Bread Cubes
and a literary classic
One dinner last week was a rosemary crusted steak with an olive and tomato panzanella, some lavender honey goat cheese, and basil from my plant. John wanted me to get his vitamins in the picture.
There’s a million things you can do with bread, and cutting it up into cubes is one of them. Panzanella was invented as a way to use up old bread, but this olive sourdough was new bread purchased earlier in the day from the best bakery in our county, Simply Bread. They’re only open half the week for limited hours, and they’re a 30 minute drive south - so I don’t make it there often, but when I do it’s such a treat!!
After finishing a few consecutive months of recipe testing, it’s very gratifying to be able to reclaim my fridge and freezer - reorganizing, purging, and refilling with things I want to eat rather than things I’m obligated to eat. To quote Helen Rosner’s iconic and award-winning essay: “any leisure activity loses some appeal once it becomes mandatory.” I’d recommend reading if you don’t believe me when I say there are some downsides to my job.
Anyway, I found this lovely ribeye from who knows when after spelunking through my freezer, smeared it with a paste of rosemary, garlic, and a teensy bit of dried lavender, and let it sit uncovered in the fridge for 2 days.
I gave it a hard sear in my best steak skillet, a $2.50 thrift find from a brand called Commercial Aluminum Cookware - a company founded in the 1960’s that would later rebrand as Calphalon! It’s heavy but thin, has a sturdy handle, and knocks it out of the park every time.
Bread cubes aren’t just good for dinner - eat them in the morning for a great breakfast! This chicken sausage and mushroom strata might be one of the Great Things I’ve Made, inspired by a recipe in one of the coolest cookbook concepts I’ve come across, Kitchen Express by Mark Bittman.
I sauted the diced sausage and mushrooms with some diced tomato slices I had leftover from a recipe test, then layered that mixture, plain sourdough bread cubes, and grated smoked cheddar in this cutie patootie baking dish John’s dad got me for Christmas last year.
What I think made this strata so good is that I whisked the eggs with a splash of heavy cream and a splash of katsuo dashi. I started making katsuo dashi after I tested a Japanese-ish cookbook a few months ago, first making kombu dashi by simmering a piece of kombu in chicken broth, and then katsuo dashi by steeping bonito flakes in the kombu dashi.
Yes yes I know it’s involved (although not hard!), who has time for that, wow Laura you’re superhuman (which we already suspected from your perfect hair) - you can also just use water. But sometimes you might be wondering while eating something: dang why does that taste so good. It’s usually because of an involved (but not hard!) step like that. The point is that the broth and cream make the eggs less rubbery and more custardy.
I baked it at a low temperature because that’s what the incredible Boston-based Flour Bakery does to make their perfect egg sandwiches, which I fell in love with maybe 12 years ago. Leave it to ATK to sum up the science and share a recipe. And shoutout to one of my oldest pals Alexis for introducing me to Flour and many other great foods through the years. Look at me getting all sentimental!
The last meal I made with bread cubes was some type of chicken-picatta situation with preserved lemons, capers, thicc sauted onion, and more of that katsuo dashi to make it saucy. I don’t remember very well what I did here because I was talking on the phone while I was cooking and I was pretty distracted until suddenly a plate of dinner was in front of me somehow. Love when that happens!
Have you heard of books? Reading was a constant and really resonant hobby of mine when I was a kid, but somewhere after high school I lost my way.
Lately I’ve been exploring the leisurely hobby that is reading, as it relates to my relationship with productivity: what am I even doing when I consider myself “productive,” what is the lasting emotional impact of being “productive,” how having an entrepreneurial immigrant father (and living in New York and being a freelancer) shaped the way I prioritize “productivity”?
Sometimes I think I’ve subconsciously put off reading in adulthood because it seems like the diametric opposite of the type of productivity I’ve grown to know. Reading is for vacation, it’s a moment of something indulgent that you have to earn, it’s only for bedtime or when there’s “free” time. Obviously so much of that is untrue, and all these thoughts had been bouncing around in the racquetball court that is my brain, when, coincidentally, a writer I really love published this essay a few days ago:
If you don’t have time to read it (lol!), here’s my favorite bit:
My internet usage is lower, but I’m by no means an ascetic. It’s not that I don’t see what’s online. It’s that it feels farther away now, even as I’m looking right at it. It’s taken on a different quality. A truer one, I think. I’ve developed what I think of as ephemeraphobia: a natural aversion to cheap, fleeting thoughts. They make me slightly nauseous.
I was never sure what was important, and what wasn’t. I experienced reality as a series of disconnected images. Each one was loud, urgent, and temporary. The feed refreshed, and there was an entirely new constellation. My thoughts resembled the medium I engaged with. To be too attached to the right now is to miss the bigger picture. The powerlessness that chronic social media use inspires comes from the medium’s pact with the absolute present. New. New. New. Show it to me. I recall scrolling to the very top of the feed and desperately trying to pull the absolute present toward me with my thumb, needing to know: And then what?
Chills! I never thought I would prefer reading on anything else more than physical paper books, but for once I was wrong, because my Kindle is growing from Tangible Thing to Tangible Obsession. It’s light to hold and turning the page is just a tap so I can read with one hand, and I can read at night without bothering John by keeping the light on.
Since the end of last year I’ve been working through The Series of Unfortunate Events - books I’d read til 2 AM in middle school, absolutely tickled by the fourth wall breaks, in a way that was probably so new and novel to me at the time.
My sister Gina is currently reading the Twilight series (sorry, The Twilight Saga) for the first time, because she was only 6 when Twilight came out in 2005 (two years before the first iphone omg). Anyway, she inspired me to dive back in - it’s very easy for 34 year old Laura to see why 14 year old Laura was hooked, and it’s been a really entertaining journey. One day I might read adult books again maybe.
