I published this newsletter two years ago in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, and I thought it deserved a little recirculation, especially for those who are still noodling over what stuffing you’d like to make. And for anyone with plans to make a pumpkin pie, this muffin recipe will help you make sure none of your leftover filling goes to waste. I’ll be making at least one batch. Happy turkey day!

from 2023: Dutch oven stuffing + pumpkin pie muffins

A few months ago, I was deep down an internet rabbit hole when I stumbled upon this story in about Lena Richard, a Black Creole chef and cookbook author from New Orleans who had a show on television more than a decade before Julia Child did. I couldn’t read the story fast enough, and it left me both curious and embarrassed. I’ve spent months and months of my life in New Orleans, and I think I know a few things about the food there and its history — and I’d never heard the name Lena Richard.

Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of reading about Richard, with plans to do more, and I ordered her book, “New Orleans Cookbook,” and read it cover to cover. Published in 1940, it’s an extensive compendium of Creole cooking, with base recipes, variations, sauces, dressings and more. Like most cookbooks of that era, the language reminds me of the recipes my family has passed down for a few generations; it assumes a knowledge of basic cooking that’s in some ways lost. The instructions are vague at times and always brief; it’s a book with small dimensions, and there are sometimes three recipes on the same page.

I’m planning to cook my way through parts of Richard’s book in the coming months, and the first recipes I was drawn to were the ones that reminded me of holidays: creamed spinach and pie crust, popovers and stuffing. I was especially inspired by Richard’s recipe for a “plain” bread stuffing, and I’ve spent the past few weeks using it as inspiration for a Thanksgiving dish.

Dutch oven stuffing

adapted from Lena Richard’s bread stuffing

active time: 40 minutes

total time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

servings: 8-10

Lena Richard’s recipe for “plain” bread stuffing has a lot of things I enjoy — onion, green pepper, garlic — and I was intrigued by the fact that it had a little bit of a kick. Richard’s recipe called for actually stuffing something with the stuffing — a novel idea! — whereas I like to make stuffing on its own, as more of a savory bread pudding. I scaled the recipe up, tweaked some spices, downplayed the celery and landed on just the right level of moisture to make this cross the threshold from crouton to actual stuffing. Oh, and I decided to make it a one-pot production, which may be the thing I’m proudest of.

This stuffing is classic and savory, a teensy bit spicy and really simple to make. Don’t skimp on the duck fat; it adds a level of flavor dimension that you won’t want to miss.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and make sure your racks are spaced so there’s room for a large Dutch oven with its lid on.

2. Pour 1 cup of dry white wine and 1 cup of vegetable stock into a liquid measure and stir briefly to combine.

3. Crack 2 large eggs into a blender.

4. Chop ½ of a large yellow onion, ½ of a green pepper and 2 stalks of celery into a very fine dice. (If you’re a perfectionist, aim for 110 grams of onion, 80 grams of green pepper and 50 grams of celery.) Combine the vegetable mixture in a medium bowl and grate 2 cloves of garlic on top. Season the vegetables with ½ of a teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper, ½ of a teaspoon of red pepper flakes and 2 teaspoons of kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal).

   

5. In a large Dutch oven (preferably 9 quarts, or something that’s 12ish inches in diameter), heat 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter and 3 tablespoons of duck fat over medium heat. Once the fat is melted, lower the heat to medium-low and add the bowl of vegetables, garlic and spices. Stir to fully incorporate the garlic and spices into the veggies. Cook the mixture for 10 minutes, until the onions are translucent. If you notice any of your vegetables browning, lower the heat; your goal here is to soften everything, not crisp it.

6. While the vegetable mixture cooks, take a 1¼-pound loaf of white bread, preferably pre-sliced, and cut it into cubes. Think of aiming for your pieces to be between the size of a sugar cube and a die. Use the crust, too! Different textures are fun.

7. Once the vegetables have softened, carefully add the bread cubes to the Dutch oven and stir slowly to incorporate. Keep stirring, really letting the vegetables, spices and fats meld with the bread and allowing the bread to fry a bit in the fat. Cook the bread, stirring occasionally, for four minutes, until you notice some of the pieces browning.

8. Pour 1 cup of the wine-stock mixture over the bread, and stir to combine. Let the bread cook for 1-2 minutes, and then turn off the heat.

9. Pour the remaining wine-stock mixture into the blender with the eggs, and pulse the blender briefly to combine. It will only take a second, and you’ll be left with a frothy white mixture. Pour the wine-stock-egg mixture over the bread in the Dutch oven, stirring to incorporate fully.

10. Make sure the bread is in a uniform layer in the Dutch oven. Cover the Dutch oven, and place it in the actual oven. Bake the stuffing for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, remove the lid and continue baking for 35 minutes, until the top of the stuffing is beginning to brown and crisp just slightly — but before it dries out.

11. Allow the stuffing to cool for 10 minutes and then serve.

leftover pumpkin pie filling chocolate chip muffins

active time: 10 minutes

total time: 30-35 minutes

makes 9-12 muffins, depending on your preference for muffin size

I have never in my life made a pumpkin pie — or any pie, actually — and found that I’ve had the exact right amount of filling for my crust. That’s especially the case around Thanksgiving, when I find myself making more pies than I have pie plates — and making pies to give away — so I resort to using those little disposable aluminum dishes. They hold less than any pie plate I own, which means more leftover filling, which means waste. But behold, a solution: muffins!

On Saturday, I made this pumpkin pie with pepitas (yum), and I wound up with almost exactly 1 cup of leftover filling. Using some common baking ratios, I came up with a muffin recipe in a pinch, and it should work with most pumpkin pie filling recipes, assuming they contain a sweetener of some sort (sugar, maple syrup, agave), some milk or cream, a couple eggs and the requisite blend of spices. You’ll notice I’m not using precise language here, and that’s because no two filling recipes are the same, and also because these are not precise muffins. These are good muffins — very good muffins, even. But they’re not going to win any awards for beauty or innovative taste. They’re just a means of turning food waste into a tasty breakfast.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and make sure you have a rack in the center of the oven.

2. Melt 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter and allow it to cool slightly.

3. Pour 1 cup of leftover pumpkin pie filling into a large bowl.

4. Whisk in 1 egg, the butter and 140 grams of sugar, incorporating until the mixture is smooth and uniform.

5. Add 190 grams of flour, ¾ of a teaspoon baking powder, ½ of a teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal). Using a wooden spoon, mix until the flour is just incorporated, though the mixture will still be a bit lumpy.

6. Add 100 grams of bittersweet chocolate chips and stir until they’re just incorporated.

7. Place baking cups in a muffin tin; this recipe will make 12 smallish muffins or 9 slightly larger muffins. (Filling the cups about ⅔ of the way will yield 12 muffins.) For 12 muffins, bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. For 9 muffins, bake for closer to 25 minutes.

Lately: Not a lot is new. I haven’t had time to cook. I did have time to bake about 80 cookies for Jesse’s book event this week at Wonderland Books, the store where I’ve been working. A ton of people showed up to listen to him talk on the five-year (ish) anniversary of his book being released. They also seemed to enjoy these sourdough chocolate chip cookies, which have become my go-to receptacle for getting rid of my starter discard. … For another way to use your sourdough discard, keep reading!

blueberry muffins with lemon curd

active time: 15 minutes

total time: 45 minutes

makes 12 muffins

These days, I’m always looking for ways to use my sourdough discard, since I’m allergic to throwing it away. I also wound up with some surplus lemon curd in my fridge after making a cake, and thus this recipe was born. The sourdough discard gives these muffins the faintest tang, and the sharp citrus taste of the lemon curd cuts the sweetness — though these are still plenty sweet.

And if you’re not a sourdough person, never fear. Check the footnotes for an easy substitution; all it takes is some extra flour and extra milk, and you too can have muffins galore.

Ingredients:

• 113 grams (1 stick, ½ cup) unsalted butter, melted

• 200 grams (1 cup) granulated sugar

• 113 grams (½ cup) sourdough discard1

• 2 large eggs

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 120 grams (½ cup) plain, full-fat yogurt

• 30 milliliters (2 tablespoons) milk

• 250 grams (2 cups + 1 tablespoon) all-purpose flour, divided

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon Kosher salt

• 240 grams (about 2 cups) frozen mixed berries

• 170 grams (¾ cup) lemon curd23

• 2 tablespoons coarse sugar, such as demerara or turbinado

Instructions:

1. Heat your oven to 425 degrees. Place cupcake liners in a 12-muffin tin and grease them with cooking spray.

2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the melted butter, sugar and sourdough discard, beating on medium speed for about a minute until smooth.

3. Add the eggs one at a time, beating on medium speed until each is incorporated.

4. Add the vanilla, yogurt and milk, beating on medium speed until the clumps and streaks have all disappeared, about 2 minutes.

5. Remove the bowl from the mixer. Add 2 cups (240 grams) of flour, plus the baking powder, baking soda and salt. With an offset spatula, stir to incorporate the dry ingredients into the wet, mixing just until all the streaks of flour have disappeared into the batter. Don’t worry if there are a few clumps.

6. Add the remaining flour (10 grams/1 tablespoon) to a small bowl with the blueberries, distributing the flour evenly so it coats the berries. Pour the berry-flour mixture into the batter4 and fold it in with the spatula. Do your best to work quickly and gently so the berries don’t streak the batter blue — though it’s impossible to totally avoid5.

7. Scoop about 2 tablespoons of batter into each liner — using up approximately two-thirds of the batter. Add 1 tablespoon of lemon curd to each muffin, and then distribute the remaining batter to cover up the curd, distributing evenly. Sprinkle the muffins with the coarse sugar.

8. Bake at 425 degrees for 8 minutes. Decrease the oven temperature to 375 degrees and continue baking for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops of the muffins begin to brown.

9. Let the muffins cool for at least 15 minutes. These are best enjoyed the day of baking or the next day.

Lately: I’ve been enjoying The Cut’s new-ish newsletter, Book Gossip. This month’s edition leads with reminiscences about publishing house holiday parties in an era that’s deader than dead. … Speaking of industries that involve the written word: I started working part-time last week as a bookseller at Wonderland Books, a new store in Bethesda, Md. I’m there two days a week and having more fun than I ever could have imagined, especially considering my last retail experience was at Georgetown Cupcake in 2007. I’m 1,000 times better suited for bookselling than hawking overpriced cupcakes. … And here’s a fun update: My husband is launching a Substack newsletter to complement his work as a reporter at The Washington Post. It’s free and will go behind the scenes of his job covering the business of college sports. Subscribe here, please! … Just like last year, I’m offering a pretty steep discount on paid subscriptions between now and the end of the year. Click this link or the button below to subscribe or upgrade.

Get 30% off for 1 year

carmelitas

adapted from this classic Pillsbury recipe

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 50 minutes, plus cooling

It took growing up and learning about my other families’ traditions — my friends’, my husband's — to realize it: I come from a Christmas cookie family. While other people try new recipes each year or have one signature treat they come back to each December, my family leans toward excess. Organized, tradition-heavy excess. Every holiday season for as long as I can remember — for longer than I’ve been alive — the women in my family have started baking as soon as Thanksgiving has ended, the same four recipes over and over, delivering boxes of sweets as gifts and snacking on them well into the new year. German chocolate pound cake, Russian tea biscuits1, my great-grandma’s sugar cookie recipe and carmelitas. This is our roster, never to be altered.

