Made This For Dinner, Issue #9
Broccoli aglio e olio, braised beans with bacon and winter vegetables
Hello!
While this is technically issue #9, this is my first edition of Wow, I Made Like Two Things For Dinner This Week (and That’s Fine!). Sponsored by Chipotle (not sponsored by Chipotle but please know I would take that opportunity in a heartbeat).
I was texting a friend earlier this week and mentioned that writing last week’s newsletter felt like a slog. That mood trickled over into cooking too — I was in a funk. Food happened, sure, but it was mostly bowls of Cheerios, leftovers from the freezer or takeout.
So! Here are the two dinner recipes I did manage to tackle this week, along with a promise that I’ll be back in proper form next Sunday.
What I made for dinner
Broccoli aglio e olio: I watched Carla Lalli Music make this on Instagram and found my interest piqued. It looked exactly something I used to order at a local restaurant growing up that I’ve been chasing ever since (…even though I live approximately 35 minutes away and could very well make the drive to pick it up) called broccoli and ziti. As you likely guessed, it’s a very simple dish. What it comes down to is how you cook the ingredients. Do allow yourself the pleasure of tender broccoli here, both the stems and florets. There’s a time and a place where snap and crunch is called for, and this ain’t it. What you want is something more akin to a braised broccoli, like Alice Waters’s long-cooked broccoli or Roy Finamore's broccoli cooked forever. The dish is great as explained, but I would also encourage you to add a few glugs of white wine and let it cook off with the oil and pasta water just before serving. I included a few sauteed shrimp on top and called it a day.
Braised beans with bacon and winter vegetables: This was a pretty simple recipe from Melissa Clark’s cookbook '“Dinner.” She has you crisp some bacon in dutch oven, saute diced parsnips, celery root and aromatics in the rendered fat, throw in a pound of beans, cover it all with stock and then let your pot hang out in the oven for about 2-3 hours at 325°. Once the beans are cooked through, you stir in a bunch of greens and drizzle everything with sherry vinegar. While I can’t vouch for this recipe specifically, the closest thing I could find to it online was Clark’s red wine pinto beans with smoky bacon. It also sounds good!
What I made that wasn’t for dinner
I had a cara cara orange languishing on the counter so, after watching a few how-to videos, I decided to try supreming citrus for the first time. These segments were my best efforts (or least pithy). I served them over a quick chia seed pudding made with almond milk, maple syrup and toasted slivered almonds.
Other dinner ephemera from this week:
How the Cookbooks of 2020 Tell the Stories of Our Pandemic Kitchens: I’m not surprised to find Ina Garten’s Modern Comfort Food at #2 here, given its Nostradamus-like prediction of a title, but I am still actively perplexed about who is cooking from those Magnolia books.
Now, here’s an easy dinner idea you will certainly not regret:
Our first cookbook club meeting of 2021 is tonight (a virtual class with Smita’s Cookery!) and got my copy of Simply Julia in the mail yesterday so I’m starting to feel the pull to get back in the kitchen. See? It’s all coming back to me now, just like Celine said it would. Talk to you next week!