My September diary: Celery leaf soup and mussels in Newark
Mustard pickles?
A look back on September—what I ate, made, and read.
🥒 Old-fashioned mustard pickles!
We went upstate to the New Paltz area for the wedding of our good friends, Steve and Janine. We had a nice breakfast at Underground Coffee and Ales. Afterward, I dragged the boys to Wallkill View Farm Market, a nearby country store. We picked up snacks for the weekend, and I got a jar of applesauce and mustard pickles (I have no idea what a mustard pickle is). I lugged these back to the city via the Amtrak and subway—I am who everyone thinks I am.
The wedding set off a nine-day marathon that took me nearly a week to recover from. On Monday, we went to Newark for a Kacey Musgraves and Father John Misty show at the Prudential Center. We decided to book a hotel near the venue and take work off the next day. We saw Musgraves a few years ago in Nashville, but FJM has been on my list for a long time. He did not disappoint (and neither did Musgraves).
In Newark, we went to Fornos of Spain for dinner before the show. It is an old-school Spanish joint in Ironbound, the Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian neighborhood where we stayed. We ordered the Drunk Mussels, an eggplant special, and got lit off gin martinis.
The following day, we grabbed breakfast at Sihana Cafe. Skylar had to head back to the city for an appointment, but I walked to Portugalia Sales Inc. to check out their ceramics. I picked up a collection of handpainted glazed terracotta—a plate, serving bowl, and espresso cup set.
Later that week, we went to St. Vincent and Manchester Orchestra at the new venue, Brooklyn Paramount. I also took
’s newsletter workshop (I highly recommend it if you have a newsletter). During all this, I somehow hosted book club (this month's was All Fours by Miranda July). Needless to say, I did not leave the neighborhood the following weekend.🥬 Kimchi-making season
The Napa cabbages arrived at the farmers' market! I made a quarter gallon of kimchi and followed Eric Kim’s recipe from NYT Cooking like I usually do. A bit of a labor of love, kimchi is fun and relatively easy to make. This jar will last us for a couple of months.
I bought Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Tenderheart after scoping a copy at the library first (I’m trying to do this with all cookbooks—so many miss the mark). I made the Celery Leaf Soup with a particularly bushy bunch of celery from the CSA. Fabulous. I did think it needed an acid in addition to the chili crisp. I am out, but I realized this would have been the perfect use for Tart Vinegar’s celery vinegar.
I also bought a copy of The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio Leo. I got the hare-brained idea to make every recipe in this book (fully expecting this to take me five+ years). The first recipe I made was the Whole-Grain Maple Spelt Pan Loaf. I typically don’t bake with a levain, so it’s been a bit of a learning curve. Leo’s style is also more precise than I gravitate toward, but valuable because it’s teaching me to learn visual and tactile proofing cues. The recipe turned out well—thank god for my trusty collapsible bread proofer. I have a million thoughts on sourdough and bread-baking; get ready for an upcoming newsletter on that.
🥀 The garden is over!
I put most of the garden to bed for the winter. I chopped down all the plants and vines (leaving the roots in the ground to compost in place), dumped in whatever compost I still had left over, mixed in blood meal, and planted a cover crop of crimson clover. The peppers are still going. I’ll see what can ripen before the first frost (probably sometime in early November).
I put together this sweet TikTok of shaky video I took on my “real” camera:
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👀 ICYMI
Earlier in September, I shared a CSA diary of a week of solo eating:
😈 What I read
I’m nearly done with Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman. I’ll share a full review next month.
On the non-food front, I read All Fours by Miranda July and Ambition Monster: A Memoir by Jennifer Romolini. All Fours had me laughing and laughing, as foreign and unrelatable as I found it (not a bad thing; who wants to relate to everything?).
I was surprised by how much I liked Ambition Monster. As a media girlie directly after Romolini’s generation, I wasn’t surprised by its drama or characters in the least. I’ve had my own complex relationship with ideas of success and ambition after learning valuable lessons in my early 20s (working on a failed political campaign will do that to a person). I’d love to read reviews of this memoir if you’ve seen any interesting takes or have any related recommendations.