Every Friday morning, Bon Appétit senior staff writer Alex Beggs shares weekly highlights from the BA offices, from awesome new recipes to office drama to restaurant recs, with some weird (food!) stuff she saw on the internet thrown in. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
Smash the taters
Wearing a souvenir apron of Michaelangelo’s David’s...frontside...a man named Bill manned the grill last weekend when we made a minor feast of Chris Morocco recipes, followed by one of Molly Baz recipes. Both were fabulous and I’d highly recommend recreating them:
Night 1: Chris’s brisket with peanut-scallion salsa is a sleeper hit. The salsa is the star, though, and it works with anything you’re grilling because it’s crunchy, nutty, garlicky—not very controversial qualities, unlike that apron. So we grilled steaks we got on sale, shout out to Hollywood Market in Troy, Michigan. Then on the side we had Chris’s Big-Flavor Broccoli, which lived up to its name. At first you’re like, soooo it’s roasted broccoli? But the red onions you cook down first give it this low-key sweetness, anchovies dissolve into mysterious explosive umami, and you top it with CHEESE. I stood alone at the stove and watched the cheese melt onto the broccoli and thought, This is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. Because it WAS.
The recipes:
Grilled Brisket with Scallion-Peanut Salsa
Big-Flavor Broccoli
Night 2: Bless that salt goddess Molly Baz for her spicy (not thaaat spicy) coconut grilled chicken thighs and smashed potatoes. We made three pounds of potatoes and they disappeared immediately. Even if you mess them up, slightly overcooking them in the boiling water, which the recipe explicitly warns not to do—it’s fine. Because the smushy bits still got crispy in the hot oven and the walnut topping covers all sins. The chicken’s marinade is made up of stuff that’s usually in my pantry: coconut milk, anchovies, sambal, ginger, sugar, and lime juice. So I’ll be making that again this summer, maybe with SHRIMP!? Imagine!
The recipes:
Spicy Coconut Grilled Chicken Thighs
Crispy Smashed Potatoes with Walnut Dressing
In cereal news
The latest bored-in-the-house-in-the-house-bored food trend is COOKIE CEREAL and PANCAKE CEREAL and I’m not even going to look further into those because I can guess what it means. All cereals are tiny cookies anyway; this seems like a natural progression. But may I remind you that Cheerios are still great? I’ll even take HONEY NUT SCOOTERS, the bagged generic brand my mom bought spitefully, to be served with a nice bowl of 2 percent watermilk. Whatever gets ya going.
Sweaty meats
“Do you like puffy bread and sweaty meats?” I’ve been listening to the hilarious “Oh, Hello” p’dcast (which investigates, uh, Princess Diana’s death) and the fake commercials for Subway (pronounced “S’bwayyy”) and other brands make me laugh-cry. The p’dcast starts out deranged and only gets weirder from there. There’s a specific Venn diagram of people this might appeal to, but I’m hoping you’re out there reading this.
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