Carmelitas are by far the most addictive offering. Jesse sighed last week when I made my first batch. “I guess I’m going to gain 10 pounds now,” he said, as if there was no other choice but to idly snack on five or six of them each day. A high school friend of mine used to ask me to mail them across the country each year, and I did — despite the fact that the carmelita recipe is out there on the Internet, by no means something of my family’s creation.

But over the years, we’ve mastered the art of this sweet and salty little bar cookie. Pillsbury’s recipe, to me, lacks some drama. This is a dessert that should be a much about chocolate and nuts as it is about oats, and the Pillsbury version hews too close to breakfast for my liking. A carmelita is going to be sweet no matter what, but my formula punches it up with bittersweet chocolate and an extra dose of pecans, and maybe that’s why UPS has earned a small fortune over the years zipping these things to all corners of the country.

Ingredients:

• 1 ¼ cups butter, softened, plus more for greasing the pan

• 2 cups + 3 tbsp. all purpose flour

• 2 ½ cups quick-cooking rolled oats

• 1 ½ cups firmly packed brown sugar

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

• 1 12.5-oz. jar of caramel ice cream topping

• 1 ½ cups bittersweet2 chocolate chips

• ¾ cup chopped pecans

Instructions:

1. Heat your oven to 350°F, and butter a 13x9-inch pan (or use cooking spray).

2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine butter, 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of oats, brown sugar, baking soda and salt. Pulse the mixture several times to begin, allowing the flour to start to incorporate. Once the mixture is somewhat combined and there’s no longer a risk of it overflowing, mix at low speed until it’s crumbly and looks like clumps of wet sand.

3. Scoop out about 3 ½ cups (slightly more than half) and press it into your prepared pan, creating a uniform crust base. Bake the crust for 10 minutes, until it’s just beginning to puff and brown at the edges.

4. While the crust bakes, add the additional ½ cup of oats to the remaining oat-flour-sugar mixture, and mix on low speed for about a minute until the oats are completely incorporated. Set aside.

5. Combine caramel topping and 3 tbsp. of flour in a small bowl or (and this is my preference) a liquid measuring cup with a spout3. The flour will slightly lighten and loosen the texture of the caramel.

6. Chop the pecans, either by hand or in a nut chopper4.

7. Remove the crust from the oven, and sprinkle it evenly with the chopped pecans. Next, sprinkle the chocolate chips, again trying to cover the surface relatively evenly. Drizzle the caramel across the top, taking care to avoid the very edges5. Sprinkle the remaining oat crust on top of the caramel, covering it entirely.

8. Return the pan to the oven and bake an additional 20 to 25 minutes, until the topping is golden brown. Cool for 1 hour, and then refrigerate the pan for 2 hours, until the filling is set. Cut the carmelitas into 20-25 rectangular bars.

Lately: Here are two New York Times recipes I made this week and think you all might want to try: chile-butter chicken with vinegared potatoes1 and creamy coconut-lime rice with peanuts2. … I’m in the middle of reading the second “Slow Horses” book, and this quote made me feel seen (even though it’s referring to an octogenarian as he decides whether to have a second whiskey): “If there was anything he missed about being young, it was that careless ability to fall into oblivion like a bucket dropped down a well, then pulled up slowly, replenished. One of those gifts you didn’t know you possessed until it was taken away.”

sourdough blondies with hazelnut and bittersweet chocolate

adapted from Nancy Silverton’s blondies in “The Cookie That Changed My Life”

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

In retrospect, I’m always intrigued by the recipe I pick first when I buy a new cookbook. Earlier this year, when I got my hands on Nancy Silverton’s dessert bible, I flipped through and landed on blondies — a bar cookie I generally find inferior to the brownie, not worth the time or hassle. But for whatever reason, that’s what I settled on. People are mysterious.

And the blondies were good. Really, really good. Right off the bat, I substituted hazelnuts for the walnuts Nancy calls for; I don’t like walnuts, which means there were none in my freezer. Having never made the walnut version, I shouldn’t authoritatively say these are better, but … they’re better.

This adaptation goes beyond just a nut switch, though. It’s cut down for a smaller pan, because these things are so rich, and there’s no way I won’t finish them all if they’re sitting on my counter. I also incorporated sourdough discard, in part because I wanted a bit more of a savory tang, and in part because I’m always searching for things to do with my discard. Those changes and a few others yielded a gooey, rich, caramelized, ever so slightly savory bar cookie that is, I swear, just as good as the best brownies. (Except Ina’s. These aren’t as good as Ina’s.)

Ingredients:

• 150 grams raw, unsalted hazelnuts3

• 3 sticks (339 grams) unsalted butter

• 325 g dark brown sugar

• 115 g granulated sugar

• 2 large eggs

• 1 tablespoon vanilla bean paste4

• 113 g sourdough discard (unfed)

• 270 g all purpose flour

• 1 tsp diamond crystal kosher salt

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 80 g bittersweet chocolate chips5

• flaky sea salt6

Instructions:

1. Place a rack in the center of your oven, and heat the oven to 325 degrees. Place the hazelnuts on a baking sheet.

2. While the oven heats, melt the the butter and brown it7 in a light-bottomed saucepan over medium heat, paying close attention. The butter will begin to bubble and foam after a few minutes, and once it does, begin to gently swirl the pan every 20 or 30 seconds, until the milk solids are browned and look like coffee grounds.8 Remove the browned butter from the heat and allow it to cool.

3. While the butter cools, roast the hazelnuts until they’re browned and giving off a bit of oil, about 15 minutes. Set them aside to cool, and increase the oven temperature to 350 degrees.

4. Coat an 8-inch square pan with cooking spray, and line it with two sheets of parchment paper, laying one so one of its corners lines up with a corner of the pan, and the sheet falls over two of the pan’s sides. Lay the other so that one of its corners lines up with the opposite (diagonal) corner of the pan, and it falls over the other two sides. Crumple and crease the excess parchment paper around the lip so that the two sheets fully line the pan and stay in place. Then spray the parchment paper with cooking spray and set the pan aside.

5. When the the brown butter is approaching room temperature (it doesn’t have to be all the way there), measure out 265 grams9, making sure to include all of the dark milk solids. Pour the butter into the bowl of a stand mixer outfitted with the paddle attachment. Add the sugars and beat until combined, about one minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. The batter will smell like caramel.

6. With the mixer running on low speed, add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla paste, beating well after each addition.

7. Add the sourdough discard, flour, salt and baking soda, mixing on low at first and then increasing to medium speed and beating for about a minute until incorporated. The batter will have a smooth, sticky texture. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl, then beat for 30 more seconds.

8. Add the chocolate chips and hazelnuts, beating briefly until just combined.

9. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, sprinkle a few pinches of flaky salt across the top, then return the pan to the oven and bake for 45 more minutes, until the edges are firm and the center is still slightly wobbly — but a toothpick or fork comes out clean.

10. Let the blondies cool for at least an hour before carefully lifting them out of the pan and cutting them into small pieces. These are rich and relatively tall, as far as bar cookies go, so you really don’t need to cut big pieces. An 8-inch pan should yield 12 to 15 blondies.

Lately: I’m cooking again! A lot! Spurred on, I think, by the start of my adventures with sourdough baking, plus a good re-stock of my pantry. Here are some recipes I’ve been loving lately: There’s NYT Cooking’s chopped wedge salad — though this week, instead of using mayo in the dressing, I used a single raw egg yolk, and it was even better. I also added some grilled chicken. I also made this creamy coconut-lime rice with peanuts (also from NYT Cooking) for the second time earlier this week and think it may have earned a spot in the regular rotation. And this recipe for sourdough rolls, which I landed on thanks 100 percent to SEO and laziness, is actually great. I’ve also been experimenting with sourdough loaves, and this recipe yielded the best results of the three I’ve tried so far.

not-too-sweet and somewhat onion-y cornbread

adapted from Melissa Clark’s brown butter skillet cornbread in New York Times Cooking

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 55 minutes

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with cornbread. I adore corn. I love bread. There is no greater end to a meal then using a piece of carbohydrate to soak up some amount of accumulated juices — an activity for which cornbread seems specifically engineered. I should be its biggest fan, then. I should proselytize its virtues far and wide.

Instead, I find myself disliking as much cornbread as I like, most often because the slab of carbs I’ve been served is either too sweet or too dry or occasionally too fussy. A few months ago, I baked Claire Saffitz’s loaded cornbread, which was studded with all kinds of goodness (bacon, actual corn kernels, peppers) and simply too much for me. Still determined to keep baking a dish I often don’t like, I swung next in the other direction, making a batch of Melissa Clark’s brown butter skillet cornbread. It was as simple as cornbread comes, and I managed to snatch it out of the oven at the exact moment it melded from underdone to perfectly moist. The edges were crispy. I liked it — but again, I found it too sweet.

Enter this recipe, which draws some inspiration from Saffitz’s — stick something savory in your cornbread, and it’s bound to be better — but follows Clark’s general principles, with a bit less sweetener. If you suffer from my same cornbread affliction, consider it the cure.

Ingredients:

• 12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) / 170 grams unsalted butter

• ⅓ cup chopped green onions, white and light green parts only (3-4 green onions)

• ¼ cup + 3 tablespoons / 105 ml maple syrup

• 2¼ cups / 530 ml buttermilk

• 3 large eggs

• 1½ cups / 180 grams yellow cornmeal, fine or medium-coarse grind

• ½ cup / 65 grams whole wheat flour

• ½ cup / 60 grams all-purpose flour

• 1 tablespoon + 1½ teaspoons baking powder

• 1½ teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

Instructions:

1. Heat your oven to 375 degrees. In an 11-inch cast-iron skillet (a 12-inch skillet will work, too — but it’ll bake faster and make for a slightly flatter slice), melt the butter on the stovetop over medium heat. As soon as the butter is melted, add the green onions, stirring to incorporate. Cook, stirring occasionally; it will grow foamy and the foam eventually subside, leaving behind browned butter with a nutty smell. The onions will be soft and somewhat translucent, though some will also brown in the butter. (Keep a close eye on the butter so that it doesn’t burn. Browning in this case should take between 5 and 7 minutes.)

   

2. Remove the skillet from the heat, and pour the butter and onions into a large bowl. Don’t bother to wipe out the skillet, even if a few pieces of onion remain.

3. To the bowl with the butter, add the maple syrup and the buttermilk, whisking to combine. Then, using a wooden spoon, stir in the cornmeal, flours, baking powder, salt and baking soda — combining just until there are no more streaks or clumps of white.

4. Using the same wooden spoon, scrape the batter back into the cast-iron pan. It will still be warm (that’s a good thing!), so be careful not to touch it with your bare hand.

