Summertime Party Salads ☀️

Plus: Sweet and Salty Nuts, Pretty Bad Waffles, and Susan Spungen on Lunch Therapy.

Hey everyone,

I just made a mix on Spotify called “Three Weeks Left in LA” because, you guessed it, we have three weeks left of living in L.A. It’s weird to think that this kitchen that I’ve been cooking in for the past twelve years will no longer be my kitchen. It’s funny to look back to all of the kitchens you’ve had in your life: your childhood kitchen, the kitchen that you had in your first apartment after college (that’s where I first started cooking: I’d heat up frozen CPK pizzas in the oven), the first one you shared with your sig other (in my case, Park Slope, with a crooked cabinet over the stove).

While you reflect on that, I’ve got a delightful listen for you. My Lunch Therapy session with Susan Spungen!

In case you don’t know, Susan Spungen is a prolific cookbook author and food stylist (she was one of the founding editors of Martha Stewart Omnimedia) who recently authored a brand new cookbook called Veg Forward, that’s jam-packed farmer’s markety recipes, organized by season, with gorgeous pictures all shot by Susan on her iPhone.

Our talk covers everything from photography tips, using filters, what Martha Stewart is really like, buying props for food styling, coming up as a woman in restaurants at the start of her career, and, most fascinating to me, doing the food styling for such movies as Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron called her out of the blue!), Eat, Pray, Love, and — the one that’s always fascinated me — It’s Complicated, mostly for the croissant scene, which I asked her about here:

@amateurgourmetSusan Spungen addresses croissantgate on this week’s Lunch Therapy! #podcast #itscomplicated #baking #movies #nancymeyers #merylstreep #food #fyp

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Listen below on Spotify, here on Apple podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

So let’s talk summertime salads (I put “Summertime Sadness” by Lana del Ray on my mix and now I’m singing “summertime salads” to that same tune….)

On Saturday I attended a party at our friends’ Ryan and Jonathan’s and I was in charge of bringing the salads. Since we were also ordering pizza, I decided to go the “refreshing” route. Enter watermelon with feta, red onion, and basil.

I honestly can’t, in good conscience, sell this as a recipe. It’s just cubed watermelon — both red and yellow — tossed with thinly sliced red onion, cubes of Feta (Ina says to cube your feta, not to crumble, because it looks prettier), basil, a giant glug of olive oil, the juice from two limes, a splash of vinegar (Concord grape vinegar, a weird choice, but that’s what I had), lots of salt, and pepper. And it sits beautifully in the fridge while you’re getting ready for your party. It’s delightful.

The other salad that I made is usually called “Chinese Chicken Salad” though this one didn’t have any chicken. I just shredded a bunch of purple cabbage and Napa cabbage using the shredding disc on my food processor:

Same with carrots. Then I made Ina Garten’s Chinese Chicken Salad dressing, and zhuzhed things up with lots of scallions, cilantro, and salted roasted peanuts, and toasted sesame seeds.

Tossed all together, it was almost coleslaw adjacent, but with more of a heft from all of the crunchy, savory bits. I’d totally make this again; maybe I’d even add the chicken next time.

For the party, I also brought a nutty snack mix that I saw on Eater the other day; it’s from Abigail Zielke of Chicago’s All Together Now.

It’s a really fun recipe because you basically beat egg whites until foamy, add sugar, then add Aleppo pepper and salt and lots of chopped rosemary and, finally, your nuts. You bake it in a 350 oven until it’s all brown and toasty and then add corn nuts to the mix. It’s sweet, it’s salty, it’s savory, it’s candy-like. I couldn’t stop eating it.

One thing I could stop eating were these buttermilk waffles that I made on Sunday morning using the King Arthur Flour recipe.

Normally King Arthur Flour recipes are super reliable, but this one is pretty confusing: it says you can add 1/2 a cup of almond meal or pecan flour as an optional addition for flavor, but you don’t need to. I took that to mean that you should add another 1/2 cup of flour, so I tried rye flour.

I guess that’s not really the recipe’s fault. In any case, the waffles were really dry and Craig barely ate his. Next time, I’m leaving out that final half a cup.

Hey, who’s ready for some links?

• Neil Patrick Harris’s Grub Street Diet (Grub Street);

• Why Do American Diners Look That Way? (Kottke.org);

• Why NY Has Better French Fries than LA (Eater);

• Every WireCutter pick from Carmy’s kitchen on The Bear (Wirecutter).

That’s all for today, folks!

Wish me luck: packing starts this week and the movers come a week from Friday. It’s all happening!

Your friend,

Adam