I'm a couple of days late, but here's what I loved most about the hot month of August.
1. Grate a tomato, rub bread with garlic, and eat. Do it before the season's over.
2. The Everygirl is a practical and stylish website I'm really enjoying.
3. Giddy when this new cookbook arrived.
4. Tried some new restaurants this month. Celebrated Julia Child here and all around seasonal fare here.
5. Shirts for recovering English majors.
My friend Sara wrote a cookbook. It's beautiful, thoughtful, and full of the kind of recipes you've come to rely on from her blog, Sprouted Kitchen. I read it cover to cover the day it arrived, and have since gone back to revisit all the pages I added post-it notes to. You might want to bookmark this recipe for the first cold snap, because it will be here sooner than we realize.
Andrew and I went to the Hollywood Bowl last weekend (it never really feels like summer until I've done that). We enjoyed a picnic in the grass (grilled pepper, onion and goat cheese sandwiches + white bean and zucchini salad + macaroons from Bouchon + a crisp Sauvignon blanc), then found our seats and cozied up to the smoky voice of Diana Krall.
I made Sara's smoky red lentil soup the next day, and Andrew went on a hilarious diatribe about how he doesn't really like soup. But wait. It gets better. (And just for the record, he approved everything I'm about to say, and even suggested that I tell Sara about how this conversation went down.)
Molded in the cold earth, potatoes sprout up when we need them, the moist dirt still flecked on its skin until scrubbed away. And there's nothing wrong with the fact that potatoes have been historically associated with peasants and rural-dwellers, poverty, and hunger. All the best meals begin humbly, don't they?
Potatoes live a hard, wrenching existence, but a purposeful one. The potato is a mighty workhorse, that much is certain. Versatile. Reliable. It offers the kind of stick-to-your-ribs meal that has enabled human survival.
My goodness, that all sounds dreary. Let's move to the poem, shall we?