IT ISN'T OFFICIALLY summer, but the temps are in the nineties, so I think it qualifies. I had hoped to put together a nice, tender, juicy newsletter for you, my dear Mushroom Heads, but life conspired against me. Next week.
As I struggled to figure out how to integrate Michaela's hectic camp schedule into my own somewhat haphazard routine, I made some tasty summer treats in the easiest way possible. I am on a bit of an "anti-recipe" kick. I do not want to run around getting lots of ingredients, I do not want to turn on the stove (at least not for long), I do not—and this last one is critical—want to dirty any more dishes than absolutely necessary. This time of year I just want to pick the vegetables that are fresh, then cook and eat them with pasta. A frying pan and a pot, basta.
Michaela's Secular Jewish Sunday School teacher taught the class traditional recipes from different countries for Passover, and one of them was a Persian cucumber/vinegar drink which is so easy and delicious I have started making it on the regular. In the summer we eat a lot of watermelon and sometimes have more than we need so I wondered if watermelon would also work well with vinegar. I googled it and lo, it is a thing. I did use this recipe as a guide, but improvised the ratio. I made the simple syrup but in future I think I will just mix the sugar in with the fruit and vinegar since the acids will dissolve it anyway. What I like about this recipe is that you don't discard the fruit. It all just stays mixed together. I strain it when adding it to club soda, but that's it. I used a blender to puree the melon but you could just smash it with a ladle. Tart and sweet, though it does mellow over time.
The other thing I made out of necessity was chocolate syrup. What? I craved ice cream with chocolate syrup and I'm too much of a snob to use the Bosco that's been sitting in our fridge for five months. Again, I did use a recipe for reference, but only to find out whether it was possible, as I imagined, to just heat up chocolate chips with dairy and call it a day. I filled a glass jar with about a quarter cup of chocolate chips, added some cream and half-and-half, and put the jar into a saucepan filled about a third of the way up with water and let the water boil around it, double-boiler style. Then I rummaged the kitchen for other ingredients to put into the jar: cinnamon, a splash of vanilla, salt, coconut oil. I stirred everything together, and voila, I had chocolate syrup already in a storage container, and no additional dirty dishes; I just rinsed out the pan and put it on the drying rack. This stores well in the fridge and you can just eat it with a spoon straight out of the jar which is what I did yesterday afternoon.
And that, my dear Mushroom Heads, is what I'm sharing with you this week. If any of you end up trying these, let me know how it goes. Or share your own easy summer recipes!
Three Things That Kept Me Going This Week
- I am late to Stereophonic, which just set a record for Tony nominations, and features Juliana Canfield, the actress who played consummate personal assistant Jess on Succession. I've been listening to the album, with music by Arcade Fire's Will Butler that successfully parrots '70s bands (specifically Fleetwood Mac), yet feels contemporary. (Maybe because so much new music lately sounds like old music?) Canfield sings one of the best songs on the album, "In Your Arms."
- Through pure luck we got to see "madskills" on opening day at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and loved the various TikTok videos of construction workers hamming it up on the job—or just doing the job, which is the kind of invisible labor everyone takes for granted.
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)
- Speaking of taking architecture for granted, Thomas de Monchaux's essay (eulogy?) on the old Whitney building helped me understand why I have started to avoid museums. The Renzo Piano Bloatification Machine turns them into these colossal, exhausting halls where there is little intimacy or chance of unexpected reveals or, worst of all, character.* (The Art Institute of Chicago is a good case in point; I find the "new" modern wing confusing, even combative, as though the building were deliberately trying to put visitors off art.) FYI the New York Review of Architecture is one of the best publications out there on any subject; well worth subscribing to if you're at all interested in buildings or housing or the environment.
Thomas de Monchaux
(Relatedly, we caught the Mina Loy retrospective at the Arts Club of Chicago right before it closed, and to me that was a near-perfect show and museum-going experience. It helps that it was also free. The building, discreetly and purposefully designed by John Vinci in 1997, includes a Mies Van Der Rohe–designed staircase salvaged from the first Arts Club building, which was torn down after the club lost its lease.)
Lastly, the latest Mushroom News: Mushrooms Eat Fire!
The Editors
Have a great week, Happy Father's Day to all the dads or dad-identifying folks, and Happy Juneteenth!
* I co-edited a little book about disappearing museums with Katarina Burin and Farhad Mirza which Chad designed. It's called Museum Memories. We have some copies lying around if you're interested—ten bucks a pop plus shipping.