Cooking For a Witchy Crowd, or Second Breakfast #9
Hello! This is Meghan McCarron, and you're reading my newsletter, Second Breakfast. If you no longer want to receive this newsletter, you can unsubscribe here.
Over Memorial Day, I spent the weekend at a friend's castle in Yonkers. It really is a castle, a turreted Victorian-era mansion with stained glass windows, a cursed chapel, and 100-foot wraparound porch with a view of the Hudson. About 20 of us gathered there, lodging in rooms scattered over five floors. The vibe was witchy.
My weekend job was managing the food. I had no idea how to do this, and it was surprisingly tough to research. The best resource I found on feeding a crowd was this sandwich calculation on a random blog.
But in the end, it all worked out. For breakfast, we acquired bagels in a big haul from Too Good to Go (truly the app's best use case). Lunch was D.I.Y. sandwiches and a simple salad of kale massaged with olive oil, lemon and salt.
A different cook made dinner each night. I made slow-roasted salmon, the shaved fennel and radish salad Salt Fat Acid Heat suggests pairing with said salmon, a boiled potato dish you sauce like pasta, and braised chard with olives. Oh, and a real slapdash cobbler.
All were gussied-up versions of dishes I make weekly. I thought that would make things easier. But oddly, it didn't. I knew what I was doing, generally, but that also meant I paid less attention than I do when breaking in a new recipe.
The dinner was good, and we had lots of leftover salmon for bagels, which had been one of my main goals (Costco wild salmon is an incredible deal). But the experience made me realize I'm more of a "try the big dumb ambitious thing for the first time" dinner party cook. It's that whole beginner's mind, zen mind thing. No overcooked salmon mind.
That was May. Now it's summer summer. Every week at the farmers market I buy pounds of tomatoes. We eat them all. I buy more. We eat more. Tomatoes on bagels. Tomato sandwiches. BLTs. Panzanella. Fresh tomato pasta. The baby only likes tomatoes as pasta sauce, but I slap one on his plate every meal. He'll come around.
It's been a minute since I sent out a newsletter. I'm busy, and it feels good. Most of the reporting I'm working on hasn't run yet. Here's what has:
A dive in to the California bill that threatened to ban restaurant service fees for the New York Times. I got to break a little news that the state senate was looking into preserving those fees, which they ultimately did
An essay on fancy chains, and how they define my neighborhood for Eater. There’s also an interactive portion of the piece, a new "chain street," which I researched and wrote. It was a pleasure to work with my editor Lesley Suter again, and to write a capstone for coverage I started in 2015, when I predicted, well, exactly this.
A guide to Brazilian food in West LA and beyond for the LA Times, including a new spot to get Brazilian burgers. You know what's great? Eating your way through a neighborhood and then reporting out how it came to be. I've been a national-level reporter for so long, but I started out running Eater Austin, and it's a treat to do this kind of work again.
Also, I sold a short story for the first time in a decade. It’s about a union battle at a private Mars colony, and will run in Lightspeed early next year.
We are having fun watching the Olympics. I feel complicated about the Games, but I love the intense perfectionists competing. I even loved the opening ceremony, in all its profoundly French corniness.
Listen, I can be a “LA has soooo much history” scold. But it’s pretty funny to consider all of the famous, historic locations Paris showcased during their opening ceremony and attempt to imagine an LA equivalent. Randy Newman’s “I Love LA” starts playing in my head. Here's a palm tree that someone lit on fire with fireworks in 2013. We lit it on fire again!
In this spirit, my first reading rec is Alissa Walker's newsletter Torched, about the 2028 LA games, and what they'll mean for our city
Michael Kimmelman's feature on what cities actually get back from the Games also has a lot of food for thought
I was one of the captain-coaches of my college rugby team, and I'm living for the enthusiasm for rugby this year
The only good soulless corporate consulting idea I’ve ever had was that 7/11 should bring their Japanese stores to the US, so I am soooo curious to see how this goes in LA
It's embarrassing to admit how long it's taken me to finish the print version of this New Yorker article on attention, but it's actually about a secret society, and it's wonderful
Angie on grandparents stuffing kids silly and food-as-love, also in TNY. Angie told me this story and I insisted she pitch and make a comic about it, and she did. I feel so powerful.
Tejal on the perfection of the plain croissant. I've attempted to try this one but they were sold out : (
The concept of climbing cringe mountain has been perhaps too useful to me thinking about my creative work lately
Sometimes I wonder if I’m too negative about my MFA experience, and then I think nah
A lovely, quietly complicated little profile of America's newest oldest Chinese restaurant
I have a new Japanese camping YouTuber I'm obsessed with, who goes by the handle yagai_no_moriko. She's in a band. She solo camps in a refurbished N-Van. She maybe works in tea? I've done too much research into camping in Japan now, and also whether you can import N-Vans (no).
I have yet to purchase and rehab a camping van, but I did go to Yosemite with friends in June. Yosemite is such a California cliche that I’d become skeptical of it, but that was stupid, because it’s unbelievably beautiful. Literally: I could not believe it. Here’s three views of the same waterfall.
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