Good morning. Here’s an excellent sandwich I ate around 60 miles south of the Jones Inlet on Long Island the other day, zooming around the New York Bight looking for offshore bluefin tuna: mortadella, provolone and napa cabbage kimchi on a buttered baguette, with pickled jalapeños and cilantro leaves.
Would that sandwich have been as fantastic if I’d eaten it under fluorescent lights at a desk in a Nevada server farm, or at a scarred wooden table in Bologna? Maybe. Maybe not. Context matters. There were whales out there, and storm petrels pattering around. Everyone eating together, a huge ecosystem of which I was the smallest part. Still, I think that sandwich was pretty good, and worth trying this weekend, wherever you stay.
Other possibilities: my colleague Eric Kim’s new recipe for a pepperoncini tuna salad (above), a reboot of a classic, with sweet pickle relish, celery and a drizzle of sesame oil.
Featured Recipe
Pepperoncini Tuna Salad
Or perhaps make a turkey sandwich with savory blueberry jam that Eric adapted from one Matt Cahn makes at his Middle Child sandwich shop in Philadelphia? Turkey and Gruyère on a toasted ciabatta roll with blueberry jam run through with garam masala and cinnamon — that is a run of fine words. Cahn ties everything together with Duke’s mayonnaise, a favorite of our southern states, tangy and rich. But you could use Hellmann’s instead (that’s Best Foods if you’re out West). Or make your own!
Try a radish sandwich with butter and salt. A Reuben. Cauliflower salad on a submarine roll. A fried eggplant hero! Put something between breads this weekend, and celebrate a season of food eaten out of hand, preferably during an adventure far from home.
That’s all daytime eating. At night, you might explore David Tanis’s latest ace menu, serving spicy and smoky grilled pork chops alongside turmeric potato salad in lettuce cups, with blackberry lemon curd shortcakes for dessert.
Or you could delve into Bryan Washington’s most recent gift, a melon and cho cho salad that he adapted from Denai Moore’s cookbook, “Plentiful: Vegan Jamaican Recipes to Repeat.” I’m not vegan, so I might serve that in advance of brown stew chicken and coconut rice and peas. Exhilarating.
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Now, it’s a far cry from chirashi or schav, but you’ve got to read Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post on the tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who met as teenagers, became bitter rivals and then grew into close friends. Here’s Jenkins: “At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time. ‘It was like, are you kidding me?’ Evert says.”
My colleague Elisabeth Egan recently looked back at “Bridget Jones’s Diary” after 25 years. “Bridget Jones Deserved Better,” the headline reads. “We All Did.” Click!
I liked Marian Bull on Rebecca May Johnson’s “Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen,” for n+1. Really it’s about much more than the book: “The journey of the cook and the recipe is the rare epic that does not end,” Bull wrote.
Finally, here’s Olivia Rodrigo going small to tall on her new single, “Vampire.” That’s sandwich-making music! I’ll see you on Sunday.