5. Bake until the top is golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes.

Lately: I can’t stop reading, and everything I’ve read has been so, so good. I owe you all a books roundup from July, which is coming next week. A spoiler for the August edition: Goodbye, Vitamin, which I read in less than 48 hours this week, is one of my favorite novels in recent memory. I can’t think of a story that made me laugh so hard and then, within a few words, feel so deeply sad. … I’ve placed a couple orders over the past year from Campo Grande, which sells all kinds of cuts of Spanish Iberico pork. I got a box last month, and I think it’s ruined all other pork for me. It almost feels like a different meat than the stuff I buy here in the U.S.

The best kind of journalism tracks an evolution. What is a good story if not a series of snapshots that document change? When I was writing about sports, the change I wrote about was often so, so visible, utterly obvious — but it was still fascinating. Here is Mark McGwire before he used steroids, and here he is after. Here is football a century ago, and here it is today, and how is this the same sport? The same organisms? My favorite stories to write were always the ones that let me dig deep into research, when I could make calls and hear stories about how things used to be, when one person told me one thing and another said the opposite, and it was my job to suss out the truth. I’d burrow a rabbit hole halfway to China, trying to figure out what really happened with the nerds whose computer models powered the BCS or if a kooky former conference executive’s recollections about long-ago realignment were accurate.

I found myself doing the same thing recently, when the Washington Post let me develop a recipe for gooey butter cake, a quintessentially dessert that I’d grown up eating in two different forms: one that looks more like a lemon bar and tastes the way how it would feel to eat your way out of a bag of granulated sugar, and the other that’s more like a gooey, still very sweet, caramelized piece of coffee cake. I knew which version I liked better, but I started my assignment by trying to figure out which version was really, actually gooey butter cake.

I’ll let you read my story to figure out the answer to that question, but I’ll tell you this: The first draft I filed was overly dense with historical nuggets and informed conclusions that I’d found combing Newspapers.com. I cut a tunnel through old recipes published in Midwestern newspapers and ads from 80 years ago for gooey butter cakes selling for pennies. Through those words, I watched the cake’s legend spread on a map, beaming out from St. Louis to parts unknown. I read an origin story for the recipe, and then I read what I guessed to be the origin story for that origin story, and I was in my journalistic element. The ways food has changed and evolved boggle the mind. And recipes are stories, too, told over generations. One person tells it one way and one person tells it another, and now there are two dinners, two cakes, two cocktails. Maybe one is wrong and one is right, or maybe we’re all just eating the way we want to, according to the stories our tastebuds and noses and instincts have been told, over and over again.

Lately: I’ve been staring at Ixta Belfrage’s cookbook, “Mezcla: Recipes to Excite,” in my Bookshop.org cart ever since I added it on Saturday night. I’m going to place my order soon. I spotted “Mezcla” on Saturday morning at Backwater Books in Ellicott City, Md. My best friend was in town, and we decided to check out Old Ellicott City, which was a 10/10 if you’re looking for a charming place to wander. … Backwater Books has a little upstairs bar, tucked against a wall and surrounded by shelves of books. There are small tables and comfortable chairs scattered throughout the store, presumably so people can sip and read. If I open a bookstore bar someday, will you come? … While in Ellicott City, we also stopped by Manor Hill Brewing. I’ve had Manor Hill’s peach wheat beer before and loved it. The brewery itself was underwhelming. And the road leading up to it was scattered with signs from angry neighbors, who seem very upset that about the added traffic the brewery has brought. … Less upsetting: Maybe consider following my professional Instagram account? Until now, it has kind of mirrored this newsletter, but I’ve decided to broaden its scope a bit and share more about my other writing, especially the fiction I’m working on.

A month ago, I told you all about my plans to quit the supermarket. That experiment was supposed to end today, and I was supposed to have some profound thoughts about better, smarter ways to shop for food.

Profundity is hard. I promise, I do have a few takeaways so far, but June went by in a blink. There were visitors and travels and my husband’s 30th birthday and a (non-scary) medical procedure that sapped my appetite and energy. I cooked dinner fewer than 10 times. I barely baked. So it was simple to avoid the grocery store. Too simple.

That’s all to say: I’m going to stay on my no-grocery store kick until Aug. 1. And I’m going to put a real emphasis on cooking and baking and gathering interesting ingredients from new sources. I’m going to keep reading “The Secret Life of Groceries” as I go on this adventure. And in 31 days, I’ll share what I’ve learned. Until then, a few more preliminary takeaways:

• Basics are really expensive. I’m talking things like peanut butter and ketchup. I’ve been getting them at my corner store, which is family-owned, so I don’t feel as bad about buying JIF that costs as much as a whole chicken … but I still feel a little silly.

• Everything else seems much, much cheaper. I haven’t done a full spending tally, but the credit card bill looks lower. The other day, I stopped at a farm stand near the Baltimore airport and bought peaches, six ears of corn and several onions for something like $6.50.

• Speaking of cheaper: I may never go back to buying my favorite packaged snack, the bite-sized chocolate-peanut butter Perfect Bar. A pack of six costs $9.99, and I’ve mastered a recipe (below) for a homemade version that costs about a third as much per serving.

• I’m not being as creative when I cook. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. Everything I’ve been making is really meat- and vegetable-forward, probably because of the quality of protein and produce I’m buying. But I’d like to try to make some more interesting dishes in July — and to get over my fear that I won’t be able to track down a particular ingredient.

pretty close to perfect bars

active time: 15 minutes

total time: about 2 hours, 15 minutes

When I decided to try the supermarket-free life, the thing I was most worried about was how I’d get my Perfect Bar fix. For the past year or more, I’d been eating at least one snack-sized chocolate-peanut butter Perfect Bar per day. Usually more than one. They fed my sweet tooth and were reasonably healthy, I figured.

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It’s that time of year again: a new season, when I have to reacquaint myself with what I like to cook when it’s warm outside. Most days, I hate the idea of turning on my oven for any activity other than baking. And my grocery shopping gets flipped upside-down: Instead of planning meals and making a list, I wander the farmer’s market and buy whatever looks good, then spread it all out on my counter and puzzle out what to do with it.

Flipping to that mindset isn’t always easy. Last week I made meatballs. Meatballs! When it was 80 degrees outside! Who makes meatballs under those conditions? So in the spirit of my semiannual dinnertime confusion, I figured I’d veer toward service journalism for today’s newsletter and highlight some of the more seasonally appropriate food I’ve been cooking lately — along with stuff that’s on my to-make list as spring fades into summer. Here goes:

scallop and blueberry ceviche from the Washington Post: I was raised by a woman who lives in abject fear of undercooked food. Sushi is an upset stomach waiting to happen. Oysters are a lurking threat. My mother is great at cooking steaks to a spot-on medium rare — but every time she does so, she cuts one open, panics and asks if anyone wants her to throw their meat back on the grill. Which brings me to ceviche.

It took me years to overcome the biases these food fears baked into me. But eventually I started eating sushi and ceviche and raw everything. And then, a few years ago, I started making it myself. Drowning raw shrimp or scallops or flaky fish in acid and confidently serving it a few hours later to my guests? The first time I did it, my leg twitched until I could confirm I hadn’t killed anyone. Back then, I usually used this Defined Dish recipe. These days, I mostly go recipe-less when I make ceviche, which is quite often in warm weather. But this Washington Post recipe is intriguing enough that I’m going to go the recipe route next time and try it.

pickled strawberry toasts from (you guessed it) THIS VERY NEWSLETTER: I became a quick-pickling evangelist last summer, and I’m back at it. At this very moment, two mason jars of berries and vinegar are maturing in my fridge, and strawberry toasts are in my future.

guacamole from THIS VERY NEWSLETTER: Guacamole should be a big part of everyone’s life in the summer. People tell me they like my recipe. They usually eat a lot of it. Do with that information what you will.

corn and zucchini orzo salad from Food & Wine: Corn, zucchini and orzo are three of my favorite things on their own. Together, they’re downright addictive.

five-ingredient creamy miso pasta from New York Times Cooking: There is no recipe on the Internet that tastes as good as this one with as little work. I eat it year-round.

tacos de carnitas from New York Times Cooking: This recipe breaks the “keep your kitchen cool when it’s hot outside” in a big way. It simmers for an eon, but the end product (and extra work for your air conditioner) is well worth it, and there’s nothing I like to eat more on a summer night than a super flavorful carnitas taco.

spicy coconut grilled chicken thighs from Bon Appétit: This has become my go-to grilling recipe. I discovered it in 2020, when Jesse and I drove across the country and stopped at Zion National Park. We stayed at a campsite with grills, and I was in search of an easy marinade. This is that, and it’s also the only grilled chicken I’ll even consider eating. It’s spicy and a little bit sweet and requires very little pre-planning. I often have all the marinade ingredients already in my fridge.

arroz chaufa from New York Times Cooking: This is another wildly easy recipe that’ll come together in a half hour or less, depending on how quickly you can chop a red pepper. It’s packed with flavor and makes for A+ leftoevers.

honey-roasted Brussels sprouts with harissa and lemon relish from New York Times Cooking: I usually think of Brussels sprouts as a winter side dish, but this particular preparation is especially spring-y and fresh.

Cheryl Day’s sweet potato biscuits from Cherry Bombe: When I was growing up, my parents belonged to a country club, and every summer, I was a pool rat, spending sunup to sundown, six days a week, swimming and occasionally playing tennis and begrudgingly golfing. This country club had pretty mediocre food, but it made the most amazing biscuits. Buttery, melt-in-your mouth perfection. I used to call up from the pool and order four of them and nothing else, then trudge up to the dining area to bring back my carb-heavy meal. Which is to say: For those strange reasons, I associate biscuits with summertime. And these sweet potato biscuits are a delicious, fun, towering twist on the usual buttermilk.

Joanne Chang’s maple-blueberry scones from New York Times Cooking: These are my favorite blueberry receptacle — and it’s almost blueberry-picking season here in D.C. They’re not particularly sweet but have a great depth of flavor thanks in large part to the maple syrup, and they’re the perfect grab and go breakfast if you want to take your coffee on a walk before the day gets too hot.

Those of you who follow along on Instagram may be aware I was out of the country for the past 12 days. (Hi, I’m back!) had hopes of popping in for a quick newsletter while I was gone, but I caught a nasty bug, which derailed a lot of eating and writing plans. My appetite returned in time for our final dinner in Amsterdam, at the very good Bar Centraal, and I’ll have more to say about the trip soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to share an exciting bit of food (writing) news that happened while I was gone: The Washington Post published my recipe for chicken and dumplings, along with an essay I wrote about my great-grandmother, whose dish I was aiming to replicate. Read on …

My Grandma B — my dad’s grandmother, Evelyn Baldridge — never drove a car. She lived about 90 minutes from from my parents’ house in St. Louis, which meant frequent trips down I-55 to pick her up and bring her back to stay with us. She’d come for a few days at a time, then pack her little suitcase and spend a few days with my cousins nearby. That was how we spent most of our time with her: in our house, living our lives while she flitted around like a woman 50 years younger than she was, doing dishes, ironing shirts, raking leaves in the fall heat.

