Hello!
Here I am, here you are, here are some ideas and suggestions about what to make for dinner this week.
What I made for dinner
Cheddar grits with roasted mushrooms, kale and a fried egg: This started with a Bon Appetit recipe for cheesy grits with poached eggs, greens and bacon. It’s perfectly fine, but more helpful as a template: grits + greens + eggs + something crispy.
Grits: I kept these as-is with cheddar, but choose your own cheese adventure. Swiss, pepperjack, parmesan…anything that’ll melt.
Sauteed greens: You can sub in whatever greens and alliums you have on hand. The recipe calls for swiss chard and shallots; I used lacinato kale and garlic. The only non-negotiable here is the splash of vinegar, which provides much-needed acidity (unless you want to go ham on hot sauce).
Eggs: Instead of poaching, I just fried them quick until they were over easy — you get the same runny egg without having to futz with swirling water baths and baking soda and prayers to a higher deity that you won’t mess it up.
Something crispy: I do like to use bacon here but didn’t have any on hand this week. Instead, I roasted some shiitake mushrooms tossed with oil at 425° for about 10 minutes. We were delighted to find that the mushrooms actually came out tasting a bit smoky and baconlike. I’ve also made this and thrown other roasted vegetables in — cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, etc. Good for cleaning out whatever is lurking at the back of your fridge!
Tagliatelle with truffle butter and seared scallops: This recipe is from Ina Garten’s “Back To Basics,” one of the first cookbooks I ever bought and, depending on the week, the cookbook I’d be most likely to grab in a fire. It is decadent and special but also…very basic! It’s six ingredients and takes maybe 10 minutes to pull together once your water comes to a boil. However, the recipe is so simple that you do need the good stuff. Wegmans sells a truffle finishing butter that you might be tempted to grab, but it doesn’t have actual truffle pieces on the ingredient list. Better to seek it out (I use D’Artagnan) than think that the dish was lackluster or suspiciously perfumed by “truffle essence.” I served the tagliatelle with seared scallops.
Lemony shrimp and bean stew: Fast and delicious, but you’ll need to bulk it up if you want four adult dinner-sized servings (a lesson I learned the last time I made it). I doubled the beans and added half a bunch of chopped kale. I’ve never taken the recipe’s recommendation to serve it over cooked spaghetti or rigatoni (I usually just include a ciabatta sidecar), but don’t let that stop you from achieving your dreams.
Pressure cooker chicken and rice with broccoli (no photo, sorry): This one is for the Instant Pot folks. The best part of this recipe is the rice, which uses the broth that’s leftover from making the chicken as its cooking liquid. It gets a little slick from the fat and takes on the chicken flavor while the meat broils in the oven. That step is also a great point to include some vegetables — I just threw some chopped broccoli on the pan with the chicken to crisp. Don’t neglect to include a seasoning blend here, or it WILL be bland. Penzey’s lemon pepper is great.
What I made that wasn’t for dinner:
Pączki! This was my second year making pączki for Fat Tuesday. Pączki are rich, yeasted Polish doughnuts filled with fruit preserves or jam (usually raspberry). I made two kinds: a maple coffee cream version with a dark espresso dough and meyer lemon curd version with a traditional dough. They were just okay this year — the crumb wasn’t as fluffy as I would have liked, and I definitely doubled the butter in one batch on accident — but I mean…they’re still doughnuts. I’m gonna eat ‘em.
All of the recipes except one were from “Sister Pie: The Recipes and Stories of a Big-Hearted Bakery in Detroit” by Lisa Ludwinski. Detroit has a huge pączki scene and Polish population (it’s where my grandpa grew up and my great-grandma is buried). The meyer lemon curd was from Alice Waters’s book “The Art of Simple Food.” This is the most reliable curd recipe I’ve found, having been burned by others before. I received a comically large meyer lemon (like, grapefruit size) in my produce box this week and used that.
Other dinner ephemera from this week:
In this house we do not include the Oxford comma in our bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches
Okay, twist my arm, I will eat the Big Mac Salat parfait (trifle?)
Programming notes:
Several of you made the braised short ribs from Issue #5 and it warmed my heart. Please @ me (has anyone ever said that in earnest?) if you make something suggested in the newsletter. I want to know how it went!
Also: I have questions!!! Namely, how can this newsletter better serve you? More weeknight dinners? More project dinners? Do you really want me to make the TikTok feta pasta? Do you have a specific request? How can this hotline help you? Leave a comment, reply here or DM me on Instagram.