Where Are We Going?
The easiest sheet pan fish and potatoes, anything fritters, pasta alla vodka, and the black beans that are always in my freezer.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cooking, food content, my business, this newsletter, and substack as a platform in general. I’m about six months into posting every week and I’ll spare you what it sounds like in my head at 3am, but the outcome is that I’m going to make this newsletter free for everyone. If you bought a yearly subscription, thank you, I so appreciate your faith in me. Keep an eye out for a prorated refund. If you’re a monthly subscriber you’ll simply stop getting charged. Why am I doing this, you ask? I’m still figuring this whole thing out. I work hard on this newsletter and I want more people to see it and to cook from it. I also want to focus more on in-person gatherings. While I love to write, I really, really love to cook for people and talking with people in person. Making this newsletter free allows me more easily to toggle my time and attention between this online space and what I hope to build in my community without feeling guilty. So! The plan is still to keep going with four recipes and a shopping list each week, but if I take a week off here and there, at least I’m not letting my paid subscribers down. I would hate that.
Again, as always, thanks for being here. Now onto the food : ).
Quick: Pasta alla Vodka
Deb Perelman’s recipe is perfect. I make it basically the same way she does—her one pot method is unbeatable. She cooks the pasta, and then drains it and builds the sauce in the same pot. That said, I also include instructions for if you want to make the sauce without relying on the pasta, for if you want to serve it with beans, for example. It’s all delicious.
Sheet Pan: Roasted Cod and Potatoes with Roasted Tomato Sauce
This recipe should be in everyone’s summer rotation. It’s simple, elegant, light, requires very little hands on time, and is so flavorful. The fish and potatoes are good on their own with a squeeze of lemon, but a punchy sauce is welcome here. The Everything Green Goddess from last week is great, as is any salsa verde or tartar sauce, but I really love this roasted tomato sauce that you can throw in the oven at the same time as potatoes.
Make Ahead: Black Beans
These black beans have been a sub recipe in a lot of previous posts—for sopes, tlayudas, tacos. Pretty much every time I make them I make double and bank half in the freezer. They’re easy to make, but even easier to have in the freezer for quick quesadillas, breakfast tacos, rice and beans, or black bean soup (just thin with chicken or vegetable broth). When I talk to people about prepping for the week, I suggest making things like these beans, which take very little time, but are such an accessible jumping off point for a meal when you hit that 5 o’clock crush.
Wild Card: Anything Fritters
I was listening to the podcast Hard Fork last week and Kevin Roose and Casey Newton were interviewing Pete Wells, the former New York Times restaurant critic. He was talking about how chefs are embracing AI—as an idea sounding board, come up with new recipes, to learn about different ingredients, as a tool to push their creativity. The other night I was standing in front of the fridge, looking at what was in there and was uninspired. I opened ChatGPT and wrote: What can I make with leftover corn and rice? It came up with a list of good ideas including fried rice, rice and corn chowder, quesadillas, stuffed peppers, and the recipe I landed on, rice and corn fritters. Fritters, like all pancakes, are kind of annoying, because you have to stand there and fry them, but they kept well in the oven until we were ready to eat. The real magic of them is that you can throw pretty much anything in there and you’ll have a savory, warm, crispy, vegetable filled pancake. These were great on their own, but they’d be even better with the Everything Green Goddess, just saying…