Sometimes, though, we spent the day in Farmington, Mo., where she lived in a tiny white house, with a porch swing out front and a shared vegetable patch down the street. That was when Grandma cooked. And her cooking was legendary. My dad treated it like a competitive sport. It was so unlike everything we usually ate at home. Grandma B made biscuits and gravy and practically a whole hog’s worth of bacon. I heard stories of bygone meals that revolved around squirrel.

And as a little girl, the pickiest of eaters, I was mystified. Gravy made me suspicious. Squirrels were cute. I never fully embraced Grandma’s cooking, with one notable exception: chicken and dumplings. It was my favorite thing she made, especially the thick, noodle-like dumplings.

Grandma died 24 years ago, in the middle of the night a few months after her 95th birthday. Once she was gone, we sold the house and had no reason to go back to Farmington. We kept her favorite red cardigan hanging in the closet of the guest room in our basement, and we talked about her all the time. But she hadn’t amassed many earthy possessions over her very many years, so very little of her remained. And she never wrote down her recipes.

For a few years, though, my mom made chicken and dumplings, approximating Grandma’s methods. But it was labor-intensive, and she had two teenagers to raise, so eventually, it fell out of the dinner rotation. I’ve craved it ever since.

So when the food editors at The Post asked me if there were any recipes I’d like to develop — bonus points if there might be a story behind them — chicken and dumplings came to mind. Over the course of February, March and April, I finessed the recipe and, I’ll admit, cheated a bit. I made it a bit less complicated. I tried to cut down on the dirty dishes it generated. And I tried to give the dumplings a bit of pizzazz.

The recipe and essay published this week. Which means Evelyn Baldridge — who was born in Doe Run, Mo. in 1905, who could not drive or swim, who finished eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse and then stayed home to raise her baby brother — has now appeared in the pages of The Washington Post.

Here’s a sneak peek at the story. You can find the recipe here.

Grandma B was always frying something: bacon or chicken or occasionally squirrel. Mornings, she would disappear into a cloud of flour and emerge with biscuits while a pot of gravy bubbled on the ancient stove. Breakfast stretched into lunchtime, and then maybe, if I was lucky, she’d spend the afternoon making chicken and dumplings.

It was the one dish she made that I truly enjoyed. I was not a little girl who would gnaw a crispy chicken leg down to the bone. I was scared of dark meat, of cartilage, of accidentally nibbling something I should not. Gravy, with all its flecks and specks and who-knows-whats, made me shudder. But chicken and dumplings? I’d scoop seconds.

I am genetically programmed to resist anything that smells even a little bit like change. Major shifts in my life have turned me into the human equivalent of a roly poly facing a predator. I curl up and hope to god I can just roll away. My brother suffers from this condition, too, albeit more actively. He once tried to drag a decades-old, fraying corduroy recliner back down from the curb when my mom had deemed it unfit for even our basement. Trimmed tree limbs in our front yard once sent him into a tailspin.

All of that — the little armored bugs, the recliner, the branches — has been on my mind this week as I’ve stared down the biggest change of my professional life so far. It arrived on Friday at 5 p.m., when I logged off Slack and signed out of my Washington Post email and started my life as a freelancer. This is good change, the best kind. I planned for this change for months and looked forward to it with something like giddiness — and now that it’s here, I spend a few minutes every hour trying not to panic. Will anyone pay me to write about food — or about anything other than sports? Will I get bored? Will I be able to pull my own weight financially?

I have to be comfortable not knowing the answers to those questions. I have to be comfortable getting bored, at least occasionally, and I have to remember that for most of the past two years, I’d have killed for the chance to have a bored afternoon.

So that’s me: anxious and excited and suddenly with plenty of time to write this newsletter.

But enough about the future. Let’s dwell, for a moment, on the recent past — specifically last Tuesday, when some coworkers gathered in a conference room to wish me well. At the Washington Post, these events are called cakings, because traditionally, the departing person’s boss provides a cake.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got nothing against a massive Costco sheet, a dense yellow cake weighed down with a thick shellacking of buttercream. But as my caking approached, I got the itch to do it up bigger. I figured if I had the guts to walk away from a perfectly good job with the outlandish claim that I was going to become a food writer, I might as well prove myself on my way out the door. So I spent most of the previous weekend assembling the components to make a massive, three-layer sheet cake, in a similar vein to my wedding cakes. I dreamed up a flavor profile — vanilla, mascarpone, blueberry, pistachio — based on the odds and ends in my fridge. I spent a full day baking, another evening icing, and voilà, I was left with a behemoth so unwieldy, I had to uber to the office with it on my lap.

Why am I sharing this? Maybe I’m advertising that if you live in the D.C. area and want to pay me to make you a cake, I’m all ears. Maybe I’m also justifying my decision to all of you. Maybe I’m staving off the next moment of panic.

My resolution for the near future, then: more cake, less panic.

slightly citrus-y focaccia bread pudding

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 1 hour, 5 minutes

There is no more satisfying bread to bake than focaccia. It’s relatively foolproof and feels like a bakery-quality treat when you’re done — but I’m usually stumped about what to do with an entire sheet pan worth, which is how much my favorite recipe yields. Enter this bread pudding.

Google “focaccia bread pudding,” and most of what you’ll find is savory: focaccia bread pudding with caramelized onions, rosemary olive bread pudding, stuff of that nature. That’s an oversight I’m here to correct. A sweet focaccia bread pudding still has a pretty high salt quotient, which makes this dessert the perfect collision of sweet and just a little bit savory, and don’t skip the almond extract, which adds a ton of depth of flavor in just a measly teaspoon. The final product is relatively light, as far as bread pudding goes, which means it’s pretty heavy but won’t leave you incapacitated.

Ingredients

• 800 grams of day-old focaccia bread (or another not-too-dense loaf)

• 2 cups heavy cream

• 2½ cups half and half

• 9 egg yolks

• 1 orange (preferably cara cara, but any will do)

• ¾ cup light brown sugar

• 1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

• 1 teaspoon almond extract

• vanilla ice cream

Instructions

1. Set your oven to 325°F and place a rack in the middle of the oven and another on the top shelf.

2. Toast the bread: Weigh your focaccia and tear the portion of the loaf you’re using into small, bite-sized chunks. Spread the torn bread on a baking sheet, and toast it on the middle rack for about 12 minutes, until it’s started to dry out but hasn’t yet begun to brown.

3. While the bread toasts, zest the orange and juice it into a liquid measure. You should wind up with roughly ½ a cup of juice.

4. Make the custard: Pour the juice into a large bowl. Add the zest, heavy cream, half and half and egg yolks. Whisk the mixture until it’s uniform.

5. Add ½ a cup of brown sugar, plus the salt, vanilla extract and almond extract to the liquid mixture. Whisk again to combine.

6. Assemble: Once the focaccia is toasted, transfer it to a 9x13-inch baking dish and press down firmly on the pieces to compress them slightly. Pour the custard mixture across the bread.

7. Once the custard is distributed throughout the baking dish, begin to press the bread down so that it submerges in the custard and begins to saturate. You will still have pieces of bread protruding above the custard, but they should be at least somewhat saturated with custard. Keep pressing down the bread for a minute or two, repeatedly saturating the top layer. Place the bread pudding in the refrigerator for an hour.

8. Bake: When you’re ready to bake, heat the oven to 425° F. Remove the bread pudding from the fridge and do another round of saturating the bread, pressing down across the entire pan. Sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup of brown sugar evenly across the top of the bread pudding.

9. Bake the bread pudding on the middle rack of the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until the custard is no longer runny. Switch on your broiler to high, and move the bread pudding up to the top rack, broiling for 3 to 5 minutes, keeping a close eye on the bread pudding throughout. The top of the pudding will begin to brown and caramelize, and when it’s reached a golden color, it’s done.

10. Eat: Let it cool for 45 minutes and serve with vanilla ice cream. To reheat, place the pan, uncovered, in an oven set to 425° F and cook for 5 to 10 minutes.

But on March 14, at least here in the northern hemisphere, half the world’s best pies aren’t worth baking. Don’t even think about a strawberry rhubarb pie. Do not dream of blueberry or peach or blackberry or cherry or even apple. March 14 is one of the least hospitable moments of the entire year for fruit pies. It’s the exact moment when I feel the most despondent about fruit. The weather is getting warmer, trees are blooming, and I want a goddamn berry that tastes like something other than watered-down cardboard.

That’s all to say: I celebrate Pi Day almost exclusively with custards and nuts and even occasionally sweet potato. This year, I was bored of my usual options. And so, a new pie was born.

slightly frozen custard pie

adapted from/inspired by Claire Saffitz’s no-bake lime-coconut custards

active time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

total time: about 18 hours

The beauty of this pie is that it’s almost ice cream. But it’s not. It’s pie. It’s custard. It’s slightly frozen, which is exactly how custard should always exist: very cold, smooth and easily spooned.

There’s also a secret ingredient: miso. It mellows out the chocolate ganache so it complements the tart citrus rather than competes with it. I love miso. Miso for president.

One last thing: This pie is a little fussy. It’s a make-the-day-before-you-eat-it pie. It requires planning, and I am not often a baker who plans. But for this pie, at least, I will plan.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F.

2. In a food processor, combine 180 grams of graham crackers, 40 grams of granulated sugar and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt for 20 to 30 seconds, until the graham crackers are fully crumbled and no large chunks remain. With the motor running, stream in 90 grams of melted coconut oil and incorporate until the mixture looks like damp sand.

   

3. Pour your crust mixture into a pie plate and press it evenly up the sides; you should have plenty of crust to get all the way up the sides of a standard-depth plate. And don’t worry about your crust being totally even in height. A little variation is nice! Do make sure, though, to press and compact the top edge of your crust so it doesn’t crumble down.

4. Once your crust is ready, bake it for 10-12 minutes, until it’s just a bit more golden than it already was and it feels slightly firmer to the touch. Set it aside to cool.

5. While the crust bakes, spread 2 tablespoons of unsweetened coconut flakes on a sheet pan. Set aside until the crust is finished.

6. The crust should still be baking. Next up, in a small bowl, break up 2 ounces of bittersweet chocolate into small pieces — about the size of a square of a Hershey bar. If you’re using chocolate chips, even easier. Heat 140 grams of heavy cream and 1 teaspoon of white miso in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring frequently. The miso will dissolve into the cream as the temperature rises. Once the cream reaches a simmer, keep an even closer eye on it, cooking and stirring for 3 to 4 more minutes. Pour the warm cream over the chocolate and let it sit for 8 to 10 minutes.

7. When the crust is out of the oven, put the coconut flakes in and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, watching carefully. Coconut is unreliable!

8. Okay! Let’s regroup. The coconut is in the oven. Take your eyes off of it for a quick second and whisk the ganache vigorously, incorporating the chocolate and the cream. It should come together pretty seamlessly, but use some muscle to get the mixture really smooth. Then pop the crust (once it’s cooled to room temperature) and the ganache in the fridge.

9. Get the coconut out of the oven once it reaches a caramel brown color. Place it in a small bowl to cool.

10. Next, the custard. You’re going to need about 5 limes, depending on how juicy they are. Buy six, just to be safe. Zest one lime into the bowl with the coconut; you’ll wind up with about 1 teaspoon of zest. Set that bowl aside.

