moonlight ride
solstice salads and strawberry cake
Happy summer solstice! My tradition on both solstices is to post the hours of daylight we get, to celebrate the days getting longer in winter, or to acknowledge the blessing of our long hours of sunlight in summer. Here, we enjoyed 16 hours and 15 minutes of daylight on June 21st. This year I also learned that at this latitude, the sun is never far enough from the horizon between June 7th and July 5th for it be considered “night”: there are four hours of “astronomical twilight” between about 11pm and 3am before the sun starts its rise again. So, if the solstice feels bittersweet because you know the days are starting to get shorter, remember that we still have more than a week with technically no nightfall.
Last weekend we did a lot of socializing, and it was nice but I did feel like I needed at least one extra weekend day just to relax afterwards. On Friday my dad and his partner came over for dinner, and so did my sister Alice whom I haven’t seen in a couple of months. She and Jeff work for the same company so he actually sees her more than I do! We ordered Korean food from Maru and shared two bottles of wine, sitting around the table until after 10— signs of a great dinner party.
Saturday we went to Orto with Jeff’s family to celebrate his mom’s birthday. This place is one of my faves for fresh pasta; the menu is different pretty much every time you go and I have never had anything there I didn’t love. If you go, make sure to get an order of bread for the table, even if the price seems like a lot: their amazing bread is from the adjoining bakery, and it comes with fresh tapenade, a delicious fruity olive oil, and caramelized onion butter that I could eat with a spoon. I chose the ricotta gnocchi for my main, which was with spinach pesto, asparagus, pickled fiddleheads(!!), and green pea sauce. I can’t remember the last time we went out and I finished my whole meal while Jeff did not (he got the squid ink pasta, which was excellent but filling).
Finally on Sunday, we had to grit our teeth and go to the Costco in PoCo to get gas and replenish our stores of granola and rice, among other things. Normally I’d reward myself for surviving the visit with a Costco hot dog, but instead we met up at Patina for some beers and barbecue with a couple of friends who live nearby. The brewery was busy and understaffed so there was a bit of a wait to get seated and the fries were slightly overdone, but the service was still great and so were the smoky pit beans. And any place where I can sit on a patio and be surrounded by dogs is okay by me.
On the solstice, it was, of course, raining. We had some brussels sprouts we’d bought on the weekend that needed to be used and when it came time to make dinner and I looked outside at the misty, grey weather, I regretted my choice of making them into a Caesar salad. But once I’d made croutons out of the end of last week’s sourdough, blended up a fresh batch of mayo for the dressing, and started roasting the sprouts, I was pretty excited about it. In the summer I like to use a slightly more acidic and potent version of Caesar dressing for grilled romaine hearts, and it’s nice for kale or sprouts too. Just add a some white wine vinegar, dijon mustard, and a little extra lemon to whatever Caesar dressing recipe you normally use, with olive oil to thin as needed.
While letting the sprouts cool a bit, I fried us each a slice of prosciutto for garnish (or fried capers would be good too) and grabbed some arugula out of the garden. These plus a couple of chopped lettuce leaves made it filling with lots of texture and flavour variety, and it was exactly the dinner I didn’t know I needed.
We roasted a whole chicken this week, which is a dinner that’s deceptively easy and always feels really special. I wanted to try something like the gochujang glaze on Eric Kim’s eggplant, but although I changed the ingredients a bit, it turned out to be not quite the right choice for my preferred chicken roasting method— the breast skin came out more than a little dark. I think next time I would add the glaze at the halfway point, or else slow-roast the whole thing at a lower temperature instead. But it wasn’t inedible or anything; the chicken was still juicy and the spicy-sweet glaze was still delicious.
To go with it, I made a green salad with the Lucky Peach carrot-ginger dressing, and some roasted mushrooms and kale in sesame oil, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. A friend makes something like this for Thanksgiving and there are almost never leftovers since it’s wonderfully crispy, salty, and just acidic enough to break up the other dishes. All three of us ate seconds of everything, and if I hadn’t brought it up, maybe no one would have suspected that parts of the chicken skin were the same colour as the cast iron pan it was cooked in.
We got some less-than-perfect strawberries off the sale rack at the produce store, figuring they could go into a pie or something. I had this strawberry sumac cake recipe saved, and it turned out to be a great use for them. A fruity, not-too-sweet cake is the unsung hero of summer desserts, and the olive oil was really lovely with the light citrusy flavour of the sumac. I raised an eyebrow at putting cornmeal in a cake, thinking it might come out dry, but the cake was light and fluffy and I actually loved the little bit of crunch it added as a contrast to the berries. I also think it can handle more strawberries than what’s suggested in the recipe— I used close to a pound in total and still felt there could have been a bit more throughout the cake.
For the cream, I subbed in half oat milk and half yogurt (using full-fat coconut milk would work too). And sprinkling the sugar on at the end seemed like a good way to waste a bunch of sugar as it falls off the cake, so I did it before baking, using demerara sugar so that the texture wouldn’t disappear as it cooked. I used a 10” cast iron to bake this and it still almost filled the pan completely as it rose in the oven, so be careful using a 9”! I better go get some ice cream to eat this with during the upcoming heat wave.
I kept thinking about the mango cucumber salad from this rice bowl recipe, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. But rather than make the exact same thing again, I chose sweet chili sauce for the crispy tofu. To increase the spice level and savouriness (sweet chili sauce is pretty mild, at least by my standards), I added a big spoonful of Guilin-style chili sauce, and a dash of Pineapple Punch habañero hot sauce. The salad was also a little different because I was out of jalapeño— I made the dressing the same, but added some Aleppo pepper flakes. Maybe I didn’t make this bowl as beautiful-looking as my red curry version, but that hardly matters when I am ferrying it to my mouth as quickly as possible once I sit down at the table.
Media:
As we round out Pride month, I enjoyed this piece for Punch: The Cocktail Bar is Queer. It discusses several modern queer cocktail bars in New York and other cities, some of the history of queer spaces and gay bar culture, and what a queer bar now provides in a time when it’s no longer illegal to operate (or exist in) such a space.
“The rise of the queer cocktail bar, in all its splendor, has, perhaps just as intended, initiated a greater conversation about inclusivity, economics and who higher-end LGBTQ+ spaces are for.”
Put another way, are fancy queer-owned cocktail bars that are intended as a space for other queers to gather really more inclusive than any other upscale bar, if they exclude the portion of the community that can’t afford to go there? Queer culture and socialization preferences are not a monolith, so it makes sense that a wider variety of spaces might exist today than 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. But as someone who lives in a city where we’ve watched queer spots slowly close down as they’re priced out of their buildings, I understand it’s often too expensive to operate a dive bar unless it’s been rent controlled since the ‘90s. Any venue’s income has to come from somewhere, and often the simplest option is alcohol. And as one patron says, feeling connected to other queers is still what’s at the core:
“Having these spaces where we can just hang out, carry a conversation, is really important.”
Anyway, if anyone is opening up a place like this in the lower mainland, let me know— I’ll put on my best denim jacket and be right over to order a Paloma.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please smash that like button below, or share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. Lastly, are you tired of Dall-E images yet? I certainly am not.