standin’ in line, people everywhere
mycoprotein and Marzetti, the return of Komolafe, and tomorrow's it-condiment today (this & that 7/11/25)
Is everyone getting up bright and early this weekend to watch the Wimbledon finals? No excuses, since the Brits capitulated to the US market and are now waiting until the positively twilight hour of 4pm (8am Pacific / 11am Eastern) to toss the coin. My East Coast friends and family will be excited to know that first-time finalist Amanda Anisimova hails from Freehold, NJ. Her game (huge, flat groundstrokes from the baseline) is a throwback to the “big babe” tennis of the late 90s and early 00s, when Lindsay Davenport, Jennifer Capriati, and Venus Williams were dominating. Anisimova has an especially inspiring story. She was a teen prodigy, getting to the semis of Roland Garros as a 17-year-old in 2019. Two months later, a week before the US Open started, her father and coach, Konstantin, suddenly died from a heart attack at the age of 52. Since then, Amanda has struggled with physical injuries and mental health problems, finally taking an extended break before returning to tennis last year. Since then, she’s steadily climbed the rankings and will break into the top 10 for the first time next week, regardless of tomorrow’s results.
Her opponent, Iga Świątek, is a four-time Roland Garros champion who’s hated playing on grass since last week, when (after the worst year of her professional career), she kept winning on it. After demolishing Belinda Bencic (another underachieving former teen prodigy) yesterday, she comes in as the slight favorite against Anisimova. Świątek, whose shout-out of a traditional Polish pasta and strawberry dish (Makaron Z Truskawkami) drew equal parts curiosity and ire and was (of course) adapted by NYTCooking, can create almost as much power as Anisimova, but her shots are loopy, crossing the net with much more height and spin. It will be, as most great tennis matches are, a study in contrasts. Świątek’s spin, movement and rabid, hyper intensity against Anisimova’s awesome but effortless, almost laconic power. What’s crazy is that they are both 23 years old but haven’t played each other since they were children, when Iga beat Amanda 6-4, 6-2 to claim the 2016 Junior Fed Cup title for Poland.
The men are playing on Sunday, when we get a rematch of the instant classic from last month, when Carlos Alcaraz beat Jannik Sinner after more than five hours and three match points against him at Roland Garros. I hope this match is as epic, though Alcaraz has won the previous two Wimbledons and Sinner’s least favorite surface is grass.
Despite the hours of TV tennis, I did get to cook a little this week. For the main blog, I made a (loosely) tennis-inspired dish, the Palm Springs Racquet Club’s Gazpacho, written up in what some consider the first celebrity cookbook, Vincent and Mary Price’s 1965 A Treasury of Great Recipes. More on that shortly.
My lunches were another week of HLMcK’s No-Cook Chili Bean Salad, served on some Trader Joe’s Cruciferous mix and topped with sunflower seeds, queso blanco, and a squeeze of lime. I palmed it injera-style into El Machete all-butter flour tortillas, and this time I didn’t forget the bell pepper.
Today I ran out of bean salad, so I made myself the first tomato sandwich of the summer. Open-faced on toasted TJ’s multigrain, with OG Best Foods, supermarket on-the-vine tomatoes, and a little arugula. I didn’t want to jazz it up too much, but I sprinkled some Aleppo chile on the mayo and dotted the tomatoes with salt, black pepper, olive oil, and just a drop of Champagne vinegar. I mean c’mon. Perfect. And the tomatoes are just going to get better.
I made Vincent’s ‘60s gazpacho (only a half-batch, but still way too much) on Sunday, but cold, raw veggie soup isn’t exactly satiating, so I decided to pair it with a more ‘90s country-club-inspired dish, the suddenly trendy again Chicken Caesar wrap. (My local kabob shop has people lining up around the corner for theirs every Thursday.) I used What’s Gaby Cooking (the human personification of a Chicken Caesar wrap) as my sherpa, but I used a shredded kale/arugula blend, pecorino, my El Machete torts, and a healthy glug of bottled Marzetti Supreme Caesar Dressing. You homemade dressing fascists would send me to the gulag at the sight of the godforsaken bottled menagerie in my fridge. But I will not apologize for Marzetti; it won the Bon Appetit taste test. I stole Gaby’s basic-b idea of subbing croutons with toasted panko, but next time I’m going back to the tried and true. Panko gets lost in all that sauce. Oh yeah, and the “chicken”? Straight-up Quorn Meatless ChiQin Patties. Sorry to the vegans, but Quorn’s mycoprotein and egg white concoction is the unequivocal best meatless chicken on the market. It’s not bad for you either, with 9g protein, 160 cals, and only 300mg (not as bad as it sounds) sodium.