11. Zest two more limes into another small bowl. You should have 2 more teaspoons of zest.

12. Now, begin to juice your limes straight into the bowl that contains only the zest. (Not the zest-coconut mixture!) You want to wind up with ½ a cup (113 grams) of lime juice. Set the juice-zest mixture aside.

13. In a large saucepan, whisk together a 400 ml can of coconut milk, 480 grams of heavy cream, 156 grams of honey and ½ a teaspoon of kosher salt. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, which will take a bit less than 10 minutes if your stove’s definition of medium-high is the same as mine. Lower the burner temperature to medium and continue to stir the cream mixture frequently for about 20 minutes until the mixture has reduced by about one-third, to 3 cups. If you think you’ve gotten there, pour the mixture into a liquid measuring cup to check. Tip: It will be runnier than you expect. Don’t worry. Get yourself to three cups, and you’re golden.

14. Take the saucepan off the heat and pour in the lime juice-zest mixture, whisking vigorously to combine. Then pour it back into the liquid measuring cup (or into a medium-sized bowl), let it cool slightly, then put it in the fridge to cool even more.

15. Get the ganache out of the fridge and stir it to make its texture more uniform. It should have thickened significantly but still be pourable. Get the crust out, and pour the ganache into the crust, tilting the pie plate to spread the ganache all along the bottom of the crust. Put the crust back in the fridge.

16. Let the ganached crust and the custard cool in the fridge for 3 hours. When the custard is cooled and thickened, pour it (gently! without splattering the ganache!) into the pie crust and sprinkle the zest-coconut mixture on top. Put the pie back in the fridge overnight.

17. Four hours before you want to eat the pie, move it from the fridge to the freezer and let it chill even more. When it’s ready to serve, it’ll have the consistency of slightly soft ice cream.

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You may have noticed I’ve switched things up over here lately. The early-in-the-week paywalled posts have met their end, mostly because I wasn’t sure they were serving anyone well.

Going forward, I’m going to have a lot more time and energy (!!!) to dedicate to Grazing, and I’m planning to spend the next few weeks thinking in a good amount of detail about the best way to structure this space and make it a place people want to visit. I have big goals for Grazing in 2024, and I’d love to find a way to sustainably grow the subscriber base beyond the point where it’s plateaued in recent months. Tell your friends to subscribe! Tell your enemies! Tell strangers!

Even better: if you have input, please take the time to fill out this reader survey. Let me know if you love recipes, if you love essays, if there are things I’m not doing that you think I should do — or things I’m doing that I should stop immediately.

As I figure things out, I’m going to scale back to one newsletter per week for the next month or two. With that schedule, the first newsletter of every month will be a recipe, and it will be behind the paywall.

carrot-pistachio muffins

active time: 15 minutes

total time: 40 minutes

servings: 12 muffins

Believe your eyes! It is, for the second week in a row, a recipe. I’ve been baking up a storm over here and churning through so many pistachios that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear there’s a widespread shortage in Mid-Atlantic grocery stores.

I remember the first time I tried one of these wizened little greenish nuts: I was in seventh or eighth grade, and my mom bought a big bag of them, unshelled, and told me they constituted a healthy snack. I was at an age where I desperately wanted to eat food other people labeled as healthy, but I also had a phobia for most vegetables, fruit and anything else with vitamins. A humble pistachio may have been the first bite of green I ever enjoyed.

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From Dec. 22, 2023 until Feb. 16, 2024, I did not bake a single thing. My KitchenAid mixer got nearly two months of rest. But other than perhaps prolonging the life of my favorite appliance, very little good came of such a long baking hiatus. I don’t think I got healthier. I definitely didn’t get happier. Maybe, though, maaaaybe I got a little bit more creative. Because when the baking itch hit last week and I finally had time to mess up my kitchen, I dreamed up a cookie that, well, is very much worth dreaming about.

espresso, pistachio and chocolate chip cookies

adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s salted chocolate chunk cookies

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 50 minutes + the time your dough needs to rest

makes: 18-20 cookies

Last spring, I embarked on a baking project that I thought might take six weeks. It ended up stretching through the summer and into the fall, but after chewing through unholy quantities of butter, chocolate and sugar, I landed on a winner in my chocolate chip cookie bracket: Smitten Kitchen’s salted chocolate chunk. To me, at least, these cookies had three standout qualities. They contained tons of chocolate. The turbinado sugar gave them a satisfying crunch. And salt! Flaky salt!

That said, I loved a lot of the other cookies in the bracket, including a massive, flat, brown butter, halva and pistachio beauty. As someone who’s never gotten much out of a pecan or a walnut in a cookie, pistachios definitely made me change my tune. Pistachios make most things better. So I started wondering if I could improve upon the bracket-winning cookie. Originally, I planned to see if I could add some pistachios and up the crunch factor — but as I started building this hypothetical cookie, I was also very, very tired, and suddenly, the cookie of my imagination also included espresso.

The real-life cookie is, I am happy to report, as tasty as I imagined — as rich and crunchy and nutty and buttery. It’s doing a lot. But not too much, I promise.

1. Let ¾ of a cup (170 grams) of unsalted butter come to room temperature on the kitchen counter.

2. Finely grind about 2 tablespoons of espresso beans. If you have a powerful grinder that can get them to a truly powdery texture, you’ll be all set. If your grinder doesn’t yield a particularly fine grind, then use a mortar and pestle to pound the grinds into a finer consistency. You won’t use 100 percent of the beans you grind, but this should get you in the ballpark. (Alternatively, you can use espresso powder. If you are, do nothing at this step and then double the quantity of espresso grinds later on in the recipe. Espresso powder is weaker than finely-ground beans.)

3. When the butter is softened but not warm, add it, plus 20 grams of granulated sugar, 30 grams of turbinado sugar and 165 grams of light brown sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer. Cream the butter and sugars on medium-high for 4 to 5 minutes, until the mixture is fluffy.

4. Add 1 large egg and 1½ teaspoons of vanilla extract to the mixer. Cream them with the butter-sugar mixture on medium speed for about 20 seconds, then scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl and mix again on medium-high speed for about 1 minute.

5. Add ¾ of a teaspoon of baking soda, ½ of a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, 10 grams of finely ground espresso beans (or 20 grams of espresso powder) and 210 grams of all-purpose flour. Pulse the mixer on low speed several times to begin to incorporate the dry ingredients, then mix on medium until the dry ingredients are just incorporated. Your dough will be somewhat crumbly.

6. Mix in 210 grams dark or bittersweet chocolate chips and 65 grams of chopped roasted pistachios — only until they’re just incorporated. Cover your dough and refrigerate it for at least 4 hours and ideally overnight, though if you must bake your cookies immediately, they’ll be fine.

7. Once the dough has rested, take it out of the fridge and preheat your oven to 360°F. Scoop the dough into 2-tablespoon balls; you should wind up with 18 to 20 cookies. Place them on parchment-covered baking sheets, sprinkle them with Maldon salt and bake them for 12-14 minutes. Because of the espresso in the dough and the color it lends the mixture, it’ll be harder to tell that the edges are browning, so you’ll have to trust your instinct on when to remove them; essentially, you want the top to be something more solid than mushy and the edges to be just beginning to brown.

8. Let the cookies cool on a wire rack for about 20 minutes, and you’re good to feast.

A quick programming note: There will be no Grazing next week. I’m unable to take much time off my real job for the holidays, so to give myself some extra time around friends and family, I’m going to take a little newsletter vacation. I’ll be back in the New Year, with plenty to say about a feast of the seven fishes in South Philadelphia and a few days of gluttony in New Orleans.

Thank you all, as always, for reading. And happy holidays.

For so many people — me included — holiday cookies are a matter of tradition — which also implies repetition. I’m lucky my family’s dessert traditions are pretty phenomenal, but even so, I sometimes feel stuck. The muscle memory of Christmastime baking is comforting, but occasionally I want to mix in something new, to add my own entry into the canon of cookies each generation of women in my family has made and taught and shared.

Enter ricciarelli, a traditional Tuscan cookie I ate for the first time last year in Siena. Ricciarelli are by no means exclusively Christmas cookies, but last December, I realized served as a great contrast on my chocolate-forward dessert platter. Ricciarelli are almond-y and slightly citrus-y, with a thin, crispy shell and a chewy consistency inside. They’re light — or lighter than the average holiday fare — which means you’ll find yourself suddenly on your fourth cookie and still reaching for more.

I also consider these cookies an edible victory. You see, last fall, when my family was traveling in Italy, I was feeling destructively hangry while standing in the piazza outside the duomo in Siena. I spotted a bakery, practically sprinted inside and settled on a ricciarello each for me and my husband. After we inhaled our cookies in less than a minute, we turned right back around to buy more for my entire family. Our tour guide, Giuseppe, explained that we’d made a very good choice in the bakery; ricciarelli originated in Siena in the 14th century. But when Jesse suggested I try to replicate the cookies at home, Giuseppe (a very nice man!) delivered some attitude. “They’re very hard to make,” he told us, at which point he and Jesse engaged in a bit of a verbal spar over my baking abilities.

When we got home, I immediately looked up recipes, and I discovered that the Internet is rife with ricciarelli recipes. Dozens and dozens of those ad-infested, wordy cooking blogs have them, but there were other sources, too, some straight out of Italy. I began to experiment with different takes, and I soon realized there were about a dozen different distinctions. Some ricciarelli were made with only powdered sugar, some with a mix of powdered and granulated, still others with both sugars and a sugar syrup. Some included orange rind. Some called for almond flour, others for almond meal, others for whole almonds, blanched and food-processed. And some called for the cookies to be individually rolled into balls, while others instruct you to roll the dough into a log and slice the cookies from there.

Reader, I have made them all. And today, I give you my favorite version, which hews close to the more traditional Sienese recipes, but with a few twists. Are these cookies a little bit time-intensive? Yes, but most of the time is inactive. Are they also pretty darn simple to make? Actually, yes, I swear!

Sienese ricciarelli

adapted from many, many sources

active time: 40 minutes

total time: 1 hour, 40 minutes + an overnight rest for the dough

makes ~26 cookies

My take on ricciarelli uses a combination of finely chopped almonds and almond flour, which I think gives the cookies the proper density. I also am somewhat heavy-handed with the citrus zest, because a little bit extra zest is never a bad thing.

These cookies are so versatile. Serve them on a platter full of other cookies and cakes at a holiday, or dip them in your coffee on a Tuesday morning. (I’m a firm believer breakfast should have no rules.) Another perk: They’re gluten free without any added effort, so if you have any friends or family with an allergy, they’re a great way to make sure no one gets left out of dessert.

1. Fill a medium-sized saucepan with water and bring it to a boil. Prepare a colander. When the water has reached a rolling boil, add 200 grams of almonds and let them cook for about 1 minute, until most have floated to the surface of the water. Pour the almonds over the colander in the sink and immediately begin to stream cold water over the almonds for another minute, cooling them. (Alternately, you can just buy blanched almonds, though they’re harder to find and more expensive than just buying little guys still in their skins and doing the work yourself.)

2. Meanwhile, get out your food processor and add 330 grams of granulated sugar and 200 grams of almond flour to the bowl.

