What newly made up word do you love but also hate? One of mine is in this newsletter
Thanks so much, all of you who entered the giveaway for advance copies of THE PROPOSAL, and thanks a bunch to new subscribers! I'll email the winners this afternoon!
I have a few new pieces out this week: first, I wrote an essay about recovering from surgery for the August issue of Real Simple magazine, and it's on newsstands now! (Here's a glimpse at it from my instagram, it's not online yet but it will be). I also wrote a story of a day from early February, a few days after my book came out, for the new website Popula, where I talk about how hard January was, how I had no idea what I was doing with this whole book thing (I still don't!) and washing dishes.
This week I'm recommending to you all one of my most used and most irreplaceable kitchen tools, that I somehow never see other people talking about: these tiny silicone spatulas. The spoon shaped one (that has the terrible but descriptive name "spoonula") I use more than basically anything else in my kitchen. I use it when I scramble eggs (it's so essential for me for scrambling eggs that when I go over to my mom's house for holiday breakfasts, I bring it along with me), for getting sauces and other liquids out of the corners of my food processor, for stirring stuff I'm cooking on the stove, especially when it's diced like onions and garlic and a bigger utensil would miss things. I link to this specific one, because I've used others, and this is my favorite one: some others are either too flexible or too stiff, so they don't function the way I want them to when I'm cooking. I looked this up yesterday because I need a new one (because the one I currently use was not good enough when I was making the recipe below this week) and I realized I should share this with all of you.
A few weeks ago I had the honor and the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Nicole Chung's upcoming memoir, All You Can Ever Know, and it blew me away. Nicole is an adoptee, she's Korean and was adopted by a white couple, and this book is about her life growing up in a small white town, the story she was always told about her birth parents, and then her search for (and discovery of) more information about her family. It's absorbing and stunning and hard to put down and full of moments of joy that made me cry, and I can't wait for all of you to read it when it comes out in October. Preorder it at any of those links above (you can preorder a signed copy from Powells!), and I promise you, you'll be so glad you did.
So about once a month, I pick up a mystery box of vegetables that a local farm puts together (if you're in the Bay Area, it's Mariquita, and they're great, there are drop off points at a few places around SF and one in Oakland, the vegetables are fantastic, and they have good recipes with the box). I picked mine up last week, and I usually make mental plans about what I'm going to make after I see the list of what I'm getting, but this week I neglected to compare that list with the list of all I have to do this week. Which is why I was frantically making ratatouille on Monday night in my hot as hell kitchen because those tomatoes had to be used. But, that ratatouille turned into three lunches for me this week. The first day I ate it alone with some bread, and then that night I cooked a batch of farro and tossed it with the rest of the ratatouille and some feta, and that made lunch for two more days. I think the key to ratatouille is to cook the zucchini and the eggplant separately from everything else, and then combine everything at the end, so that's how I told you to do it below. You can do it either all on the stovetop or half in the oven, depending on how much you want to hang around the kitchen vs. how much you care about your kitchen being hot.
Ratatouille
one onion, thinly sliced
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 or 3 red bell peppers, thinly sliced
5-10 ripe tomatoes, depending on size (if they're the big beefsteak ones, 5, if they're the small early girls, 10), cored, with some of the seeds squeezed out, and diced (most recipes tell you to peel the tomatoes but come on, I'm not going to make you waste your time by peeling tomatoes)
1-3 eggplants, depending on size (mine were the small Japanese ones, so I used 3), cut into 1 inch pieces
3-4 zucchini, cut into 1 inch pieces
basil
olive oil
salt
For the tomatoes/peppers:
Heat about 5 or 6 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet at medium heat (you want the whole bottom of the skillet well coated). Add the onions, and cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are softened, then add the garlic, and cook for about two to three more minutes. Add the peppers, season with salt, and raise the heat to medium high. Cook until the peppers begin to soften (about seven to ten minutes), and then add the tomatoes and more salt and reduce heat to medium. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the water from the tomatoes has cooked away and the whole dish looks saucy.
For the eggplant and zucchini:
If you're using the oven: preheat the oven to 400. Use two big rimmed cookie sheets, and on one put all the zucchini pieces, and on the other put all the eggplant pieces. Toss all liberally with olive oil, and slide into the oven. Roast the zucchini for about 15 minutes, and the eggplant for about 25 minutes (both until golden brown but not burned).
If you're using the stove: take two other large skillets and heat plenty of olive oil in them to medium high. Add the zucchini to one, and the eggplant to the other. Saute the vegetables, stirring frequently, until they're golden brown on all sides.
To finish:
Add the cooked zucchini and the eggplant to the tomato/pepper mixture, and let it all simmer together for about a minute or two. Thinly chop basil, and toss it on top of the mixture. Stir, taste for salt, eat.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Jasmine
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