CWYC #1

Oh, hey, whoops. I didn't write anything for the rest of the summer.

Back when I decided I would write a book about how much I love cooking and try to convince whoever my readers are that they, too, could love cooking, I decided that I would title the book Cook When You Can. I still think that's a catchy title, and makes for a decent abbreviation, so boom! Now my random emails are called CWYC with a number so it isn't so embarrassing for me to look at the date of my last email as the title of the post.

So AnYWayZ I hope that y'all had a great rest of your summer and are settling back into some sort of routine for the cooler months.

Food

I am helping manage a cherry tomato plant that, as I am wont to do, haphazardly tossed in my raised bed near my back porch. That thing is now a chaotic beast that is producing a half pint of cherry tomatoes every other day, which is not at all what I expected but welcome in this house due to our familial fascination with nightshades.

On that note, the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is a great pickup this cookbook season and has my favorite panzanella recipe. If you want a link, this one by Serious Eats is fine. Serious Eats has several great notes in that recipe about the bread aspect, but I like how Samin introduces macerated red onion into her version to kick the flavors up a notch. That works especially well when you have a literal pile of very sweet cherry tomatoes you need to use up.

I've also jumped on the harissa train, which is (Will Ferrel voice) so hot right now (pun over-intended). My favorite attempt to using it so far was this chicken thigh tomato harissa feta situation from Epicurious. They suggested tossing some random bread on the plate, which is a thing you could do, but I think this could have benefitted from some more veggies or a starch. I tried pasta and that was not the answer. I haven't figured that out yet.

Content

Since late show hosts are really having a tough time lately, I wanted to share this absolutely unhinged episode of the YouTube show Hot Ones, where famous people eat hot wings while answering well-researched and semi-difficult questions about their famous lives. They tend to struggle and it's funny. I've watched the show for years and never seen the host upstaged as delightfully as he was by the one and only Conan O'Brien. Give it a watch.