3. Set your oven to 120°F.

4. Peel the almonds; with a quick pinch, they should slide right out of their skins. Discard the skins, and spread the blanched almonds on a baking sheet in a single layer. Put them in the oven for 10-15 minutes, until they’ve dried but before they start to brown.

5. Pour the dried almonds directly into the food processor, put the lid on and pulse the mixture for about 30 seconds until the almonds are finely chopped and the mixture resembles sand.

6. In a small saucepan, combine 20 milliliters of water and 50 grams of granulated sugar. Bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved and you have a clear syrup. This should take about 3 minutes, depending on how hot your stove runs.

7. Turn your food processor back on and, while it’s running, stream the sugar syrup into the sugar-almond mixture until it’s just combined. Scrape the resulting dough into a large bowl.

8. Sift together 50 grams of almond flour, 50 grams of powdered sugar and ½ of a teaspoon of baking powder. Stir that mixture into the dough, incorporating it fully. Cover the dough, which will be relatively dry, with a cloth overnight.

9. The next day, scrub 1 orange and then finely microplane the zest from the whole fruit. Set the zest aside.

10. Sift 50 grams of powdered sugar into a small bowl.

11. Place 3 large egg whites in the bowl of your stand mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment. Turn your mixer on medium-high, and whip the egg whites until a stiff peak forms. Once it has, add the orange zest and sifted powdered sugar, along with 2 teaspoons of almond extract, whipping the eggs after each addition until the new ingredient is just combined. The eggs will lose a bit of their stiffness. That’s okay.

12. Take the towel off of yesterday’s dough, and give it a stir with a spatula. Add the egg whites on top of the dough mixture, and use your spatula to combine it all. It will form a relatively sticky dough, which may still feel a bit crumbly. If it does, knead the dough with your hands until the egg whites and moisture are more uniformly incorporated.

13. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper, and place another ½ cup of so of powdered sugar in a small bowl. Begin to roll your dough into balls, keeping them relatively uniform with about a 1-inch diameter. Roll each ball in the powdered sugar and place it on the baking sheet. Using your hands, shape each ball into an oval — you’re aiming for something resembling a football shape, but flat. Spread the cookies out on your baking sheet; they will expand a bit, but not too much. I’ve found I can fit 15 or 16 on each standard half sheet.

14. Let the cookies rest for an hour, until they’ve formed a bit of a shell.

15. After an hour, set your oven to 325°F. While it heats, let the cookies rest a bit longer. You may notice they’re starting to form cracks. If you’d like, you can pinch each cookie slightly at the edges to emphasize the cracks even more; this is a purely aesthetic exercise.

16. Bake the cookies for 16 minutes, though you should begin to check them after about 12 minutes. The cookies should be puffed up and feel just solid to the touch, and you want to make sure you remove them from the oven before they start to brown. (They’ll firm up even more once they’re out of the oven.) Let the cookies rest for a minute or two, and then transfer them carefully to a wire rack.

Notes: When rolling the cookies into balls, I tend to wash my hands periodically with water. The more coated your hands get it dough remnants, the harder it is to roll the cookies.

Here’s another great thing about these cookies: They’re even better on Day 2 and still great on Day 3. So you can make them in advance of any party or holiday when you might want to serve them.

A few months ago, I was deep down an internet rabbit hole when I stumbled upon this story in about Lena Richard, a Black Creole chef and cookbook author from New Orleans who had a show on television more than a decade before Julia Child did. I couldn’t read the story fast enough, and it left me both curious and embarrassed. I’ve spent months and months of my life in New Orleans, and I think I know a few things about the food there and its history — and I’d never heard the name Lena Richard.

Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of reading about Richard, with plans to do more, and I ordered her book, “New Orleans Cookbook,” and read it cover to cover. Published in 1940, it’s an extensive compendium of Creole cooking, with base recipes, variations, sauces, dressings and more. Like most cookbooks of that era, the language reminds me of the recipes my family has passed down for a few generations; it assumes a knowledge of basic cooking that’s in some ways lost. The instructions are vague at times and always brief; it’s a book with small dimensions, and there are sometimes three recipes on the same page.

I’m planning to cook my way through parts of Richard’s book in the coming months, and the first recipes I was drawn to were the ones that reminded me of holidays: creamed spinach and pie crust, popovers and stuffing. I was especially inspired by Richard’s recipe for a “plain” bread stuffing, and I’ve spent the past few weeks using it as inspiration for a Thanksgiving dish.

Dutch oven stuffing

adapted from Lena Richard’s bread stuffing

active time: 40 minutes

total time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

servings: 8-10

Lena Richard’s recipe for “plain” bread stuffing has a lot of things I enjoy — onion, green pepper, garlic — and I was intrigued by the fact that it had a little bit of a kick. Richard’s recipe called for actually stuffing something with the stuffing — a novel idea! — whereas I like to make stuffing on its own, as more of a savory bread pudding. I scaled the recipe up, tweaked some spices, downplayed the celery and landed on just the right level of moisture to make this cross the threshold from crouton to actual stuffing. Oh, and I decided to make it a one-pot production, which may be the thing I’m proudest of.

This stuffing is classic and savory, a teensy bit spicy and really simple to make. Don’t skimp on the duck fat; it adds a level of flavor dimension that you won’t want to miss.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and make sure your racks are spaced so there’s room for a large Dutch oven with its lid on.

2. Pour 1 cup of dry white wine and 1 cup of vegetable stock into a liquid measure and stir briefly to combine.

3. Crack 2 large eggs into a blender.

4. Chop ½ of a large yellow onion, ½ of a green pepper and 2 stalks of celery into a very fine dice. (If you’re a perfectionist, aim for 110 grams of onion, 80 grams of green pepper and 50 grams of celery.) Combine the vegetable mixture in a medium bowl and grate 2 cloves of garlic on top. Season the vegetables with ½ of a teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper, ½ of a teaspoon of red pepper flakes and 2 teaspoons of kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal).

   

5. In a large Dutch oven (preferably 9 quarts, or something that’s 12ish inches in diameter), heat 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter and 3 tablespoons of duck fat over medium heat. Once the fat is melted, lower the heat to medium-low and add the bowl of vegetables, garlic and spices. Stir to fully incorporate the garlic and spices into the veggies. Cook the mixture for 10 minutes, until the onions are translucent. If you notice any of your vegetables browning, lower the heat; your goal here is to soften everything, not crisp it.

6. While the vegetable mixture cooks, take a 1¼-pound loaf of white bread, preferably pre-sliced, and cut it into cubes. Think of aiming for your pieces to be between the size of a sugar cube and a die. Use the crust, too! Different textures are fun.

7. Once the vegetables have softened, carefully add the bread cubes to the Dutch oven and stir slowly to incorporate. Keep stirring, really letting the vegetables, spices and fats meld with the bread and allowing the bread to fry a bit in the fat. Cook the bread, stirring occasionally, for four minutes, until you notice some of the pieces browning.

8. Pour 1 cup of the wine-stock mixture over the bread, and stir to combine. Let the bread cook for 1-2 minutes, and then turn off the heat.

9. Pour the remaining wine-stock mixture into the blender with the eggs, and pulse the blender briefly to combine. It will only take a second, and you’ll be left with a frothy white mixture. Pour the wine-stock-egg mixture over the bread in the Dutch oven, stirring to incorporate fully.

10. Make sure the bread is in a uniform layer in the Dutch oven. Cover the Dutch oven, and place it in the actual oven. Bake the stuffing for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, remove the lid and continue baking for 35 minutes, until the top of the stuffing is beginning to brown and crisp just slightly — but before it dries out.

11. Allow the stuffing to cool for 10 minutes and then serve.

leftover pumpkin pie filling chocolate chip muffins

active time: 10 minutes

total time: 30-35 minutes

makes 9-12 muffins, depending on your preference for muffin size

I have never in my life made a pumpkin pie — or any pie, actually — and found that I’ve had the exact right amount of filling for my crust. That’s especially the case around Thanksgiving, when I find myself making more pies than I have pie plates — and making pies to give away — so I resort to using those little disposable aluminum dishes. They hold less than any pie plate I own, which means more leftover filling, which means waste. But behold, a solution: muffins!

On Saturday, I made this pumpkin pie with pepitas (yum), and I wound up with almost exactly 1 cup of leftover filling. Using some common baking ratios, I came up with a muffin recipe in a pinch, and it should work with most pumpkin pie filling recipes, assuming they contain a sweetener of some sort (sugar, maple syrup, agave), some milk or cream, a couple eggs and the requisite blend of spices. You’ll notice I’m not using precise language here, and that’s because no two filling recipes are the same, and also because these are not precise muffins. These are good muffins — very good muffins, even. But they’re not going to win any awards for beauty or innovative taste. They’re just a means of turning food waste into a tasty breakfast.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and make sure you have a rack in the center of the oven.

2. Melt 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter and allow it to cool slightly.

3. Pour 1 cup of leftover pumpkin pie filling into a large bowl.

4. Whisk in 1 egg, the butter and 140 grams of sugar, incorporating until the mixture is smooth and uniform.

5. Add 190 grams of flour, ¾ of a teaspoon baking powder, ½ of a teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal). Using a wooden spoon, mix until the flour is just incorporated, though the mixture will still be a bit lumpy.

6. Add 100 grams of bittersweet chocolate chips and stir until they’re just incorporated.

7. Place baking cups in a muffin tin; this recipe will make 12 smallish muffins or 9 slightly larger muffins. (Filling the cups about ⅔ of the way will yield 12 muffins.) For 12 muffins, bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. For 9 muffins, bake for closer to 25 minutes.

A few weeks ago, when I was charring oranges and Meyer lemons for a citrus compote to go inside one of my wedding cakes, my nose swooned at the smell of citrus rind meeting heat. For days afterward, I couldn’t stop trying to recall that particular aroma, and I began to daydream about ways to cook citrus and incorporate it into savory dishes. I knew I needed salt, and maybe a nutty component, too — and after a few days of musing, the basis for this recipe was born.

I’m biased, but I love it, and Jesse told me tonight, after eating this pasta for dinner multiple times in the past week, that he’d like to eat a vat of it. So … try it out. Get a vat. Enjoy.

orecchiette with prosciutto, broccolini and orange

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 30 minutes

serves: 4

It’s been warm in D.C. lately, but mentally, I’m ready for winter cooking — and this pasta represents a decent compromise. It’s slightly too heavy for summer, but it’s not quite a meatball or a braise or any of the other dishes I immediately default to once it gets truly chilly outside.

It’s also a study in contrasts. It’s a little sweet from the orange and plenty salty from the prosciutto. It’s green, but it’s also creamy. It’ll fill you up, but it won’t weigh you down. It’s also proof there’s nothing citrus can’t do.

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, and add 12 ounces of orecchiette. Cook until the pasta is al dente, according to the directions on the packaging; I tend to find about 10 minutes does the trick.

2. While the pasta cooks, cut 2 ounces of prosciutto into ¼-inch-wide strips. Set it aside. Next, trim the woody stalks from a bunch of broccolini (about 6-8 stalks will do the trick). You want to end up with about 5 ounces of trimmed broccolini.

