Welcome to Home Cooking Diary, a newsletter on my journey as a home cook—the successes and failures alike. Cooking log, photo diary, and recipe recommender. This is a recurring installment in which I recap my month of cooking and highlight noteworthy meals. Note: if you’re reading this as an email, you may want to read it in your browser, lest it cut off at the end.
My bookstore, Golden Hour Books, is open at last! We softly opened two weeks ago, and while there are still kinks to work out, I’m feeling immensely proud of what we created. Now that the space is mostly finished I’m utterly consumed with figuring out systems for keeping up with inventory—so that’s mostly on my mind. But I still need to get signage figured out, get Tycho ready to begin daycare, order brown paper bags for customers to take their books away in (it’s the littlest things you forget!), and figure out how to print receipts (lol). The list is long but I’ll leave it at that. For obvious reasons I haven’t had the luxury of time to cook, so meals have been haphazard and I’ve failed to document most of what we ate—which is perhaps fine, as I suspect they fell more into the snacking category. I’m always trying to beat away the nagging fear that I’m not feeding Tycho well enough. This little newsletter has fought for my attention and I’ve been a bit blue having not been able to devote time to it. I hope to wrestle back enough time for it by the end of this month.
Clare de Boer’s Hot & Sour Sungold Soup was by far the most memorable thing I cooked in August. The evening I made this soup I was determined to slow down and labor over something that didn’t involve a screen after putting Tycho to bed. I took my precious time making it, and the process did its work to calm and center me. And the soup itself didn’t disappoint. Deliciously acidic and spicy from the chili oil, and nourishing from the lentils, I couldn’t stop eating it. I was a bit short of fresh tomatoes so I subbed in a handful of canned San Marzanos—I recommend that workaround if needed, and plan to make a pantry version of this soup even after tomato season ends. I also want to call out that yield of this soup was pleasantly large. I think it provided at least four meals.
At the risk of being repetitive, the MVP of this household continues to be Mina Stone’s Italian Sausage with seasonal vegetables. I cannot stop because it makes fantastic use of all of our incredible summer produce that I don’t currently have the brain space to be creative with. Just prep the veggies to be roasted, taking care to properly season and drizzle plentifully with good olive oil and good dried oregano, and add your sausages. Then season again. After making sure everything on the sheet pan is properly prepped I roast it in a 400 F oven for 40 minutes, and then add something like fresh sage or kale (the latter is what the recipe suggests), for a fun herby, crispy bit on top. Roast for another 10 minutes, ét voilà. A perfect dinner.
And a longtime favorite: Alison Roman’s Crispy Chicken Cutlets. A schnitzel or milanese or katsu is a beloved meal in my book, and thus far Alison’s preparation for cutlets is my favorite version for making it at home. I’m not fastidious about pounding the meat as thin as it should be for schnitzel, so I like that this recipe is forgiving in that regard. There are few things more satisfying. On a separate note, I cannot wait to visit the store that Alison just opened in the Catskills, First Bloom. Funnily enough, it’s located in what used to be my favorite little airbnb/inn, Table on Ten. Reed and I had a mini-honeymoon there after we got married at Foxfire Mountain House many many years ago. And many years before that fell in love with the area during a stay there, that led us to buying property nearby.
Other notables this month include a delicious vegetable and hominy stew from the Rancho Gordo Bean Club newsletter—I love hominy but am still learning how to cook it properly; Hetty McKinnon’s sweet corn porridge (so yum—especially if you love jalapeños); Shrimp scampi with orzo from the NYT cooking newsletter; Clare de Boer’s Torn Peach Cake delivered a mixed result but the flavors were fantastic and I’m excited to try this again. The recipe calls for A LOT of butter and my peaches were very juicy so the amount of liquid prevented this cake from rising and cooking properly (at least that’s what I think went wrong).
xo AV
Everything I cooked in August
Note: I forgot to document my cooking most of this month, hence the many gaps.
8.1.23 / Annie’s frozen waffle with homemade raspberry jam (Camilla Wynne’s Jam Bake); leftover chilled seasame noodles with white rice (Colu Henry)
8.2.23 / chive omelette (inspired by S2 of The Bear, of course)
8.7.23 / Salmon salad with white rice and scallions; Spaghetti with zucchini (Rachel Roddy)
8.8.23 / Chicken with tomatoes (Alison Roman)
8.9.23 / Oatmeal with sunflower seed butter and blueberries; waffle with Biscoff Cookie Butter and maldon sea salt
8.10.23 / Italian Sausage and roasted vegetables (Mina Stone); heirloom tomato with chives
8.14.23 / Pot of beans; Creamed Corn Pudding (Hetty McKinnon); Dilly Bean Stew (Alison Roman); white beans dressed with leftover salsa verde
8.15.23 / Shrimp scampi with orzo (Ali Slagle)
8.16.23 / scrambled eggs with toast
8.17.23 / Torn Peach Cake (Clare de Boer)
8.18.23 / radish and tuna salad toasts; fresh tomato pasta
8.19.23 / Crispy chicken cutlets (Alison Roman)
8.21.23 / Oatmeal with peanut butter and blueberries; Tuna-Mayo rice bowl (Eric Kim) with cucumber and some roasted veggies and chili crisp; Summer veggie pasta (Rachel Roddy’s An A to Z of Pasta)
8.22.23 / Roasted CSA Veggies (fennel, potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage)
8.23.23 / scrambled eggs and toast; Hot and sour sungold soup (Clare de Boer)
8.27.23 / Zucchini and hominy stew (Rancho Gordo Bean Club newsletter)
8.31.23 / Tuna-mayo rice bowl (Eric Kim)