noodsletter #.0029
Recent work; that fennel salad.
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Book Bit
One consequence of the incident, she said, was that she had lost the ability to eat in a normal way—whatever that was. She supposed she must have known how to do it once, because she had got his far without ever really thinking about eating, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she had, or what she had eaten for all those years. She used to be married, she said, to a man who was a very good cook and who possessed generally an almost fanatical sense of order around food. The last time she had seen him, which was several months ago, he had suggested they go for lunch. He had chosen a fashionable restaurant, of a kind she no longer went to, for reasons of economy and also, she supposed, because she now lacked the necessary sense of entitlement, in that she felt she had no right to be in such places any more. She had sat and watched him order and then slowly consume a starter, main course, and dessert, each dish very moderate and in its own way perfect—the starter had been oysters and the dessert, if she recalled, had been fresh strawberries with a dash of cream—followed by a small espresso which he had downed in one swallow. She herself had ordered a side salad. Afterwards, when they had parted, she had passed a donut shop and had gone inside and bought four donuts, which she consumed one after the other standing in the street.
From Outline by Rachel Cusk.
A remarkable novel.
Some Work Stuff
Work has been rather intense in the runup to the holidays. One of the things that’s vastly different about ChefSteps is the volume of stuff we publish, as well as the frequency, is, frankly, nuts. I hesitate to post about it on Instagram because it would basically have the frequency of spam.
A lot of this stuff is just for paying subscribers (to ChefSteps! not this humble/humiliating newsletter!), but some of it is free.
We just published an air frying class, with tons of recipes and guides. (You need a subscription or need to buy the class.)
We publish an episode of the video series “The Road to Cooking” every week, along with a recipe. This week featured Claudette Zepeda and her recipe for lamb barbacoa. (These are both free.)
Matthew Woolen’s pumpkin riff on homemade Ding Dongs. (For subscribers.)
A bunch of recipes for Thanksgiving, all of them free:
Fully loaded duchess potatoes (these are amazing)
Cranberry sauce (nifty trick in this one)
Sausage and mushroom sourdough stuffing
Chicken-fried turkey breast cutlets (amazing, but also for subscribers only)
A lot of these have videos, too, and all the photography is amazing. And this is just what we’ve put out in the last two weeks.
“News”
More of the artist’s work: pho, banh mi, boba.
The artist’s art used to illustrate this piece, which describes going to McDonald’s as going “To the bank of the Saline River.” I like that.
Gingko trees are fascinating, and their nuts are delicious poison:
In short, ginkgo seeds entered Chinese cuisine as imperial appetizers
There was a female gingko tree on my block when I lived in my last apartment, and I harvested the nuts once a year, which caused some serious tension in my marriage. (that barf smell you sometimes get a whiff of when you’re walking around in NYC? It’s gingko nuts—it intensifies when you dry them, and lingers if you dry them indoors.)
As a bit of advertising, a pair of sweats with “smooth” emblazoned across the butt is pretty funny for a mayo company.
This is a nutty short story and I honestly don’t know how I feel about it!
I began walking — north, south, west, I couldn’t tell which — and when I looked up, I was in front of the McDonald’s on 8th Avenue. It felt like a sign. I followed a family of British tourists inside. Along the back wall, menu panels glittered with brilliant, pulsing light. My teeth itched. At the counter, I ordered two twenty-piece chicken nuggets, a chicken sandwich and two burgers off the dollar menu, a large fries, and a large vanilla shake. I began drinking the shake on my way out.
Alfresco dining in NYC is here to stay. I’m generally supportive, even if that means I am supporting the vast community of NYC rats.
The possibilities of the peanut.
Oomancy: divination by means of eggs.
This piece is about ingesting effluvia as a kink, sure, but it is astonishingly well-written.
Chrissy Teigen + Gawker = click.
Gas stoves the new cigarettes.
If you need another reason not to go to Olive Garden, it’s the choice of white supremacist insurrectionists.
Can Japan’s sushi culture survive the plundering of the oceans inspired by Japan’s sushi culture? Maybe the question is should rather than can, hmm.
How to make lab-grown seafood delicious.
Candy prices and corporate ghouls.
A scientist who’s an outspoken defender of the meat industry’s impact on climate is funded by the meat industry. I am shocked and surprised. (I am not shocked and surprised.)
Julie Powell, author and blogging innovator, died.
A good review of the bad Anthony Bourdain biography. I met him a couple times. Never seemed particularly happy to me.
