Good morning. I had a dream I was in Dan Tana’s in Los Angeles and the place was packed. There was no coronavirus pandemic, just sweating martinis and jovial laughter, and I persuaded my guest, to order the shrimp parmigiana: best thing on the menu, exactly the sort of thing you’d never make at home. The shrimp was delicious in my dream, but those words — “at home” — brought reality into my consciousness. Things went circular. I woke up in a sweat.
I miss complicated restaurant dishes, the ones a single cook works on for the whole shift: quick-frying the shrimp in batter, napping it in tomato sauce and mozz, running the dish under the salamander broiler so that it goes leopard-spotted at exactly the moment the shrimp’s perfectly cooked. You can make that 30 times an evening for a couple months and shrug: It’s easy to make. Do it once at home, and you’ll see the lie in the sentiment. It’s not.
So I’ll wait for my shrimp parmigiana, my double consommé, my Peking duck. We’ll be able to eat those again, someday, I hope. In the meantime: Simplicity, ease, deliciousness squared.
It’s neat. Setting yourself up for a lo-fi night of cooking — oven-roasted chicken shawarma, say, with a side dish of charred shallots with labneh — can actually hint at some of the joys we experienced in restaurants, when we could go to them. A vegan cheeseburger, courtesy of J. Kenji López-Alt, could remind you of In-N-Out, back when you ate meat, back when you could sit in a booth at the shop on Sepulveda near LAX, first or final meal in Los Angeles. A Screaming Eagle cheesesteak sub might take you back to college dining halls, to how you could eat then, as if for two people or three. Steak au poivre from David Tanis? Is this now Raoul’s?
There are other recipes I’d like to make real soon. Jerrelle Guy’s any-fruit drop biscuits (above), for instance. And David’s pasta with fresh tomato sauce and ricotta. Not to mention Melissa Clark’s pasta with fried lemons and chile flakes. I could do those back to back!
(By the way, none of this is to say a cooking project can’t be enjoyable right now. Angela Dimayuga’s beef empanadas prove that plain. So, too, Marcus Samuelsson’s quinoa with broccoli, cauliflower and toasted coconut, which is only laborious in the shopping. Try those, as well.)
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Now, it’s nothing to do with buttermilk or hand pies, and I won’t bother you with the back story that led me to the site, but via The New York Public Library I came across this digitized collection of old New York magazines, dating back to the title’s birth in 1968, another watershed difficult year for America. There is some really good browsing and reading to be had there.
Speaking of magazines, Essence turned 50 this year, and its editors have put together a marvelous hub that lets you explore its history through the lens of its covers and cover stars.
Finally, in case you missed it, here’s A.O. Scott on Wallace Stegner, the first installment in a series he’s writing for The Times on American writers, some well known, some forgotten, some overlooked. It’s very good. I’ll be back on Wednesday.
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June 22, 2020 at 09:42PM
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What to Cook Right Now - The New York Times
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