Luxury Mayonnaise & Creepy Bones
In which we learn why everyone's squinting in the grocery store
Sunday 8/13/23
Rotisserie chicken and plantains
Another Sunday night, another Kikiriki dinner! Succulent rotisserie chicken and melty-sweet fried plantains from the Peruvian spot on Central Ave. And the best part of all, Kikiriki’s Special Hot Sauce, which elevates the already-excellent chicken to “damn, I can’t stop eating this” status.
The other great thing about this meal is that I now have a full-to-bursting freezer bag of chicken bones (which Anne lovingly calls my “creepy bone collection”) with which to make one of my favorite kitchen projects—chicken stock! If you ever want to geek out about homemade bone broth with me, I’d love to chat about it. Homemade stock is another great example of my kitchen philosophy: never throw away flavor.
Monday 8/14/23
Big Salad, Griot Cafe x Kikiriki Collab
I used some of the leftover rotisserie chicken to top these perfect salads from Griot Cafe, another favorite local business. Their mixed kale salad features finely chopped kale, cabbage, and broccoli, alongside pepitas, dried cranberries, and a poppyseed dressing. Oh, and crispy fried wonton strips for some reason? But you won’t hear me complaining. Every salad needs a little something crispy on top.
Anne isn’t crazy about the poppyseed dressing (too sweet) so I whipped up a batch of my old standby lemon vinaigrette, and ended up drizzling some of that onto my salad along with the poppyseed. Pretty good combo, you heard it here first. Don’t be surprised when it goes viral on TikTok.
Tuesday 8/15/23
Sri Lankan takeout from Randiwa
Anne picked up Sri Lankan takeout on the way from work in Staten Island. This was my first time eating Sri Lankan food! I ordered something the menu called lamprie, also spelled lamprais, a Sri Lankan specialty originated by Dutch colonizers in the 16th century. It consisted of curried chicken, vegetables, bright yellow rice, cashews, a little fried ball of fish (I think), and a deep-fried boiled egg (!!) all wonderfully spiced and wrapped inside banana leaves. I’d never eaten anything like it, but the spice blend reminded me of Indian food and Thai food, and it was an adventure.
Wednesday 8/16/23
Greek mezze platter
This dinner was inspired by a recent YouTube video by one of my favorite cooking gurus, Nisha Vora from Rainbow Plant Life, in which she explains how to create a simple and healthy mezze platter. You had me at “low-effort dinner,” Nisha! A mezze platter struck me as a slightly more sophisticated and cohesive version of Girl Dinner. I’m in.
When I was standing in line at the grocery store to buy some mezze supplies, the woman in front of me turned around and said to me, apropos of nothing, “I know why everyone’s squinting in the grocery store all of a sudden.” I expected her to say it was related to always staring at our cell phones (which I had, in fact, just been doing) but instead, she offered the explanation that we were all squinting in disbelief because the prices were getting so high. I laughed politely, which is my default response to unsolicited information from strangers, but she wasn’t having it. “I’m serious! I’m over here like, thirteen dollars for a jar of mayonnaise?! At these prices, it’s cheaper to eat in restaurants!!”
Outlandish mayonnaise prices aside, this happens to be one of my favorite topics, and I was thinking of how to inform her—politely—that the “eating in restaurants is cheaper” claim will pretty much never be true, but at that moment, the woman behind us in line got impatient and said to the first woman, “Look, the register’s open, move up! You waiting for a personal invitation? Damn!” How freeing it must be to move through the world like that, unencumbered by thoughts of politeness.
Anyway, this meal was perfect. A simple salad of chopped cucumbers, chickpeas, and gorgeous, velvety beefsteak tomatoes from my balcony garden. Store-bought tzatziki. Cubed feta and kalamata olives, drizzled with olive oil. This Trader Joe’s eggplant spread. Canned dolmas, or stuffed grape leaves, also from Trader Joe’s. And these Greek flatbreads with an impressive 15 grams of protein per serving. It felt light and healthy, but still delightfully tasty and filling.
Thursday 8/17/23
Today, we took the baby to the zoo (where she squealed at the goats in the petting zoo and roared at some unimpressed lions), and we ended up eating a hodgepodge late lunch in the Savanna Cafe. So we weren’t hungry for a proper grown-up dinner, and grazed lightly on yogurt, cereal and popcorn. Live free!
Friday 8/18/23
Sweet corn polenta with eggplant sauce
Tonight we were invited to dinner at the home of some lovely new parent friends in our neighborhood, and they set the dinner bar high with this super-summery dish from Ottolenghi: polenta made of fresh sweet corn cooked with butter and feta, paired with a chunky, savory sauce of tomato and eggplant. Unbelievably fresh and tasty. They said they’d gone into Manhattan to get all the veggies fresh at the Union Square Greenmarket, and I knew I was among kindred spirits, further confirmed by their serving the meal with a gorgeous loaf of bread from our local Bread & Salt.
Raised by polite Southern parents to never arrive empty-handed, I offered to bring dessert. I decided to branch out from my go-to dessert (salted brown butter rice krispie treats), and improvised a no-bake yogurt and berry tart. I mixed plain Greek yogurt with lemon juice, vanilla, maple syrup and honey, and poured it into a store-bought graham cracker crust, letting the mixture set overnight. Right before we walked over to their house, I placed fresh berries on top in a painstaking design, but by the time we arrived, the creamy yogurt “custard” part of the tart had melted in the summer heat and swallowed up my beautiful berry art. (Maybe this is why people follow dessert recipes, instead of just… making them up on the spot.) Luckily, the tart was still pretty tasty, and matched the theme of “summer produce made slightly decadent by the addition of dairy.” We complimented each other’s cooking in between toddler screams and giggles and soap bubbles; a fine evening.
Saturday 8/19/23
Teriyaki sesame salmon with soba noodles
Remember when I made those Sea Cuisine teriyaki wild salmon fillets a few weeks ago? They were on sale again ($8.24 for a package of two; cheaper than a jar of mayonnaise!) so I made those for dinner tonight, paired with another soba noodle salad. This time I dressed the noodles with this miso sesame dressing from the cleverly named vegan blog Pick Up Limes, and topped with diced avocado, peanuts and toasted sesame seeds. Easy, delicious, protein-packed dinner.
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Thanks for reading! Here’s a link to last week’s Dinner Diary, in case you missed it, and here’s a Bon Appetit recipe roundup of 86 different bean dishes you could make this week. What are you waiting for?
FYI, I have since fact-checked my fellow shopper’s mayonnaise claim and discovered that the store’s most expensive mayonnaise offering, a 48-ounce jar of Hellmann’s, only costs $8.99. Can’t believe everything you hear!
XO,
Hannah