Good morning. Melissa Clark laments this week in The Times. It’s about missing out on the holidays we can’t celebrate this year because of the pandemic. “There won’t be any crazy egg with bright red lipsticks,” he wrote, “I won’t park in front of Camembert and Stilton dishes, not even a sleeve of Ritz cookies with this so identifiable orange cheese. which I hope a year later course. “
The crackers stopped me. They, along with the orange cheese tubs, are a feature of the party NYT Cooking has every year at Sardi’s second-floor bar on West 44th Street in Manhattan, a few steps from the back door of what was The New York Times Headquarters. Sardi’s is a Broadway restaurant, its dining rooms usually full of tourists and its bars with theater professionals and newsrooms. It is said that the people of the Times went there so much that when the newspaper published an article on the excavation of the ancient city of Sardis, in present-day western Turkey, a copy editor inserted an apostrophe between the “i” and the “s”. “To the headline.
We haven’t been there that much in recent years: our offices are now on West 40th Street and New Yorkers are nothing but parishioners to where they go after work, but always a few times a year and always during the holidays, at least until the coronavirus sent us home. So this is my dream for December 2021: Manhattans at Sardi’s, spread and cheerful cheese.
Meanwhile, to accompany her column, Melissa wrote an ace menu for snacks during the holidays, even if only a few of you are stuck at home listening to Otis Redding. I like the idea of the sour cream caviar sauce with chips (on top) and the fig olive tapenada with prosciutto and persimmon. It has a nice puff pastry cake with mascarpone, smoked salmon, fennel and lemon, and has an excellent selection of mushrooms stuffed with spicy crunch with harissa and apricots. Put them at your disposal this week or on New Year’s Eve and enjoy their delicious cuisine.
For dinner tonight, though, you can take a look at this spicy white bean stew with rabé broccoli or consider a butter chicken.
It’s not that you need a recipe to eat well. Lately I’ve been messing around with an over-the-counter recipe I found in the pages of Bryan Washington’s “Memorial” novel: “He’s breaking eggs in the kitchen, sliding yolks into a frying pan. Salt, sprinkling mayonnaise with a few sprigs of oregano Mike used to have this thing on the sriracha, he would take out a hernia every time he got it, but now he pulls out a faded bottle on my tortilla, rubbing it ‘spatula.’ I did that and oh, man.
Alternatively, what about orange flesh? Or a grilled salmon salad? Maybe creamy miso paste?
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Now, it has nothing to do with matcha or peas, but Sasha Frere-Jones introduced me to this short documentary from Twin Cities PBS, the early days of the band Hüsker Dü. Worth seeing it.
I liked Michael Luo in The New Yorker, about Christianity and the pandemic. It’s worth reading.
And, just in case you missed it, here’s Stephanie Clifford in Elle, about the journalist who fell in love with Martin Shkreli’s unfortunate pharmacist, who lost her job and marriage. Stay there until the end, where things change. I will be back on Christmas day.