3. Grate the zest from 1 orange, and slice the orange in half.

4. Just before the pasta is ready, reserve ½ of a cup of pasta water.

5. After you’ve drained the pasta, leave it in the colander. It’s time to make the sauce.

6. In a large Dutch oven, heat two tablespoons of butter over medium heat until it’s melted. Add the broccolini and cook for 2-3 minutes, until the broccolini is bright green and a few pieces are beginning to brown. Push all the broccolini into a pile on one side of the Dutch oven and add the prosciutto, moving the pieces around occasionally so they all begin to brown. Cook the prosciutto for 3 minutes, and then incorporate the broccolini so everything is evenly distributed. Reduce the heat to low.

7. Pour ½ of a cup plus 2 tablespoons of heavy cream into a liquid measure. Add half the reserved pasta water (¼ of a cup) to temper the cream, and then add the liquid to the Dutch oven with the prosciutto and broccolini.

8. Squeeze the juice from both orange halves into the sauce, and add the orange zest. Add ½ of a teaspoon of ground pepper and ¼ of a teaspoon of nutmeg, and bring the sauce to a simmer. Add the pasta and stir to incorporate.

9. If the sauce feels thick, add a bit more pasta water.

10. Add ⅓ of a cup of freshly grated Parmesan to the pasta and stir rapidly to melt and incorporate it into the sauce. Cook the pasta for 2 additional minutes and serve.

Notes: I tend to discard nearly all the broccolini stalk and leave mostly florets. I just find it too stiff and woody. Also, there’s no need to separate your prosciutto slices before you add them to the Dutch oven; the pieces will naturally separate as they cook.

So in the spirit of enduring tomatoes, I decided to put together a kind of loose framework for one of my favorite tomato-based meals: a BLT. It’s similar to what I did with guacamole over the summer in that there’s no hard-and-fast recipe, just a loose framework for how to make a great BLT on your own terms. Unlike the guacamole formula, though, this one contains an ingredient hack that I’m pretty damn proud of.

the BLT formula

active time: 20 minutes

total time: 20 minutes

serves: as many people as you’d like

There are few things better than a BLT made with fresh ingredients: good bread, tomatoes right off the vine and bacon that’s just the right kind of crispy. I’m leery, though, to declare what makes a BLT great. For some people, it’s the tomato that matters most, for others the bacon, for others the lettuce. Plus, everyone’s preferred ratios are different. And that’s all okay! The beauty of sandwiches is that they’re easily personalized.

This BLT method, inspired by Spanish pan con tomate, probably isn’t for someone who thinks the tomato needs to make up the substance of the sandwich. It’s also not for someone in a rush. It is, then, for those of you who love the taste of tomatoes but are sometimes troubled by their shape and texture and non-uniformity. It’s for people who might declare a meal ruined if an errant bite were to pull an entire juicy, red slice out from between the bread. There’s no going back at that point; you’re stuck with a BL and hearty dose of disappointment.

Here’s what you’re going to need for these alternative BLTs:

• some crusty, but not super crusty, white bread — you want the sandwich to have a backbone, but not to injure the roof of your mouth

• a big, juicy heirloom tomato or two

• good olive oil — use the stuff you’d use for a salad dressing, not the stuff you’d use to roast veggies

• kosher salt and black pepper

• thick-cut bacon, preferably uncured and applewood smoked

• butter lettuce — this, I think, yields the perfect level of crunch and heft while still offering some actual flavor

• mayonnaise (optional)

• a large box grater

1. Grate your tomato (or tomatoes) using a large box grater. (I’ve found that one large heirloom tomato is enough for 2-3 BLTs, depending on how much tomato you want on your sandwich and how big your sandwiches are and how juicy your tomato is.) Discard the skins.

2. Pour your grated tomato through a fine-mesh sieve, pressing out as much of the water as you can. Discard the water, and scoop your concentrated tomato into a medium-sized bowl.

3. To your tomato, add some olive oil. I think 1 tablespoon per large tomato is a good ratio, but you might have reasons to want more or less. Add a pinch of kosher salt and some freshly grated black pepper. Stir to combine, and then add more salt and pepper if necessary.

4. Set the tomato mixture aside, and fry some bacon. Or make it in the oven. I aspire to be an oven bacon person, but I always forget that aspiration until my bacon is on the stove and beginning to splatter.

5. Let your cooked bacon drain on a paper towel.

6. Slice your bread. If you really want to take this exercise seriously, you could even bake your own bread. When I made these BLTs recently, I baked New York Times Cooking’s updated no-knead bread, and it was a fantastic option.

7. Begin to layer your ingredients. I think the order here is important, because the last thing you want is for the tomato mixture to make the bread soggy. To avoid that, start with the bacon. Place a layer of the crispy stuff across one slice of bread, overlapping pieces slightly (or overlapping them a lot if you’re a bacon-forward eater).

8. Spoon the tomato mixture on top of the bacon, tucking it in to the meat’s crevices and piling it as high as you’d like. Your mixture should have enough substance to it that it can hold it’s shape well; that’s why draining the water is important.

9. After that, lay a few leaves of butter lettuce on top, covering the tomato. Spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on the remaining slice of bread (this isn’t totally necessary, I don’t think, what with the olive oil in the tomato, but it also can’t hurt). Top the lettuce with the bread, slice the sandwich in half, and you’re in business. I will never make a BLT the typical way again.

It’s been a minute since I beamed an actual recipe into everyone’s inboxes, so this week, I decided to send two — both for cocktail syrups.

For me, for whatever reason, this has been a summer of wine. But now that it’s winding down — and now that I’ve emerged from several weeks of self-imposed sobriety — all I want are cocktails. So I had a little fun this week with fruit and came up with two cocktail syrups that, in my slightly tipsy opinion, are perfect for the transition from summer to fall.

pineapple-habanero syrup

serves: many

prep time: 5 minutes

cook time: 45 minutes

what you need: a grill, cheesecloth, a blender or food processor

Start with about 1 pound of cored and cubed pineapple. How you get there is your choice; you can buy a fruit and chop it yourself or get your pineapple pre-chopped. There’s no judgment in cocktail syrups.

Preheat your grill, and once it’s reached about 400°F, lay the pineapple cubes on it. Let them cook for 5-6 minutes, until they’re starting to brown. Begin flipping them in order to brown as many sides of each piece as possible. The fruit doesn’t need to be totally charred; it just needs to have clear grill lines and to have begun to caramelize. The whole pineapple-grilling process should take about 15 minutes.

Once your fruit is properly cooked, head back inside — unless you have an electric range. (If you have an electric range, you’ll want to also grill your habaneros alongside the pineapple.) Turn on your gas burner, and set 2 habanero peppers on top of it. Let them char for about 5 minutes, turning them periodically, until their skin is about 80 percent blackened. When they’re ready, place them in a bowl covered with plastic wrap for 10 minutes.

While they sweat, put your grilled pineapple in a blender or food processor, and puree it until it’s smooth.

Remove the skin from the habaneros; it should come off easily; sometimes I like to do it under running water, which speeds the process. Remove the stems, halve the peppers, and remove the ribs and seeds. Add one of the peppers to the blender or food processor and puree until it’s fully incorporated. Taste your puree and see what you think about the spice level. (Habaneros pack a punch, so one may very well be enough.) The goal at this point is for your puree to be about 10 percent spicier than you want it to be; the flavor will get toned down as the syrup cooks.

Once you’ve added as much habanero as you’d like, pour your puree into a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add ¾ of a cup of water and ½ of a cup of granulated sugar. Stir to combine, and bring the mixture to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat to low and allow the mixture to simmer for 10-15 minutes, cooking down slightly.

Let the mixture cool, and strain it through a cheesecloth into a jar, squeezing to extract as much liquid as you can. You should have a bit more than a cup when all is said and done.

The syrup will keep in the fridge for several weeks. Add about a teaspoon to a margarita or the tequila- or mezcal-based drink of your choice.

spiced fig syrup

adapted using methods from The Cocktail Codex

serves: many

prep time: 10 minutes

cook time: 2 hours

what you need: a blender, a sous vide

Program your sous vide to 135°F, and let the water begin to heat.

Meanwhile, remove the stems from your figs and quarter them. You will need 7 ounces of quartered figs, which is the yield of approximately 10 to 15 figs, depending on how big yours are.

Place 200 grams of granulated sugar into your blender. Pour 200 milliliters of hot water into the blender, and mix the sugar and water for about 15 seconds, until the sugar is fully dissolved.

Pour the sugar-water mixture into a plastic or silicone bag. Add the figs, and use your hands on the outside of the bag to incorporate them into the sugar-water. Add a 1-inch sprig of fresh rosemary and a rounded ¼ of a teaspoon of pink peppercorns to the bag. Again, squish the bag around to incorporate everything.

Once the water is at temperature, press as much air out of the bag as you can and lower it into the pot, clipping the top of the bag to the lip of the pot. Let the mixture cook for 2 hours.

At the two hour mark, remove the bag from the water bath and drop it into a large bowl of ice water. Leave it in the ice water for about a minute, then remove it and pour the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer once or twice. Pour the strained liquid into a jar or squeeze bottle, and use about half a teaspoon in an old fashioned — or a bourbon or whiskey cocktail of your choosing. I made one using 2 ounces of whiskey, half an ounce of Amaro Ciociaro and orange bitters, which paired great with the herby fig flavor.

The syrup will keep in the fridge for about a week. It also freezes well.

Hello, and welcome to my vortex of gardening angst. Come for a hearty dose of tomato hubris, and stay for a juicy, savory galette recipe.

I am, at times, given to excess. As a teenager, I was so tightly wound, so regimented, that I sometimes think I’m still making up for lost everything. I spend too much money on dresses, and I’m prone to ordering dessert, and if I’m having bread, I spread butter on thick.

So when I was researching which seeds to order for the vegetable garden I started in the spring, I didn’t think twice about the type of tomato plants to order. Tomatoes, you see, fall into two distinct categories: indeterminate and determinate. Determinate tomatoes grow to a reasonable size, and then they flower and bear a round of fruit, and that’s that. Indeterminate tomatoes are the opposite: They grow and grow and flower and flower and, in theory, yield fruit for much of the summer and early fall. Of course that’s what I went with.

Here’s what I didn’t consider: That I’m not a farmer, that my patio is quite petite, that my tomato pots only came with a five-foot-tall cage, that plants tend to go crazy in the hot, humid D.C. summers. When my mom raised her eyebrows at my choice, I rolled my eyes — and then my eyes popped out of my head as my tomato plants kept growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. While my friends’ (determinate) tomato plants began to bear fruit, mine had barely started to flower, and they’d become an invasive species, bursting from their cages and threatening to overtake everything around them.

And then, finally, little green nubs of tomato began to form (and form, and form). Suddenly my tomato plants weren’t just sprouting arms; they’d become top-heavy, voluptuous ladies practically overnight. They couldn’t support the weight of their fruit, so they collapsed and snapped, and the little tomatoes, deprived of nutrients, were frozen as perpetual teenagers, green and half-sized and inedible. All the while, the plants kept growing, as if on a mission of self-destruction. I pruned the snapped branches and steeled myself for a tomato harvest of zero.

