alison roman two ways

this week's escapades

Hello! Welcome to our fourth newsletter!

I’m sorry to report that this week Liv and I both independently wrote about Alison Roman recipes. It’s not the recipe diversity you deserve but maybe it’s exactly what you expected. Next week we will try to branch out. And we did accidentally bring to light some of the breadth of her work featuring one vegetarian recipe and one meat-centric dish. So you are welcome for that.

Liv

Ok so I crawled out of my cooking rut this week and I made The Stew. It was really delicious. I suppose you will have to call me an Alison Roman stan. I was worried it wouldn’t thicken but the swiss chard helped sop up the excess liquid. Also, have you ever seen such gorgeous chard? Just look at her! Those stems should be walking down the runway at Paris fashion week! 

I’m excited to improve on it next time around. In my effort to crisp the chickpeas I burned the bottom of the pot a little and the blackened bits gave the stew a swamp hue. For any stew heads out there, do you have suggestions for how to avoid this? 

Of course, I must say that this week---already a momentous one in history---was a big one at our house as well. First off, let it be known that January 22nd is Gingerbread Day. This annual Sachs family holiday is just about the cutest thing I’ve ever heard of. It was pioneered by Noa’s mom and her siblings, who as kids thought January, with all the holidays come and gone, was much too bleak. They decided the month needed a day of festivity and thus Gingerbread Day was born! In observance of the grand tradition, Noa made a beautiful cake: It was simply just SO GOOD.

Also, on Saturday we did Breakfast For Dinner. We made broiled grapefruit, french toast, hash browns, and scrambled eggs. Everything was excellent and it tasted like the late-night diner runs of yore. 

Right now, cooking is a joy and one of the few comforts. I love the process of seeing humble ingredients transform into something beautiful. I like the hum of chopping, the sizzle of garlic in oil. In a time when everything feels monotonous, it is such a pleasure to get to taste different foods everyday and feel a sense of possibility when browsing new recipes. But I must admit, as I write this now with three different recipes for loaf cake open on my laptop, I feel a wave of body anxiety wash over me. I gaze at my Ryan gut, passed down from generations, and I sigh because it looks puffier than usual. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, no one is seeing me anyway. Who cares?! This is my one hundred years of solitude era after all. But still, I can’t help but feel a little down on myself. I write in my planner that I will do crunches tomorrow morning but honestly I probably won't. I’m committing myself to not caring so much. Life is heavy and hard enough right now without me fixing myself a steaming plate of guilt.

So that's it for this week. I’ll save the rest for Margaret, my zoom therapist. She is lovely but has really poor internet connection because I have never seen her unpixelated.

Of Chops And Men

Hello! I am sad to report that Nate and I celebrated no homemade holidays this week. But we do have a strategy for breaking up the January monotony: checking the website of our local Whole Foods for sales. I know we all feel complicated about Amazon, but we live a three-minute walk from the best stocked WF I’ve ever seen, and when faced with aisles of vegetable-based chips and a vast supply of dark chocolate, I find it possible to compartmentalize. (We do 95% of our shopping at trader joes---don’t hate me.) So each Wednesday, we start the day by checking the newly-posted sales and texting each other from our different working rooms. Monotony: busted. Excitement: achieved. 

This week, Nate got especially excited about a deal on bone-in pork chops. The prospect of bringing home 1-2 of those slabs and trying to transform them into edible, bacteria-free fare was daunting to me. I guess I just don’t know a lot of young people who are cooking pork chops. Last year, when I lived with three roommates, none of them ever pulled out a chop and tried to cook it. None of my friends ever text me that they cooked a nice chop for dinner last night. Maybe young people across the globe are quietly pan-frying or oven-roasting pork but no one is talking to me about it.  

The bone-in chop was scary to me for another reason: Nate was given a cast-iron pan for Christmas and clearly it was going to serve as the cooking-vessel for this cut. The cast-iron enables delicious, grill-esque flavors but is a finicky bitch to own. Nate has been patiently helping it build a flavor profile with regular oiling and seasoning and has read many articles on proper cleaning techniques. So, I’m terrified to touch it--what if I scratch it or cause some sort of chemical response that alters the flavor forever?

But in spite of these fears, when Nate proposed we buy some pork chops, I was game. At the end of the day, I love pork of all forms and also have some weird, ingrained, gender shit about how I’m going to get dumped if I stand between a man and his desire for meat. 

So on Thursday it was chops time. We decided to follow an Alison Roman recipe for “pork chops with tangy mushrooms” (I guess we are also Alison Roman stans even though her newsletter annoys me each week. But she puts kale and shallots in everything and I love her for it.) The recipe seemed suspiciously easy: salt and pepper the pork, cook it on each side, saute the mushrooms amidst the fat and eat. But what did I know about the world of cooking pork chops? So we dove in and I am sad to report that we split the dinner prep-tasks along normative-gendered lines: I prepped the vegetables (potatoes and kale) while Nate handled the meat. Though Alison said it would take only eight minutes to cook the pork, it probably took more like twelve---not too shabby for end-to-end dinner prep-time. And then we sat down to eat our traditional meat and potatoes meal and it was...fine. Nate deemed it “better looking than tasting.” I felt similarly, and immediately slathered it with Dijon mustard. Though he got a great sear on the pork, it turns out both of us (even Nate, a boy) want a little more flavoring than salt and pepper to enhance the pure-meat taste. But it was filling and easy and most importantly, on SALE.

Anyway, if you are making pork chops, let me know. Now that I know that it’s possible, I’d love to be a part of the conversation and hear about your experiences (ESPECIALLY if you know a good sauce or marinade). Let’s get young people talking about pork. 

Onwards,

Abby