APÉRITIF:
If you’re like me, still waiting for an invitation to the Hamptons, begrudgingly hauling a cooler on the ferry to Rockaway once again, this newsletter is for you. In the Hamptons, lunch would mean waiting in line for $100/lb lobster salad behind Julianne Moore, ultimately settling on a mediocre tuna sandwich that costs more than a full meal elsewhere. Or perhaps we’d try to grab an iced coffee before the beach, but give up halfway through wading through Alec & Hilaria Baldwin’s tiny army of children— sorry, Baldwinitos. On second thought, I’ll happily haul my ass onto the ferry (or Rockaway Yacht, as I like to call it) once again and leave the Hamptons to the celebs and unwitting TikTok crowds. So let’s talk about Beach Lunch, one of my favorite subcategories of meals. We know you just want to pick up a sandwich that’s destined to become an actual sand-wich. We also know how seductive those boardwalk burgers and arepas are. But sometimes the lines are too long, sometimes we wake up in post-beach-nap dazes and simply can’t choose between the two, and honestly, sometimes we’re just in the mood to flex on our friends by acting like the 20-something Ina Gartens that we are. Whichever reason resonates with you, we have the best foods to bring to the beach, eat by the beach, or just remind us of the beach in the sad case you’re landlocked. Plus, this week’s Dinner Plans came from the minds and kitchens of our very own readers, so we’ve got the days leading up to beach day covered, too.
ON THE MENU THIS WEEK:
YOUR (!) DINNER PLANS
White Bean-Stuffed Poblanos: Reader Jimbo raved to us about Priya Krishna’s stuffed poblano recipe from her cookbook Indian-ish (here without a paywall). Perfect for “every future dinner party menu,” they said when sharing this recipe with us (something you can also do here), “the ground coriander adds the perfect amount of refreshing floral aroma” and apparently the white bean filling has “the same texture as a cheesy stuffed pepper.” The dish is incredibly easy to pull together and somehow marries nearly every flavor and texture: smoky, spicy, sweet, crispy, creamy, fresh, tart, etc. That’s probably why they call them a “must try!” and give these smoky, velvety peppers an “11/10”, which is also what we rate Jimbo in the category of reading & loving Sifted.
Tuna Salad: Jimbo strikes again! I spent this week obsessing over tuna melts (see below for the one of my dreams) so it’s simply kismet that this Sifted star shared their favorite recipe for (almost) exactly that, this week. Jimbo sent us this recipe, but notes to “add lemon zest and a bunch of olive oil” and to make and use Kenji’s two-minute mayo. We’re thin slice of rye toast or thick, chewy piece of sourdough bread girls, but they suggest trying a bed of lettuce as a serving vessel for this tuna salad. “You know when you take a bite of something a need to pause?”, they ask. Yes, Jimbo… we do. “That's this.”
Nutty Chocolate Chip Cookies: Like most people who have ripped into one of Maman's nutty, chocolate chip-studded cookies, Justine Lee says she goes “weak in the knees” for the doughy disks and even calls them “the best in NYC.” She shared a recipe she discovered with us for a version of them that’s both vegan and studded with crunchy, salty pretzels in addition to the classic nut mix. And in a move that made us extraordinarily proud, she also noted that while the recipe is great as written, it’s easy to un-vegan-ify them if you “simply omit the chia seeds and swap in some good European Plugra for the plant-based stuff.” Justine suggests doing so “if you're like J-Hope in the Butter music video and down for housing a pad of butter by the forkful,” which we have been since we were children snacking on gold foil-wrapped butter packets at the diner. Oh, just us?
SO YOU’RE GOING TO THE BEACH
Lobster Pasta: You could make a lobster pasta exclusively to bring the the beach, or you could make enough lobster pasta to sit down with a hot, luxurious bowl of it for dinner one night and a twirl cold, funky bites of it out of a Tupperware container at the beach the next day. Yeah, this is sort of a Dinner Plan/So You mashup situation — it’s a recipe as perfect for a random night at home as it is for the question at hand: What should you make to eat at the beach? In both cases, boiling a long pasta noodle until it’s al dente, cooking some shallots and red pepper flakes in a mix of butter and olive oil until they’re soft and translucent and adding little tomatoes until they start to blister a bit before adding lobster meat, cooked pasta, pasta water, lemon zest and lemon juice and swirling it all around vigorously leaves you with a pot of spicy, saucy spaghetti hiding barely-cooked tomatoes and perfect pieces if lobster. For those who prefer to follow a real recipe, this one is similar to what I normally whip up on the eve of a beach day.
Ramen Salad: Lobster Pasta & Ramen Noodle Salad— we have layers, people! In the Midwest they call a lot of things ‘salad’ that are distinctly not salad. Cookie salad. Fluff Salad. A horrifying, mysterious concoction aptly named Watergate Salad. But one Midwestern tradition I can get behind is Ramen Salad. Introduced by my best friend’s mom, I’ve never turned back from this perfectly packable, gets-better-as-it-sits salad. Some ramen salads call for you to cook packets of dry ramen noodles, but the best use them raw, bashed in the bag until shattered into little pieces. All the better to soak up a sweet vinaigrette alongside chopped cabbage and any other crunchy veggies you like, plus the requisite sliced toasted almonds. This recipe is close to the one I grew up on, but these days I’ll probably opt for one closer to this, which goes lighter on the prepackaged ingredients and adds fresh herbs, which we all know makes everything better. The only change I’d make? Call me crazy, but I’ll take the fluorescent glowing mandarin orange slices over fresh fruit in this salad any day.
Lime & Ritz Icebox Pie: If the beach is bliss, dessert on the beach is euphoria. Truly, there are few things more serotonin boosting than sitting in the sand, spooning this cold and fluffy pudding into your salt water-stained mouth. Whisking heavy cream and sweetened condensed together with tart, acidic lime juice thickens everything into a creamy custard made for layering with buttery, salted Ritz crackers that soften into a satisfying spoonable texture. It’s a perfect summer treat to store in your cooler until those last few exhausting hours under the hot sun — slightly savory so that you don’t crash, but sweet enough to jolt you up and get you back home.
TAKEOUT:
Someone, please, shut off the internet:
No really…… we are abusing it:
Speaking of McDonalds, their new collab with Saweetie makes me want to throw my phone in the ocean for good.
Finally, in this little cursed corner of the internet: who’s watching this season of Love Island? I love the show dearly and could go on for hours about couplin’ up, fanny flutters, and muggy behaviors, but only wish we got to see more of them cooking and eating, mainly because I just know they’re making some Fyre Festival-esque fare in the villa. That’s why I was delighted to see this headline, plus this little snippet in last week’s dramatic girlfriend-proposal between this summer’s early front runners, Jiberty (that’s Jake + Liberty, for the uninitiated). To pledge his devotion to Lib— at least until Casa Amor, a.k.a. the very next episode— he made her favorite, Spag Bol (that’s spaghetti bolognese, for the un-British.) If you think I’m not going to call it Spag Bol for the rest of my days in this villa that we call life, you would be wrong.