Writing this newsletter is easier some weeks than others. Inspiration minds no schedule. Often it strikes me on the subway, where I’ll hammer out a few paragraphs in my Notes app, or in the shower, where I’ll reach for my phone perched on the sink ledge and dictate a flurry of one-liners into the Voice Memos app, my musings about pesto punctuated by a pitter-patter on porcelain.
Other weeks, I scramble to pull something together, leaning on the changing seasons as my guide. On Monday, I sent my editor, Mia, a cascade of indecisive messages. “Maybe frozen peas?”
Once I sat down to write about a few springtime stars — peas, asparagus — words eluded me. I love them both! But I don’t want to eat peas and asparagus right now, even if it is, finally, April. I want to eat bread for dinner. That’s a tough sell for a newsletter called “The Veggie,” but the challenge moved me.
If you, too, just want to eat bread for dinner, either because you’re tired, uninspired or, I don’t know, training for a marathon, I’m here to say that you can, and you can do so with the virtuousness we often seek at the bottom of a bowl of vegetables. Take Lidey Heuck’s chopped salad with chickpeas, feta and avocado. Yes, it is richly green, sporting lettuce, diced cucumber, green olives, scallions, capers and herbs (dill, basil, mint or parsley). But it is also a beacon in my hour of carb-ish need, a vessel for crisp, olive oil-drizzled croutons.
Chopped Salad With Chickpeas, Feta and Avocado
The bread salad is a waste-fighting repository for your stale bread heels, your crushed hot dog buns, your last pieces of pita or lavash, or — gasp — a past-its-prime bagel. Give any one of them new life in the oven, to toss into Naz Deravian’s tangy and herbaceous dooymaaj salad, Hetty Lui McKinnon’s spiced chickpea salad with tahini, Yotam Ottolenghi’s chopped salad with everything bagel croutons, Lidey’s taverna salad or a more classic fattoush, like the one adapted from Ramzi Osseiran by Joan Nathan.
Dips are a fine excuse to eat bread for dinner, not that we ever needed one. Carolina Gelen’s smoky spiced eggplant dip? Yotam’s butter bean dip with frizzled onions and preserved lemon? Yossy Arefi’s protein-packed herby cottage cheese dip? Here comes the bread.
And then there are pizzas and flatbreads, among the most dependable dinner breads. Save Ali Slagle’s creamed kale pizza for when you have a bit of effort in the tank, and Dawn Perry’s pesto and mozzarella French bread pizza or Ali’s smoked Gouda and broccoli flatbreads for when you’re putting it in neutral and coasting into the proverbial gas station.
One More Thing!
I have the privilege of sitting across from the singular Melissa Clark in The New York Times office, and we got to leaning over our little desk partition to talk about bread for dinner yesterday. “Ooh, ooh, ooh, can I tell you about my croutons?” she asked me. Getting little “how she does it” morsels from Melissa is the greatest treat offered by an open-office floor plan.
So here are her croutons: She smashes cloves of peeled garlic and torn pieces of old bread — “You need to use old bread” — and throws them into a pan with enough olive oil to coat the bottom. “This is important — low heat.” She tosses the bread and garlic until browned and crisp, 10 to 15 minutes. Then Melissa adds salt and sprinkles on a bit of Parmesan, “which creates a frico-like crust over the whole thing.” Sometimes she adds red-pepper flakes or a sprig of rosemary. Crucially: “You must eat the garlic.”
Some days, in true bread-for-dinner fashion, she’ll set the croutons out in a bowl alongside olives, and that’s dinner. “Do we really want a salad?” she said with a laugh.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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