No. 16 — Bows, crispy rice, and high fashion

What’s on the menu for 6/2/23

Ahhh the weekend. Tomorrow I’m hosting my first cookbook club with a few friends (we’re cooking from Mina Stone’s Cooking For Artists) and I’m really excited…doesn’t a cookbook club feel like a very “I’m squarely in my 30s” thing to do? I’m also back into reading again after a year of having no focus so I’m looking forward to making a dent in my stack. It has the potential to be a very Ephron-esque weekend and I am ready!!!

Creative suggestion: A couple of Tuesdays ago I took myself to the Getty for the day. I hadn’t been in years but I quickly remembered why it’s my favorite museum in LA: something about ascending the hill via tram and spending so much time outside in between galleries makes for such a pleasant experience. It’s like a theme park for art.

I came for Tim Walker but stayed for Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems, Barbara T. Smith, and the excellent people-watching that can be done from the garden. I tried to take my time—I had nowhere to be and I was alone, so I went to every exhibit, eavesdropped on a lot of conversations, and took note of what artists I wanted to look up when I got home.

I’ve mentioned versions of this before, but a little thing I like to do sometimes (especially when I’m in portrait galleries) is to look for themes within the artwork. I don’t mean conceptual themes, but more like consistencies within the paintings, ie. shoes or animals or stripes. Doing this forces me to look at each piece with more focus; truthfully, I tend to glaze-over when I’m in a room of 18th century European portraits and I’ve been known to zoom through a room of them at warp speed.

This time I looked for bows. Here’s what I found:

There's a good color palette happening here, too.

Try it next time you’re at a museum! Plus, the detail shots end up being kind of fun.

Personal recommendation: My sister and I have been making dinner and watching Succession for the last several weeks (no spoilers but I 100% predicted the ending and for some reason I am really proud of it.) By the time Sunday rolls around I’ve usually had my fair share of pasta and little treats for the week and I’m desperate for something green, cheap, and easy.

This last Sunday we made Ali Slagle’s crispy grains and halloumi with smashed cucumbers and it was SO GOOD. Very few ingredients were used and very few dishes were dirtied. It has the essence of the famous Sqirl crispy rice salad but does not require the frankly ridiculous number of steps that recipe requires (I have the book and can make almost nothing from it, it’s so unnecessarily complicated.) This recipe is on NY Times Cooking—which I 100% recommend paying for if you cook a lot—but I’ve sneakily screen-shotted it so you can read it below. There’s a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure attitude in this ingredients list, but we went with brown rice, halloumi, lemons, parsley, and cumin.

Person to know: I ordered photographer Nadine Ijewere’s 2021 monograph Our Own Selves last year sight unseen—if her Instagram was any indication, I knew it’d be chock full of vibrant, cinematic shots of women in glamorous outfits and I didn’t need to know much else. And I was right! It’s a book I return to often for pattern and color inspiration.

At age 26 the London-based photographer became the first woman of color to shoot a cover of Vogue (anywhere in the world!) when she did British Vogue’s January 2019 issue. Nadine does most of her own model casting, prioritizing diverse models who don’t uphold fashion’s conventional beauty standards. She describes her work as "all about the celebration of diversity without creating a representation – particularly for women, as we are the ones who are more exposed to beauty ideals and to not being comfortable in who we are".

Our Own Selves is available on Bookshop or your local bookstore. You can follow Nadine Ijewere on Instagram here.

If you’re liking À La Carte and want to see more of something, please let me know!!! I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with things like “Side Order” (there’s a new one next week for paid subscribers!) and “At The Table With” posts. I would love to hear what you think!

x

Ali