You gotta love a complicated-feeling meal that doesn’t even involve a cutting board: this is a can of panang curry paste sauteed for a while in ghee before adding a can of coconut milk, a cup’s worth of the gorgeous dark green dried chickpeas—although they cook up black—that we bought at one of the many Indian groceries on Jersey City’s Newark Ave (on a visit to help eat things for this review), and a bunch of spinach that NSH gleefully, as mentioned before, left whole to make things easier. Each bowl has a half lime’s worth of juice, JMM garnished it all with leaves of Tulsi basil from his plant on the radiator, and we had glasses of Trader Joe’s pineapple juice (not from concentrate, as good as dessert) alongside.
It’s been a while! An ending can be a nice thing, so let’s call Needs More Salt closed, exactly 10 years after we started it late at night on Halloween in 2009—with poorly lit phone photos til the very end.
In the coming years, if at any time you’re eating a meal and you stop to wonder whether NSH and JMM are still eating together at a blue table, well, odds are we will be.
JMM made lunch! Once the sweet potatoes were in the oven, it was just a matter of making a quick ginger-scallion sauce (hot oil poured over sliced scallions and grated ginger in a bowl, with dashes of sesame oil and soy sauce) and boiling some curly Chinese noodles.
Hey, it’s my birthday week and I’ll eat what I what, even if that means we have sweet potatoes (cooked in this style) with sriracha mayo and buttery mushy peas with dill and leeks for dinner.
January 6, 10:20pm
Managed to make this escarole and white bean braise almost entirely by myself on one leg! (Although of course that’s not counting cleanup, which I remain physically incapable of doing.) We had it with a dill-heavy yogurt sauce and olive oil baguette toast.
January 4, 7:05pm
A very simple late dinner of brown sugar-glazed carrots and frozen peas with cream cheese-topped toast. Dessert was this vegan carrot cake (topped with this non-vegan cream cheese frosting).
January 3, 9:52pm
Lunch of a quick frittata from yesterday’s pasta leftovers, with the rest of the parsley and the rest of the pecorino sprinkled over the top.
January 3, 3:28pm
JMM and P hung out and then brought home groceries for dinner: we had bread and butter and cheese first because everyone was starving, and then orchestrated a pasta with anchovies, preserved lemon, Aleppo pepper, parsley, and lots of butter; a kale salad with lemon juice and olive oil, lots of grated pecorino, and croutons from the baguette fried in an ungodly amount of Frankie’s olive oil; and broccoli roasted until ideally crispy.
January 2, 8:28pm
Home late after going to three separate events (and spending over a hundred bucks on taxis to get in between them) on new year’s day: C & D’s party with its excellent snacks, K’s new movie, and then on a whim, Point Break in 3D with S. At some point during Point Break the idea of a very simple pureed pea soup popped into my head: leeks from the freezer sweated in olive oil, bouillon broth fortified with milk, and lots of frozen peas. We sat quietly and sipped the soup until it was all gone.
January 2, 12:26am
Breakfast to start the year: bread toasted to just this side of being burnt, heavily buttered and topped with scrambled eggs into which JMM mixed the last of the feta-cream cheese dip from dinner the night before.
January 1, 11:21am
JMM’s parents picked out and bought, via phone, a few bottles of wine for us to pick up from a local shop. We had the Loire white for our new year’s eve in, which included JMM putting on his tuxedo for Skyping the black-tie party we were supposed to have been attending in London and a late dinner of this puff pastry tart which we filled with homemade pesto and had with feta dip,.
December 31, 10:20pm