three best bites: there's a lot of cheese and butter in this newsletter

I didn’t eat all that well this week. Apart from many chocolate chip cookies, which I covered pretty comprehensively on Friday, these bites are just about the only really good ones I had all week. Other than that, I scavenged, throwing together dinners from odds and ends and eating jammy English muffins for lunch. It happens. It’s okay. I’m still here, and I’ve got the itch to cook a whole lot more this week than last, so that’s something, I suppose.

Jasper Hill Farm Vault No. 5 cheddar: I can’t say enough good things about our neighborhood cheese shop, Paste & Rind, which has a large but curated selection of cheeses for sale and an adorable bar space where you can sit, eat cheese and charcuterie and enjoy a glass of wine. I recently joined their monthly cheese club, and on Saturday, Jesse and I stopped by to pick up our box and (naturally) have some cheese. We tried a few things, and the standout to me was the Jasper Hill cheddar, which is cave-aged and super smooth, with a deep, nutty flavor. Paste & Rind serves it on a board with granola, apple butter and candied pecans, which may sound a little presumptuous for August, but I promise: Stick a sugary pecan on top of a slice of this cheese, and you’ll forget all your problems.

the elote is the dish on the left; also pictured are the lumpia (up top) and the pork belly

elote: On Friday night, we finally made it to the Mahal BBQ popup at Maketto. The couple behind Mahal have been serving their Afro-Filipino barbecue in the back of Maketto’s outdoor space on weekends all summer, and for one reason or another, it took us until August to get there. The biggest downside of our tardiness is that Mahal is closing up shop — at this location, at least — after this upcoming weekend. I’m selfishly hoping they choose to do a brick-and-mortar spot somewhere in the vicinity of H Street or on Capitol Hill.

I realize I’m writing all of this without telling you a thing about the food. So, to remedy that: We tried the chicken lumpia, the elote, the crispy pork belly, the smoked beef and the ube banana pudding. It was all really, really good, and the elote is the dish that stuck with me most. It’s served on the cool side of room temperature and dressed up with calamansi cream, chili crunch and cheese. On the side, there’s a ton of crudite and Skyflakes, a type of Filipino cracker. I decided to just eat the elote with a fork, and it was super creamy, intermittently crunchy, salty and sweet. I want to try to replicate it, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

passionfruit, coconut and tequila layer cake: If someone were to ask me why I spent multiple days making an elaborate layer cake to eat with my husband on a random Saturday, I would plead the fifth. There is actually a reason for my madness — and I will reveal that reason someday — but for now, I’m going to be coy.

The important takeaway here: This cake, from Natasha Pickowicz’s “More Than Cake,” is to die for. If you have a hankering to make it — or an occasion coming up that calls for a killer cake — you should. And before you start, a few words of advice:

Make the components ahead of time unless you have an entire day to devote to cake-baking. I made the passionfruit curd on Monday, the coconut-tequila soak on Tuesday and the coconut streusel and cake layers on Thursday. I let the cake cool, assembled the whole shebang and stuck it in the freezer until Saturday. Then on Saturday I made the buttercream, frosted it and dug in a few hours later.

Oh, and this is crucial, too: If you make your soak and sample it and think it’s going to make the cake taste like a blurry night from your early 20s, do not fear. The soak is intense alone, but when you marry it with all the other flavors and let everything hang out together in the fridge and freezer for a few days, it becomes super subtle. Don’t skimp on the tequila. And use every last morsel of your coconut streusel. Its subtle, sweet-and-salty crunch is the component that takes this cake from good to great.

Right after I decided to start sharing story and book recommendations in these Monday newsletters, I got an email about Bookshop.org’s affiliate program. I’m under no illusions that I have enough of a following here to make affiliate income off my recommendations, but when I clicked through the platform, I realized it’s actually a nice way to keep people up to date on the cookbooks and books about cooking I’m reading, using and loving. So I set up a page, which I hope more than anything will encourage people to buy cookbooks (and to buy them from a platform that pays independent booksellers). Click here to check out my page, which will grow over time.

The latest book I added is Sally Schmitt’s “Six California Kitchens,” which I bought last month at Levin & Company, an independent bookstore in Healdsburg, California. Anytime I travel somewhere new or new-ish, I like to buy a cookbook from the town or region, and this book is Wine Country personified. Schmitt, who died at age 90 in 2022 (right before her book was released), started the French Laundry in Napa, and the book is one part recipes, one part stories of Napa Valley in another time. I just finished reading it from cover to cover, and now I can’t wait to start cooking from it. First up, I think, is a pork loin with mustard-caper sauce. I’m also curious about a dessert called a chocolate chinchilla.