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.
Belated postcard from Paris
Florence’s Paris apartment was filled with art and strings of colorful baubles. There was a miniature dollhouse kitchen scene displayed on a bookshelf; a huge oil painting consuming the entire wall of a teeny guest bathroom. So many DVDs! This was the first time I’d stayed in an Airbnb that was actually, clearly, someone’s home. So I kept joking that we’d return from dinner one night and Flo would be there, watching TV on the couch. Well...
On my birthday, halfway through shaving my right leg in a luxurious Airbnb birthday bath, the doorbell rang. Assuming it was Bill (classic Bill) back from his run and too lazy to use the key, I ignored it. Until the door opened and a voice called out, “alooooooooo?” It was indeed Florence!!! She’d forgotten medication she needed, which happened to be in the bathroom where I was occupied in ze nude. So that—plus treating myself to a tortoiseshell hair comb with my name engraved upon it, and the big beans at La Buvette, and the blood sausage at Le Verre Volé, and a long lunch at the perfect restaurant Mokonuts—was the highlight of my trip to Paris.
Back now!
Soooo what’d I miss?
[Flips past 17 pages of gigantic world events.] What’s this? A Claire Saffitz cameo on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver!!! Yesss!
The first thing I cooked
Was Andy Baraghani’s caramelized cabbage (which SO MANY people are making!). It was ridiculously good. “I would not have imagined that cabbage could taste this good,” wrote Anonymous from Maryland. (That’s from the generous tomato paste + spice combo.) I loved it so much I had to ration it out in my lunch this week because overeating cabbage risks a gaseous condition I call “deflating mattress farts.” A nonstop stream of toots. Disturbing.
Whole Wheat Irish Soda Bread Muffins
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