A Piece of Cake

Memorial Day is nigh, the symbolic start of the summer season. But for my purposes, it’s the start of strawberry season. I picked up my first quart of South Jersey strawberries at the Union Square Greenmarket yesterday. They did cost me a kidney (if a kidney cost $9), but it was a price I was happy to pay. When I’m buying local strawberries, I like to consider the weather the week prior.

It is time again for “the spring tonic,” as my grandmother so poetically refers to rhubarb. Rhubarb is the first “fruit” of the year. And even if it’s not your favorite farmers’ market buy, rhubarb’s rosy color and tart flavor is a relief after months of over-wintered apples. At this point in the year, I do not want to look at another Cara Cara, for at least 8 months. I love a bar.

It’s about time we had another quick and easy weeknight dish here on the ol’ newsletter. Now that spring has fully sprung, I find myself pretty much exclusively wanting to eat green things. Tender greens from the market, herbs from the freshly planted pots on your fire escape, and peas from the freezer (stay with me here). While it might be a little early here in the Northeast for local peas, the frozen ones are just as good, if not better.

Weekends in the restaurant industry mean one thing: brunch. And you can’t have brunch without a bloody mary. In all my years of slinging eggs and bacon, I have made and served thousands of bloodys. And now, dear reader, I pass that knowledge onto you. A perfect bloody starts with good tomato juice. I have found the very best to be Sacramento brand.

I do apologize for the gap, but it has been a weird few weeks over here in the Spena-Clark household. I had back-to-back food poisoning, a slipped disk, and the worst flu I’ve had in my adult life. That’s right, like the classic flu. How retro of me. But here we are, back at it, and we shot a ton of new recipes in the last couple of days. So keep an eye on your inboxes for a couple of extra recipes peppering the coming weeks. Now, onto the main event.

It’s my birthday, and it’s 70 degrees outside, and Kate (the dog) is glaring at me, begging for a park trip. So here’s a quick one for you that’s also a perfect recipe for the weekend. I developed this recipe for our friends over at Graza a couple of weeks back, but it’s so good that I wanted to share it with you all here. This pancake is not too sweet yet not savory, and the cornmeal gives it a great flavor while still being fluffy. The real kicker is the maple syrup emulsified with olive oil.

As soon as Andrew and I returned to indoor dining last year, we hightailed it Joseph Leonard’s, one of my standby Manhattan joints. What a perfect return to NYC restaurants: crammed into a cozy little space, perched at a tiny little table, an inch from your neighbors, reveling in their gossip. It was like coming home, if “home” included the possibility of strangers breaking up next to you. We ordered a vegetarian entree that night, not because it was veggie, but because it sounded so good.

I don’t need to tell anyone reading about the situation in Ukraine. And as you may have noticed, I hadn’t referenced it yet in this newsletter. This is a recipe newsletter, I thought, and people with knowledge of and connection to Ukraine are saying everything that needs to be said. But the violence is nowhere near over. And as I saw the relief efforts being organized by people I do have connections to, I realized that I could use this edition of the newsletter to help amplify their work.

There are no lukewarm reactions when it comes to oatmeal cookies. Some people love them while others love to joke about how much they loathe them. And I’m just here to tell you, in a full-throated voice, that if you’re in the latter camp? You are wrong. Fully wrong. Come for me; this is one giant mound of rolled old-fashioned oats that I am prepared to die on.

Some recipes on this newsletter have a story: some kind of personal anecdote, or a historical basis. This is not one of those recipes. What this recipe is though, is deeply delicious. This is a true case of “the recipe you’re about to read is something that I just wanted to make and eat.” Tender, vibrantly-colored gnocchi in a tangy horsey sauce with a metric ton of chopped dill. I bet you’ll want to make and eat it too.