may in retrospect
the month in meals at home and around Boston and a 28th birthday menu
hello! I’m trying out a new format to share what I’ve been cooking + where I’ve been eating in Boston + what I’ve been craving all month. This idea is heavily influenced by Alicia Kennedy’s “The Monthly Menu” series, where she shares what she’s been cooking and eating in San Juan and sometimes NYC.
I would have loved for this to be an original idea, but I also desperately want to make it easier to write regularly. My hope is that having a scheduled (and doable!) monthly prompt like this will, with time, become unique enough to call my own :)
P.S. this email might be clipped when you view it from your inbox. Simply open the email, click the title, and read it on your browser or on the Substack App to see the photo gallery at the bottom!
April knocked me out completely. I started the month with an unnamed respiratory virus, which turned into bronchitis, which quickly turned into pneumonia, leaving me bedridden for days and unable to work for three weeks. An upset stomach and two weeks of antibiotics meant that all I could keep down was plain pita bread and boiled potatoes. Once my lungs cleared up, I was able to start eating normally again, and May, naturally, turned into a month of eating as many colors and textures as possible.
at home
While bedridden, I became nostalgic for the mortadella and tomato sandwiches that my mom packed for my school lunches in the second grade. My first week back at work, I stocked up on mortadella (the king of sandwich meats) and sandwich-size ciabatta rolls. Each sandwich was stuffed with a few slices of mortadella, a couple slices of greenhouse-grown Maine tomatoes, a couple slices of mozzarella (you can sub burrata!), and some pesto and olive oil smeared on either side of the bread. I’m excited to make these sandos again once we hit peak summer, which is when locally grown tomatoes hit the farmers markets.
I was adamant about having a perfect (soft) three egg scramble, persisting nausea be damned. You cook these eggs with a pad of butter as low and slow as you can bear, which takes something like 10-15 minutes. I’m not sure of the science behind it, but my guess is that the longer cooking time evaporates some of the moisture in the eggs, yielding a very concentrated eggy flavor. I swirl a small rubber spatula around the pan every 30 seconds, which is how I get tiny, satisfying curds to form. It requires more time + attention than a quick weekday breakfast, but I love how custardy and silky this scramble turns out.
A photo of Molly Baz’s bathroom got me thinking about Caesar salad1, so I finally made her recipe. I’ve had Caesar salad twice in the last decade, specifically because I grew up in Yerevan where every single restaurant, no matter the cuisine, served a Caesar salad, so it became a boring dish to me, synonymous with a visionless chef. The Molly Baz recipe is good, but idk. I can’t help but want more vegetables and more heft out of my lunch salads.
I started cravings sweets again, specifically chocolate, and snagged a pint of Straus Creamery Dutch Chocolate ice cream. It’s chocolatey without being so rich it becomes sickening. I paired it with my current favorite midday snack, Effie’s Cocoa Biscuits.
Last year, I found fresh sorrel (a lemony herb) at a speciality grocer and immediately purchased several bunches, washed and processed them into a paste with olive oil before portioning them into individual baggies and freezing them. In mid-May, I pulsed the paste with fresh kale (stems removed) and used it to dress a bowl of warm Kokuho Rose Rice, adding finely minced preserved lemon and fresh lemon juice to taste. It’s the famous Sqirl rice bowl recipe, which I had in LA 3 years ago but have never stopped thinking about.
a snack plate + wine
I was inspired after reading
’s essay “On the Meaning of Comfort Food as an Expat” and wanted to theme my monthly cheese + aged meat purchase around Spain. I ended up with a snack plate featuring spicy Queso Ibores and smokey Idiazabal, as well as ramp salami (wrong country, I know) and sliced chorizo.For wine, I finally found a bottle of Txakolina here in Boston, which typically sells out quickly as soon as it arrives to the US each spring. If you ever see bottles of white or rosé Txakolina from the producer Ameztoi or a white bottle from Gaintza, snag them immediately! This is the wine that got me into wine four years ago — it’s effervescent, minerally, and super light, perfect for the summer. Bottles usually retail for $24-$30 and you can find them on restaurant wine lists, too.
the high-low date
That first week of May, Caio and I spent an entire day in Davis Square for Boston’s Independent Film Festival. We saw shorts, we saw docs, we saw a film about a group of artists that built a secret apartment in the Providence Place Mall. Importantly, we got to eat at Dakzen, one of the best casual Thai places in town. We shared a thicc chive pancake and I had basil fried rice, which coincidentally, was also the first meal I was able to eat a year prior in Bangkok after getting sick there, too. Some foods, even those you didn’t grow up eating, have the power of making you feel cradled and cared for, and pad grapow has become that for me.
