Crone Sandwich

I am in summer-eating mode, which means lots of herbs in everything, given that our entire side garden is basically just an unkempt patch of mint. Like this salad! Which I just made for lunch this very day, but I used freshly cooked quinoa instead of brown rice (quinoa cooking directions here) and I used mint and parsley and plums, and added crushed garlic to the dressing and some sliced pepperoncini, of course. Feta. Fried almonds.

hot dog salad etc. We camped on Cape Cod and our friends got married on the beach of our favorite pond there, where we swam in the cold water, and it was all so magical that I can hardly even say anything about it. And then we came home and it rained and Birdy went back to New York, and I looked in the fridge and all I saw were the campfire hotdogs that we hadn’t eaten all of. And let me say this: if you have leftover hotdogs from the long weekend?

It’s rhubarb season! Asparagus season! Lilac and dogwood and violet season! Lily of the valley and bleeding heart season! The season where I wander around sobbingly muttering romantic poetry to myself and wonder how many springs I have left on earth in this body because all of a sudden I am William Wordsworth. Sob! It’s all ending even as it’s just begun. Come hang out with me! It’s always a laugh riot around here.

Hi! Did you need dinner to be nutritious and delicious and also cheap? I’ve got you. My wonderful father-in-law sent us home with tzatziki from the good yogurt place, so I decide to make falafel, only then I didn’t have eight hours to soak the chickpeas and so I googled “red lentil falafel,” and lifted the bones of the recipe from here. (If you give a mouse a cookie.) I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to making it with chickpeas, which I realize is total BLASPHEMY coming from me, but there you go.

I thought of calling this letter “In praise of small things,” but it felt too precious/ pretentious, like I was suddenly Michele de Montaigne writing a wee essai. But also? I love small! e.g.: Babies.

Ohhhh, hello my darling friends! I hope that you are balancing your inevitable fear and sorrow and outrage with moments that ground you in the beauty of the world and of your people in it. Also, I trust you are SNACKING DERANGEDLY? This snack is called Orange Two Ways and it’s Cheez-Its plus the exquisite California slab apricots from Trader Joe’s. If I were eating it for dinner I would use a bigger plate. My gf peeps: there are now gf Cheez-Its and they’re perfect.

plus 2-ingredient slaw and illustrations by the incomparable Phoebe Ward Bean Feast The beans pictured look like black-eyed peas, but they’re actually Rancho Gordo yellow-eye beans. Also, cauliflower is a non-standard inclusion.

Oh, hiiiii! Is it frightening/frozen/thrilling/terrible/beautiful where you are? Same! I am just returned from my great and magical voyage to the UK, where the dreariness is somehow part of the charm and where I ate my own bodyweight in, of all things, cookies, which were offered to me around every drizzling bend.

Hello, lovelies! Are you battening down your hatches? Fretting in the night? Hurting your own feelings for no especial reason? Same, same, same. I was going to post ambitiously today, and instead I’m just going to share some photos for vibes. One is of the upcoming UK Wreck tour, and there’s more info here. Please come if you can. Also? This is a perfect cake, even peachless. I use King Arthur GF flour for the 1-cup of all-purpose, and it comes out utterly divine.

Hello, loveliest ones! I am just popping up from my hibernation hole to recommend a few things for this last week of eating and lazing, assuming you have such a week planned. I made these Peppermint Brownie Cookies, which are fudgy and delicious and festively use up any stray candy canes you may have ended up with. I made them much smaller than the recipe suggests—12 to a cookie sheet versus six—and also made them gluten-free by simply swapping in a basic gf blend, which was probably King Arthur.