Salt with Green Beans and Toasted Almonds

Plus: Experiments with Protein, Crispy Tangy Tofu, and Dinner with Diana at Libertine.

Hey everyone,

Woe be it to anyone who goes viral with a Reel on Instagram! The other day I was about to make a favorite dish — Red Cat’s zucchini with toasted almonds (see this recipe on Smitten Kitchen) — when I decided, on a whim, to film it with my iPhone. When I was done, I made a cute little video:

amateurgourmet

A post shared by @amateurgourmet

Now that video’s been played 328,000 times (and it’s continuing to grow) so yay for going viral. But the comments! “Just a blizzard of salt… WTF.” “Why so much salt?” “Equal parts zucchini + salt. Noted.”

I’d be angrier if these commenters weren’t right… I actually did add too much salt here! But just by a little. It still tasted amazing. I was going for a French fry sorta feel — something a little naughty, while still being virtuous.

Anyhoo: add as much or as little salt as you want, just as long as you give this recipe a go. Some of the nicer commenters said it also works well with string beans and asparagus.

The salt issue leads us nicely into our next topic. After 12 years as Dining Critic for the NYT, Pete Wells is stepping down.

How does that tie into salt?

Here’s what he writes in his announcement:

“One thing we [food critics] almost never bring up, though, is our health. We avoid mentioning weight the way actors avoid saying ‘Macbeth.’ Partly, we do this out of politeness. Mostly, though, we all know that we’re standing on the rim of an endlessly deep hole and that if we look down we might fall in.

‘It’s the least healthy job in America, probably,’ Adam Platt said recently when I called him to discuss the unmentionable topic. Mr. Platt was New York magazine’s restaurant critic for 24 years before stepping away from the trough in 2022.

‘I’m still feeling the effects, he said. He has a flotilla of doctors treating him for gout, hypertension, high cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes.”

He goes on to point out the frequency with which professional food critics die young: A.A. Gill (cancer at 62), Jonathan Gold (pancreatic cancer, 58), A.J. Liebling (bronchial pneumonia, 59).

I’ve been thinking about my own diet a lot lately, for similar reasons. Sometimes it feels like everything that I learned about food and cooking — seasoning heavily with salt, being generous with olive oil and butter, bombing everything with mounds of Parmesan — is wonderful for making food taste good, but horrible for making you feel good.

So this week I tried an experiment: focus on protein and vegetables. Take a break from sugar and alcohol and white flour. (Not a permanent break, just a temporary one.) And track your calories in MyFitnessPal.