I’m trying to go cold turkey on my increasingly crippling tortilla chip habit, so the Caesar wraps were the only thing I had available to dip into my latest Rick Martinez salsa. (I ladled some on the bean salad as well.) This week, I made La Verde Cremosa, a simple blend of tomatillos, white onion, serranos, garlic, and avocado. It was a bit of a dud, but I blame neither myself nor the Salsa Daddy himself, instead pointing my finger at the sub-par discount produce at the Glassell Park Super King. The chiles just weren’t spicy, and the tomatillos were flat. Lime and bottled hot sauce helped, but the spark wasn’t there. Maybe I’ll have better luck with this weekend’s “Pepita Roja.”
Sunday dinner was freshly made gazpacho and Caesar ChiQin wraps, and Monday was less-fresh gazpacho and more mycoprotein and Marzetti. Tuesday was John’s birthday, so I took him to glamorous Burbank for an audacious 6pm reservation at Smoke House. Aside from an unwarranted parking ticket (of course fucking Burbank has RED permit parking only signs, not the universally accepted in LA green — take me to court, pigs), the dinner was a success. I got my weekly serving of seafood (Stuffed Salmon “En-Plank,”) my poor deprived husband was allowed to touch animal flesh to his lips (Steak Sinatra), and we shared a wedge (bacon on the side) and an order of Smoke House’s “world-famous” garlic bread. If you’ve never had the garlic bread, it is really good, coated with butter, granulated garlic, and (here’s the shocker) a powdered instant mac and cheese packet. Here’s a link to the recipe if you want to recreate it at home.
This is also my fourth summer in a row trying to get French Martinis to happen. If Cosmos are having a moment, why not the French Martini? Unfortunately, we’re no closer to vodka/Chambord/pineapple utopia than we were at the beginning of my quest, but the nice bartender at Smoke House made me two of them off menu.
Wednesday and Thursday nights, John went to two different one-man shows (I didn’t have the fortitude), so I made my sister in messed up blood Yewande Komolafe’s Masala Chickpeas With Tofu and Blistered Tomatoes. Komolafe has been sidelined with a health crisis related to her sickle cell anemia for more than a year, and this is her first recipe back for the Times. I made it as written, buying a baggie of tandoori masala from the Indian grocery down the street. I served it on shredded kale with an onion paneer paratha (the Indian grocery has a $5 minimum credit card limit) on the side. I slightly burned the chickpeas waiting for the tomatoes to blister, and I’ll double the masala next time (and maybe add a little dollop of yogurt), but this is a nice, light summer dinner.
Though I was already over the Sweets & Spices credit card limit, I also bought a bottle of Priya Red Chilli Pickle. It’s so good, as sour as it is spicy, the perfect cooling hot condiment (NOT an oxymoron) for a summer’s afternoon stuck in an intermittently air-conditioned Atwater Village apartment. It might as well be Mumbai outside, so now it’s gonna be Mumbai inside too. Of course, I’ve been known to be so far ahead of the curve (see: the great cabbage prediction of 2018) when it comes to trendspotting, my less charitable critics would argue that I’m not spotting trends at all but rather just championing my idiosyncratic (and unpopular, evidently) personal preferences. So, take this with a grain of salt, but could Red Chilli Pickle become the next Chili Crisp? Pickled, sour things are all the rage, and hot sauce never goes out of style. If you see $18 jars of Instagram-approved Fly By Priya in your suburban Whole Foods, you know who to blame, and it’s not Emily Sundberg.
I didn’t watch many movies this week because of Wimbledon, but I did finish (drumroll) a book. A rare occurrence I know. It was The Warrior, tennis journalist Christopher Clarey’s biography/history hybrid of Rafael Nadal and the French Open, which Nadal won fourteen times. The book was fine, but you’ve already suffered through too much tennis this week, so I’ll shut up about it.
I saw the new Jurassic Park movie, called Jurassic World REBIRTH. You know what? It was good. ScarJo is a mercenary, Mahershala Ali is some sort of pirate, and the Lincoln Lawyer is the world’s most irresponsible father, sailing his children, including an annoying incoming NYU freshman (she’s so me), through the dinosaur-infested ocean. But this time they’re not regular dinosaurs, they’re mutant dinosaurs, and they hold the key to eradicating all heart disease! If this sounds fun to you, go to the IMAX before Superman starts hogging all the screens.
I attempted to be a little more highbrow one night during John’s one-man show bender, dialing up Chinese neo-noir Only The River Flows on ol’ Criterion. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, but this one gets four snoozeroos. I like elliptical, I like ambiguous, I even like arty and pompous, but this one was so indebted to its influences (Fincher/Lynch/Bong blah blah blah), I had to restrain myself from switching to the latest RIVETING episode of Next Gen NYC. Now, if Brooks Marks has to solve a series of murders in 1990s rural China, I’ll be there opening night.
I have no good music rec this week, so I’ll leave you with (I’m truly on the cutting edge) Neil Young’s new song. It’s called Talkin’ to the Trees, and I deeply relate to it because he talks about buying food at the farmers’ market.