Polenta Skillet Bread: This came about as a way to use up leftover, cooked polenta, but the decadent, rich crumb and the delightfully nubby texture has earned it some prime real estate in my recipe collection. It may be the only recipe for cornbread that I use from now on. Here’s the recipe.
With Mother’s Day approaching, I’ve been revisiting an essay I wrote a few years ago about my mom’s favorite cookbook, Bound to Please, from the Junior League of Boise. All my mom’s cookbooks and recipe files, decorated as they are with oil spills, encrusted bits of food, and notes like “EXCELLENT!” and “O.K.” pencilled in the margins, still make me feel so close to her. Parents everywhere: Make sure you have some way of preserving your recipe notes so that your kids can inherit them! (Perhaps printing out your favorite internet recipes and saving them in a file? I’m curious how this works for people in our time of digitized recipes.) Some recent reading: I have been hungry for a John Birdsall essay, and this new piece about the Food & Wine test kitchen founder Richard Sax, and the veil of silence around his death, moved me very much. Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You (which is kind of a food book? There’s a very funny recipe in there) and Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control are refreshing, transporting, books to gulp down. Tom Collichio talking about what the future holds for restaurants offered a even more of a useful perspective on the whole situation than I was expecting. And this just in: Bean King Steve Sando’s Grub Street Diet. Recent cooking: Emily Stephenson’s new pantry cooking zine—the recipe for polenta berry muffins, which appears there, is what got me going on the skillet bread in this newsletter—is a lot of fun and has tons of great ideas. As soon as I bring my sourdough starter back to life, I’m going to make these scones. And two new, delayed gratification projects include vin d’orange and my own vinegar using leftover wine.
Thanks for reading. I hope you’re (still) being safe and taking care.
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