing up dishes that might lend a little brightness to bitter January days. Exhibit A: The shredded carrot-beet-kale number* you’re looking at up there, which is tossed with a yogurt-curry dressing, and which ends any argument about winter vegetables lacking in the inspiration department. Speaking of which! I talked all things winter cooking on Nicki Sizemore’s Mind, Body, Spirit FOOD podcast — namely how to bust out of a vegetable rut, how to transform cooking from a chore into a source of joy (so many people ask me for advice about this, it’s crazy), and how my family rituals have changed (and not changed) since we moved to the city. You’ll love Nicki’s holistic, generous worldview on food and health — not to mention the fun giveaway she’s offering: a free copy of The Weekday Vegetarians Get Simple. Head over there to listen and partake! And now, Three Things I’d like you to know about today…

*Your no-recipe recipe: It’s a 1:1:1 ratio of shredded carrots/beets/kale, topped with crushed spicy pistachios and tossed with yogurt-curry dressing. (In a bowl or jar whisk or shake: 1/2 cup plain yogurt, 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, 3 tablespoons olive oil, a little more than 1 tablespoon Madras curry powder, 1/4 teaspoon honey, s & p to taste.)

1. A Winter Vegetarian’s Best Friend

So what’s a vegetarian to do when the forecast and a skeletal greenmarket conspire to drive her into the arms of Marcella’s Bolognese or those Red-Wine Braised Short Ribs* of yesteryear? Well, a few years into the whole weekday vegetarian thing, I have discovered that a good starting point for addressing this problem — and I use that word loosely — is the humble mushroom. As far as I can tell, the whole lot of them, from supermarket buttons to speciality market maitakes, seem to be the only thing in the vegetable kingdom that can approximate the same kind of meaty umami I crave when the mercury dips, especially when they are cooked down to a concentrated crisp. Take the mushroom-forward Shepherd’s Pie I cooked up last winter in the face of a cold snap, which ended up becoming such a favorite that I snuck it into my cookbook only hours before the printing deadline. (With a few tweaks, the filling for that pie could easily double as a vegetarian bolognese.) Also in Get Simple? The Mushroom Soup on page 39, a hearty stew brightened by a spike of crème fraîche and dill, that might even give my Belgian beef stew a run for its money in the cozy category. Lastly, to be filed under “I’ve Never Meet a Tart I Didn’t Love,” there is this Mushroom-and-Chives take, a winter cousin of last spring’s Asparagus Tart, and just as straightforwardly stunning. Serve it with that shredded salad I opened with, and you’ve got yourself a go-to comfort food menu for winter.

Click here to download the recipe:

Dals Mushroom Tart

105KB ∙ PDF file

Download

*I know this is the opposite of the point here, but I am pretty sure that short rib recipe is the most popular we ever wrote for Bon Appétit

2. In today’s episode of “The Great Produce Rescue…”

…Jenny finds herself face-to-face with a shriveling Honeycrisp that has only hours left to live! Will she crumble under pressure and allow the apple’s ethylene emissions to destroy the rest of the fruit bowl? Or will she peel and slice that monster, fry it in butter with a hint of cinnamon and sugar, then add it to her morning oatmeal?

🚨 Spoiler alert! 🚨 This bowl of Oatmeal with Apple-Pie Apples was brought to you by Trader Joe’s instant oatmeal, a few chopped walnuts, a tablespoon-ish of whole milk, plus a drizzle of maple syrup tapped from a tree in my friend’s Vermont backyard.

💥 P.S. Eight Things to Do with Almost-Rotten Produce 💥

3. Optimizing Boredom

I’m not on TikTok, so I’ve been watching the drama of the past week unfold purely as a spectator, not as an interested party. But I have to say, I do enjoy the way it's dovetailing with the movement to cut back on our phone use, particularly social media apps. It felt liberating to delete my Twitter account a few months ago, and I only log on to Facebook during natural disasters to confirm friends are safe. (Or, ok fine, sometimes to see if a knot of friendship candle holder has miraculously surfaced on Facebook Marketplace.) But instagram is a different story. I am in a constant battle with the app — even though I am only sporadically sharing on the platform, I resent the way it so insidiously sucks me down a time-sucking vortex as a consumer. I resent how it becomes the default click for me when I’m in line at the coffee shop, or when I’m waiting to meet someone, or when I’m bored.

Boredom: Where has it gone and why isn’t there more of it? This is usually where the conversation ends up when thought leaders discuss social media, the most notorious of offenders that prevent us from sitting with ourselves, from just being. MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle, who writes about technology and social development, has long argued that embracing boredom is crucial for cultivating a rich inner life, and therefore, happiness. “Boredom is your imagination calling,” says Brené Brown, seemingly the opposite of what I was taught as a kid growing up in an analog world, where an idle mind was the devil’s workshop. And in Kate Lindsay’s “You might just have to be bored,” (via Anne Helen Petersen’s latest must-read “The Social Media Sea Change”), she reminds us:

Boredom is when life happens…..Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off, respond to the text you’ve left on read. Boredom is when you bring a book to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.

Do you have enough boredom in your life? Have you cut back on social media in a significant way? I want to hear about it.