Salad-Adjacent Food For Cozy Returns Home
Cozy chicken noodle soup with mushrooms! Fromage Fort! (We went away for just a few days and boy was the food good. Now that we're back, it's good in a different way.)
THE BOYS IN THE LAB AND COOKIE THE DOG stayed home last week while I got on a big old jet airliner for the first time since the pandemic to visit NYC. I won’t dwell on the flight—except to say that I was only able to book a middle seat, which didn’t recline, and that I have absolutely no personal filter and therefore easily absorb the territorial armrest vibes and nervous tics of anyone within 10 feet of me—even with my earbuds in my ears and a song in my heart. I was so glad when we landed that I almost kissed the ground. Boarding the flight back home, I passed a woman in first class eating a whole pizza from a box.
Luckily, the event that I’d come to town for was wonderful— a big, happy Substack party in Brooklyn at The Invisible Dog, celebrating the fabulous new, bestselling cookbook by my fellow Substack newslettrist Caroline Chambers, of What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, which is also the name of her new book.
I really don’t like to brag, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that the Department of Salad had the foresight to celebrate What to Cook ages ago, in this 2023 issue, which coincided with the week I brought Cookie home to be my lifelong sidekick, and which made me feel like Charlie Brown finding Snoopy at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.
Anyway, at the event Jenny Rosenstrach, Hitha Palepu, and I were invited to say a few words about what we cook when we don’t feel like cooking (I eat cold cereal or frozen pizza, by the way). And I got to meet Substack people I’d known for quite a while but had never met in person. Plus my dear old friends from my New Yorker magazine days, Mary Norris and John Donohue, were there. What a treat!
Honestly, the rest of my time in NYC was wonderful, too. Except the Q Train at rush hour, at the 57th Street station, which was so crowded I decided I was suffocating and jumped off just seconds before the doors closed and watched the train leave the station without me, taking my anxiety about enclosed spaces with it. I wish it had taken some of my others, too. Goodbye, anxieties! Have fun downtown! Meet me at Eataly!