Charred Cabbage and Date Salad

I'm still here!

Hi, friends. I’ve been thinking about all of you out there, and feeling badly about the long silence after my last newsletter. I can work write, but writing just as myself is harder right now. Writing is how I make sense of the world, and I’ve been having difficulty making sense of the world lately.

So many things are happening at once. (A genocide; A war on public health; a war on journalism; a war on objective reality itself.) And we all have to find a way to function in this, all if it, all the time. I find myself going back to this quote from Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (a re-telling of the Orpheus myth):

“Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.”

I find this really comforting somehow. There’s just no way around the fact that the world will break your heart. And it’s also still true that the world is filled with wonders. What I get out of this is: Don’t deny any of it. Keep going. Maybe one way to hold on to our humanity involves paying attention—to each other, to the natural world, to the political and cultural world—even when paying attention is painful or even dangerous.

I don’t have the answers but I can recommend a few things I did this week: Donate to World Central Kitchen, and adopt a kitten.

Her name is Cleo, short for Cleopatra, because she’s a queen and a genius. She also really enjoys the curry leaf plant.

I have been work writing—I wrote about the unregulated truth behind the vitamin and supplement industry for Teen Vogue, and for Politico about how the New York State Democratic establishment is using an old playbook to try to defeat Mamdani.

I’m revamping a book proposal, which will hopefully see the light of day soon. And I’ve been developing some great recipes for New York Times Cooking—like this Sheet-Pan Socca, this Creamy Lentil Tomato Soup, this Creamed Chicken and Corn, this Hoisin Garlic Chicken and this classic Senate Bean Soup.

Onwards!

What’s For Dinner?

Thank goodness for cooking and eating.

Actually, I want to tell you about a lunch, though it would make an equally wonderful dinner. It was my birthday last week, and I guess I’ve become the kind of person who wants to make myself a cabbage salad on my birthday. (I did go get a piece of cake afterwards.) It made me very happy.

This is an easy, delicious shoulder-season salad—sweet and spicy and filled with good things like warm charred cabbage, hot honey, dates, pickled onions, labneh, chiles.

If you don’t have hot honey, use regular honey and a generous smattering of red pepper flakes. If you don’t have labneh, use full-fat Greek yogurt. For the pickled onions, use this mini-recipe in the tip at the bottom of this recipe.

Spicy-Sweet Charred Cabbage and Date Salad

Preheat the oven to 550˚. Cut 1 small Savoy cabbage into 1-inch thick wedges, toss it with a generous amount of olive oil and salt. Roast on a sheet pan for 10 minutes, then decrease the heat to 350˚ and roast for another 5 to 10 minutes, until the cabbage is slumping and charred in spots.

Put a smear of labneh on a plate. Top it with a big tangle of the cabbage. Scatter pickled onions, sliced chiles, torn pitted dates, hot honey, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and salt on top. Preferably eat it like an animal with no one watching.

See you sooner next time, friends.