Hey!
What a week. After a few chats with my newsletter brain trust, I decided to change the send date to Sunday instead of Monday with the hope that it can better serve you as you plan out your week. That is, if planning is your jam — I also salute the seat-of-your-pants-ers out there.
What I made for dinner
Herbed chicken and spinach meatballs. I was trying to hold off on using this word until I gained your trust, but…these meatballs are moist! Sorry. At least I didn’t call them damp?
Tanis suggests using four slices of plain white sandwich bread. Instead of drying them out and pulsing them down to crumbs, I just tore the untoasted bread up into lazy bits. The result was little pockets of custard-soft bread with the texture of Thanksgiving stuffing, or the interior of a bread pudding. So moist! Poultry-based meatballs are usually on the drier side so this was a welcome discovery.
I served the meatballs alongside roasted potatoes with garlic and tamarind. Contrary to the meatball recipe’s claim that there is “no need for a sauce,” I am of the opinion that a little sauce never hurt anyone (see: last week’s newsletter). Thankfully the roasted potatoes had a tamarind-date dressing (also featured in Nik Sharma’s “The Flavor Equation”) that made enough to drizzle on both dishes.
Other things I made for dinner:
Rice noodle salad bowls: This was a riff on Andrea Nguyen’s rice noodle salad bowls with nuoc cham from “Vietnamese Food Any Day.” If I wasn’t worried about getting sick of it, I’d probably make these bowls once a week.* It’s bright, textured and accepting of whatever vegetables and herbs you have handy. I had a flank steak in the fridge so I grabbed that and threw it in my sous vide cooker (like Ron Popeil, you can set it and forget it).
Pressure cooker pork chile verde: This is a big win if you’re looking to gain more confidence in the kitchen. The instructions are clear, there’s minimal prep and the result is a ton of fork-tender pork with plenty of sauce to spoon over rice.
*To All the Recipes I Loved Before (I Ran Them Into the Ground): kimchi fried rice, Greek pasta with lamb, zucchini, and feta and lemon pepper chicken orzo. Off the menu but not forgotten.
What I’m reading:
This article from Tejal Rao was a beautiful + personal story about what it means to lose your appetite and sense of smell due to Covid-19.
Other food-adjacent newsletters I’m enjoying: From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, Emily Nunn’s Department of Salad and Adam Roberts’s Amateur Gourmet.
Other ephemera from this week:
I hear there’s a football game today? Boules by a billion.