Summer condensed

In which nothing really happens, but a lot of eating gets done

Hello hello,

After last month’s newsletter and noticing I have a lot less to say, I decided to cut back to monthly updates. Holding back on a lot of things as well while my micro entrepeneurship is in French bureaucratic summer holiday limbo.

The past month has been blissfully uneventful, so here’s an update on wat I’ve been eating, reading and seeing.

New recipe: smoked oyster, pea and sage linguine

I’m going to pretend I didn’t share this already last time (because I didn’t really share it properly), but this smoked oyster, pea and sage linguini turned out pretty good for some impromptu waffling about in the kitchen. I’m going to have to check if I can even get smoked oysters here but they are readily available at Jumbo in the Netherlands and Sainsberets in the UK and really are a treat to search out (don’t get the steamed mussels, they are no good).

Quick kitchen rifs and other people’s recipes

While the heatwaves haven’t hit us yet (last year around this time we were two deep in, never mind the forest fires), I have been on the hunt for easy summer eating.

Current favorites are (in no particular order):

• This vegan kimchi bibim guksu from Seonkyoung Longest

• Loaded silken tofu, any Asianish saucy topping will do, here she is pictured with the peanut lime sauce I use for noodles

• Raw salmon with an impromptu chili crisp, soy sauce and vinegar dressing. For the above I used Trouble&Spice’s Yum Phrik chili crisp and a local soy sauce, aged in Cognac barrels (I’d tell you the brand but it looks like they’ve stopped doing it)

I also made the chai latte flan from Abi Balingit’s absolute triumph of a book, Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed. Other recipes on my hitlist from Mayumu are the peach mango compote, lyche madeleines and the turrones de casoy MSG brownies. You can try the chai latte flan recipe yourself on Nigella’s website. I didn’t have a heartshaped metal pan so I used a similarly sized round terracota pan. It worked, it just needed a little more time.

Reading recs

I recently finished A Bite-sized History of France. It’s a fine entry level primer on French (food) history. It doesn’t go too deep so it’s one of those books where you could read a chapter every night before you go to sleep and doze off comfortably and work your way through it slowly that way.

One thing it touches on lightly is the colonial history of France in relation to peanuts, so I am currently reading Slaves For Peanuts, to keep the momentum going.

A little romp of an article is Cults, Conspiracies and the Twisted History of Sleepytime Tea (a tea I always thought was shit anyway, but heyho). Which reminded me of another article I read about a vegan chain that is owned by a cult.

I’ll leave you with a recommendation to follow Jasmine Mangalaseril somewhere, one of the more interesting voices in food I’ve found browsing the birdsite replacement hopefuls.

I’ll be back next month, after a quick visit to London. What are your plans for this summer?