And then the other day, I glimpsed a flash of red from inside the dense tomato wilderness. I ran down the deck stairs and stuck my head in the fresh-smelling foliage and found not one but FIVE ripe, striped tomatoes.

I plucked them off the vine and pruned some more — I am always pruning — and wondered if that would be it for the season. But that was yesterday, and it rained today, and I already see a new yellow flower. So maybe there will be more, or maybe the plants will keep teetering and tripping and breaking all their limbs, but at least I’ve learned my lesson: Next year, determinate tomatoes.

And right now, a tomato galette for dinner.

tomato and corn galette

serves: 2

prep time: 15 minutes

rest time: 2 hours

bake time: 30 minutes

I can’t believe I can finally give you all a tomato recipe after my vines have spent the whole summer mocking me.

The key to this galette is its hearty — but still flaky — crust. You’re filling it with meaty tomato slices, and you want a savory exterior that can contain the juice and substance inside; the satisfying crunch and texture of the cornmeal is also a great contrast to the broken-down tomatoes inside.

Oh, and as for those tomatoes: You want the most substantial (meaty, heirloom, low in seeds) ones you can find. I used the striped romas from my garden, and they were perfect, retaining just enough of their structure while softening and caramelizing.

1. Take 4 tablespoons of salted butter out of the fridge and slice it into six roughly equal-sized pieces. Put the butter back on its wrapper and stick it in the freezer for about five minutes.

2. Fill a small bowl with some water and a few ice cubes.

3. While the butter hardens slightly, stir together 33 grams of whole wheat flour, 30 grams of all-purpose flour, 18 grams of cornmeal and ¼ of a teaspoon of kosher salt in a medium-sized bowl. (That’s about a quarter-cup each of the flours and an eighth of a cup of cornmeal, but I beg you, get a cheap scale! Everything you bake will instantly become just a little bit better.)

4. Take the butter out of the freezer and add it to the dry ingredients, making a snapping motion with your fingers to incorporate it into the flour. You want to think about flattening the butter into shards, not rolling it into balls. Keep incorporating it until there are no large butter chunks remaining, and the butter shards are scattered relatively uniformly throughout the dry stuff.

5. Scoop 1 tablespoon of water out of the ice water bowl and sprinkle it into the dough. Incorporate it with your hands, and take stock of things. You may need another full tablespoon to get the dough properly hydrated, but you may need less, so start adding the water teaspoonful by teaspoonful. As soon as the dough can form a ball without lots of dry bits falling off, you’re good.

6. Take your dough ball and place it on a sheet of plastic wrap,. Flatten it slightly into a disc. Put it in the fridge for at least two hours and as long as overnight.

7. When you’re about 15 minutes away from taking the dough out of the fridge, set the oven to 425°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

8. Crack 1 egg into a small bowl. Add a splash of water and set it aside.

9. Grab a couple tomatoes and start cutting them into roughly quarter-inch-thick slices. Thinner is fine, thicker is probably a bad idea. All in all, you want 8 ounces of sliced tomatoes. (That might be one heirloom tomato, or it might be two or three smaller fruit.) Season the tomatoes with a big pinch of kosher salt and set them aside.

10. Meanwhile, begin to cut the kernels off of an ear of corn. You want 2 ounces of corn kernels, which only be about half of one ear. (Find something fun to do with the rest of the kernels. Maybe buy an extra ear and make a corn salad!) Set the kernels aside.

11. Take the dough out of the fridge, and place it on a floured surface. Roll it out into a circle or circle-adjacent shape. It should be about a quarter of an inch thick, and if the edges are a little rough, that’s absolutely fine. If the edges are super cracked and nonuniform and your crust looks more like a misshapen continent than anything round, perform a little surgery, filling cracks with bits of dough you’ve excised from other parts of the crust. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need something that has a loose association with the concept of a circle.

12. Dump your tomato slices into a strainer and toss them a bit, letting the excess juice run off. Put them back into the original bowl, and mix in 1½ teaspoons of flour, 1 teaspoon of sugar and the zest of half a lemon, stirring to combine. Then begin to arrange the tomatoes on your crust, overlapping them slightly and leaving about an inch of crust uncovered. Sprinkle a few corn kernels throughout, filling nooks and crannies. Add a second layer of tomatoes (and maybe even a third, depending on the shape of your galette and the thickness of your tomato slices) and the rest of your corn.

13. Begin to tuck the crust up and around the the edges of the tomato and corn pile, pinching it when necessary to keep it in place. You can try to make it pretty and uniform, or you can just tuck and fold in the most sensible way; it doesn’t matter. Your galette will be beautiful if it’s abstract (read: messy) or uniform.

14. Take the egg you set aside earlier and break it up a bit with a pastry brush, swirling the yolk into the white. Brush the galette crust with your egg wash all around the edge, getting it pretty uniformly (but thinly) covered in egg.

15. Using a metal spatula, transfer the galette to your parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake it for 30 minutes, until the crush is a golden brown and feels hard when you tap on it with your nail. Remove the galette from the oven, and allow it to cool for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, tear or slice 4 basil leaves into narrow strips and scatter them across the surface of the galette. You can feast on it as is, or you can drizzle it with a bit of balsamic reduction.

Thanks so much to everyone who responded, both in the thread I posted here and on social media, about their food traditions. I’m in the very early stages of working on a longer post (or series of posts) about the way we weave food through our traditions, and it’s super helpful to hear from all of you. And if you still want to share something, be my guest!

This week’s essay is about a tradition of sorts, too, though I had no idea until recently that it was the kind of behavior that needed to be codified and given a name (and analyzed into oblivion). But leave it to social media to dissect yet another simple, silly pleasure.

Social media has an uncanny ability to make the spotlight seem more like one of those freaky blue lights detectives shine on crime scenes to reveal blood spatter. You might at first be giddy to see your favorite under-the-radar author or the charming cafe down the block blow up on Twitter or TikTok for an internet moment. But then, often, you’ll learn something you never needed to know. The musician once fired her assistant in a fit of rage. Last month, someone found a hair in their yogurt parfait. Oh, and here’s a picture of the hair. Here’s an expert weighing in about the digestive downsides of hair consumption. Here’s another expert rebutting, claiming we should all be gnawing on follicles regularly. And now your cat’s hacking up a hairball, and the experience of breakfast at that once-beloved restaurant has gone bland.

So imagine my dismay when I learned about “girl dinner,” the latest internet food trend. Over the past few weeks, social media chatter about girl dinner has become loud enough that even I, a geriatric millennial, have become aware of it. It’s filtered all the way from TikTok to Instagram to SEO-optimized think pieces, and I ran headlong into the discourse between photos of my acquaintances’ babies.

A girl dinner is, to the best of my understanding, a plate (or napkin, or large piece of flattened waxed paper that was once used to wrap cheese) covered in an assortment of unrelated food molecules: a hunk of brie, three slices of turkey, a few berries, a fun-sized Snickers bar, two hard-boiled eggs, a yogurt, some carrots. The options are infinite and unconstrained. And kudos, I guess, to Gen Z for so definitively naming a mode of eating that so many people had already embraced for so long. (I actually named this newsletter to reflect my love of disorganized, hodgepodge eating.)

But here’s the problem: The name is terrible. It’s a little bit patronizing and a lot infantilizing, and I have to think it’s fueling the reactions. Some nutritionists say girl dinner glorifies diet culture and promotes meals that are too small and lack in nutrients. (Others say it’s a great example of intuitive eating.) The name excludes a vast swath of the population, and the fact that this a trend at all ignores the fact that the traditional American dinner — the institution girl dinner is bucking — is by no means universal. Expensive cheese and imported olives and many of the other social media trappings of girl dinner are hardly accessible to the masses.

It is possible, dear reader, to agree wholeheartedly with those critiques — to be terrified of the dark underbelly of social media that glorifies disordered eating, to have real critiques of the American and global food system — and to still revel in the joy of what I will begrudgingly here call girl dinner.

That’s because girl dinner isn’t an absolute or a directive. It’s an option. It’s a reward. It’s “Jesus Christ, I do everything around here” dinner. It’s “this is simply all I can muster” dinner. It’s “I’m secretly glad I get to eat alone tonight” dinner. There are nights when I want to reverse-sear a steak, and there are nights when all I can think about is an English muffin drenched in jam with a side of sliced cheddar. Girl dinner is permission. It celebrates cleaning out the fridge at a moment when wasting groceries feels like lighting a paycheck on fire. It highlights the fact that when I’m left to my own devices, a little bit lazy and mad for sustenance, I don’t default to the Doordash app and its avalanche of fees.

My stepgrandma Rosemary, a dietitian, always said the key to eating well, for a healthy adult, was moderation. And as I think about girl dinner and the debates around it, I think about her. She was an angelic woman, the slowest eater I ever met, and I know she nibbled on a girl dinner or two in her day. She’d have said they were fine — in moderation, of course. So tonight, I will lick peanut butter off a spoon and follow it up with a bowl of plums and a few pearls of mozzarella. Tomorrow, I’ll order a burger and a pint of beer, and the server will probably set them down in front of my husband, who will slide them toward me and have chicken.

There are days for grazing and days for gluttony, days for early dinner and days for working through dinner and slurping a milkshake before bed. Some days, you can muster a dinner that fits everyone’s definition, and some other days you cannot, and most of the time, dinner falls somewhere in the satisfied in-between.

”this is simply all I can muster” pasta

serves: 1

prep time: 5 minutes

cook time: 20 minutes

This is a dinner for the in-between, when I’m eating alone and don’t really want to cook but want a meal nonetheless. It’s also perfect for these late July days, when there’s no shortage of tomatoes and basil within a few steps of many of our kitchens.

1. Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil.

2. Pour 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a shallow pan and turn the heat to medium-low. Add ½ of a cup of cherry tomatoes — the tinier the better — and cook, undisturbed, for about two minutes, until the cherries are sizzling and sweating.

3. Meanwhile, thinly slice 1 small clove of garlic and 2 basil leaves. When the tomatoes are hot and sweaty and getting loud, add the garlic and stir to combine. The garlic will begin to gently brown. If the browning looks like something other than gentle, lower your heat a bit.

4. By this point, your water should be boiling. Add 2 ounces of spaghetti, and cook it according to the instructions on the packaging.

5. Back to the tomatoes. Keep an eye on them, and stir them occasionally. After about 10 minutes, they will begin to burst, some on their own and some as you stir. Once most have burst, tick the heat down to low and add ¼ of a teaspoon of paprika, ⅛ of a teaspoon of ground coriander and a big pinch of kosher salt. Stir to mix in the spices, and keep cooking the tomato mixture until each of the tomatoes has lost its shape, another three or four minutes.

6. If your noodles aren’t ready yet, turn the heat on the tomatoes down to the lowest possible option. If they are ready, add them to the sauce and stir to coat the noodles in the garlicky oil for about 30 seconds. Transfer the pasta to a bowl, and grate ½ of an ounce of Manchego cheese (or, if you’re not one for measuring cheese, as much Manchego as you’d like) on top. Garnish with the sliced basil.

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