Reading a great poem feels effortless.
No trace of the toil and struggle the writer endured bringing the piece
into the light.
So with food, a great meal lingers. A great dish
fills you with satisfaction, eclipsing the effort put in. No trace of the chopping, stirring, seasoning, just the finished feast.
When I made this dal (my first venture into Indian cooking), I thought of poetry.
I thought of the process. Of stitching together a poem the way I stirred the lentils.
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.)