The pre-cooked turkey you can buy from Popeye’s might actually…be good?
Someone called the cops on a BBQ restaurant because…well, bless their stupid hearts.
Becca Rothfeld, who I think is as incisive a writer as you could ask for, on online mobs and whether throwing away Halloween candy is abusive (lol, it’s not).
Fennel salad
I don’t go to restaurants often, and when I do, like the woman described in the quotation from Cusk’s Outline, they’re not fashionable restaurants, for reasons of economy; not, however, because I now lack the necessary sense of entitlement. Instead, it’s the opposite: I feel I am entitled to a better experience than these restaurants typically provide. I’m now less inclined to weather the bout of resentment they inspire, since the food isn’t so good that it justifies the attendant expenses of higher labor and ingredient costs, paying for which necessarily means I must make some kind of material adjustment in the way I live the rest of my life. Not only is the food kind of mediocre, but it also rarely inspires me, which, in the end, is half the reason I go to restaurants of any kind: to steal good ideas so I can eat better at home.
For a kind of work-related event, I found myself at Cafe Altro Paradiso, which belongs firmly in the category of “fashionable” restaurants. I wasn’t on the hook for the tab, so I was about as sanguine as is possible about the stuff we ordered—arancini, a fennel salad, a clutch of oysters—and when the stuff arrived, I was nevertheless pleasantly surprised. The arancini were excellent, the oysters ditto; the fennel salad, however, was inspiring, the kind of dish that makes going to a restaurant—any restaurant, fashionable or no—worth it.
Of course, it was very simple: shaved fennel, dressed with olive oil, lemon, and pepper, with a chunky mix of firm, chopped olives, lemon zest, and fennel fronds, and pretty curls of provolone served alongside (one of our party was lactose-intolerant). You might think that it seems like an aggressively quotidian dish, and I suppose it is: Search for “fennel salad” on the internet and you’ll get a raft of similar results. What I found so interesting about it was basically how it was physically constructed, its architecture on the plate. A mound of fennel run through a mandoline, artfully piled above a smaller dense mound of the chopped olives, zest, and fennel fronds, as if the mix had been piled into a Chinese tea cup and inverted. Digging into it, you had to mix the small mound below with the mound of fennel on top.
I like these kinds of restaurant-y salads. Back at Serious Eats, I made a copy-cat version of a radicchio and endive salad I’d eaten at Una Pizza Napoletana because it had this architectural element: layers of dressing and salad ingredients that, when eaten, are combined. The fennel salad is far simpler to make, and yet probably better when it comes down to it; I can and have eaten this salad multiple nights a week.
This is less a recipe than a kind of outline; the main point to observe is you want a quantity of olive/zest/frond mixture that’s sufficient for the mound of shaved fennel on top, and that quantity is entirely up to you. I’ve found that you can swing the proportions any which way you like: more for a saltier, more aggressively seasoned salad, less for a more elegantly dressed fennel salad, the kind you’re more likely to be served in a fashionable restaurant. The flavor comes from the quality of your olives and the quality of your olive oil; less so from the quality of your fennel, although here, as ever, good vegetables, if you can get them, make a big difference.
Ingredients:
1 small bulb of fennel, trimmed, halved, and cored, some of the fronds reserved
Handful of (good, firm) green olives (about 8-12), pitted, chopped roughly
1 clove of garlic, minced
Zest from one lemon, julienned and cut into half-inch lengths if you can manage it, or simply grated
Juice from a lemon, divided
Good olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt
Parmigiano (if you have good provolone, use that; I…don’t)
Using a mandoline slicer (and cut-proof gloves!!!!), shave fennel thinly. Place shaved fennel in a medium mixing bowl, cover with cold water, and add several ice cubes. Let sit for 15 minutes, drain thoroughly.
Meanwhile, combine chopped olives, garlic, lemon zest, a small bundle of chopped fennel fronds, the juice from a half a lemon, and a couple generous glugs of olive oil in a small mixing bowl. Season with salt and lots of black pepper. Taste for seasoning (it should be rather salty).
Squeeze a little lemon juice from the other half of the lemon over the chilled and drained fennel slices along with a very spare amount of olive oil and toss to combine (this is just to give the fennel slices a little sheen).
Spoon the olive mixture into the center of a serving plate. Mound the shaved fennel on top. Cover with a light layer of grated Parm. Serve.