On Sundays, I like to kid myself that I won’t eat out twice in the same day, that surely Caio or I will take the initiative to cook dinner. Alas. I haven’t the willpower to cook on the lort’s day. Finally off antibiotics, I’d been insisting on going somewhere nice for drinks. We ended up at La Royale, a Peruvian spot in Cambridge. La Royale is my favorite restaurant to execute the high-low date: get fun cocktails and maybe an app at a nice (high) restaurant but then get pizza (low) from a takeout spot for dinner. It breaks up the stuffiness (and financial commitment) of sit down meals at restaurants but still allows me to enjoy the atmosphere of being “out.” That Sunday, we had our leftovers from a lunch at Andala (the Palestinian cafe in Central Square) and then headed to La Royale for pisco sours, ceviche with passionfruit leche de tigre (for me), and shared the lucuma mousse for dessert.
a birthday
The 24th marked my birthday, which I got to celebrate at Dali with Caio. It’s a tapas restaurant in Cambridge that is over the top, overly flamboyant, entirely too much. In a word, it’s perfect for celebrations. There’s so much going on at this restaurant that seems to exist in a universe where the minimalist Instagram aesthetic never took hold. I love their seafood paella and jamon Iberico and garlicky shrimp poached in olive oil (gambas al ajillo) and fried cheese balls (bolitas de queso) and grilled octopus (pulpo a f’eira). Their flan is by far their best dessert (skip the churros).
The next day, I threw a birthday party for 18 guests. My “pared down” menu (eight dishes, pared down from 16) demanded 12 hours of cooking, the bulk of which was completed on my actual birthday.
There always comes a point during my intensive cooking process where I break down, either cry or snap at someone in frustration for committing myself to way too much work. I’m not sure why I do it to myself. It might be genetic (you can take the girl out of Arab countries but you can’t take the Arab hospitality out of the girl), it might be because I love praise, it might be that I love to provide or prove just how great a cook I am or a mix of all these things. But I caught myself telling Caio that I wished I had money to outsource the process to a caterer, but upon reflection, I realized that maybe the joy of cooking for others is in the labor itself, and that yes I’m trying to prove my skill but maybe I like submitting myself to the bodied experience of cooking for hours on end. I’m never thinking as clearly as I do while executing a long production list.
a menu for turning 28
warm marinated olives
(Alison Roman, Nothing Fancy)
vegetable crudité with gussied up Trader Joe’s onion and chive cream cheese
Utz chips with labne ranch with scallion oil
(Alison Roman, Nothing Fancy)
bolognese
(Marcella Hazan, NYT)
vegetarian bolognese
(same as above, except the beef+pork are subbed for mushrooms)
buttered Rao’s spaghetti
tiramisu
(Alison Roman, NYT)
strawberry chiffon cake
(Joanne Change, Pastry Love)
Not food
Last month, I published my first piece for The Infatuation, which was a list of Somerville’s best restaurants.
An absolutely adorable shoppy shop, Glass Ripples, opened recently in Davis Square, and it’s the exact type of feminine spot I immediately fall in love with. I picked up a couple of vintage hexagonal amber glass plates that I got to use at the birthday dinner.
I finally set up my vegetable garden and transplanted my saplings into the raised bed. Will this extremely time+cost intensive summer hobby pay off in vegetables? Only time will tell.
I’m not being weird. In her house tour with Domino, she calls her avocado green bathroom the “Cae Sal” bathroom.
I loved reading this 💖 drinking orange wine in your backyard and eating perfect bolognese was the best possible start to the summer!
Happy belated birthday Lala! Also, this format is refreshing and easy to follow. Felt like a magazine. Hope you’re finally feeling better :)