Sweet Somethings #5

Glistening greens, good advice, pancake soufflé

Jan 26, 2025

Hello from Brooklyn! I hope you’ve had a peaceful weekend wherever you are. Mine has been lovely — lots of lounging at home, eating out, and catching up with friends. Now, I’m gearing up for a busy week, and will combat the Sunday scaries tonight with homemade roast chicken.

To close out January on The Dish, I’m sharing a few sweet somethings (my end-of-the-month routine). This month’s sweet somethings feature my favorite way to cook and eat greens, a book I’m reading and loving, and the most delightful new dessert in all of New York City.

Thank you for being here!

Sweet Somethings

Ripassata Monster

I was an extremely picky eater as a child (and even into my teenage years), and if you’d told me then that I’d be inhaling greens the way I do today, I wouldn’t have bought it. But here’s what I’ve discovered over the years: I’ll eat all the greens forever and always — as long as they’re tender, garlicky, well-seasoned, and glistening with olive oil. While I’ve come to love a good salad and no longer think of all salads as “wet leaves” as I once did, hardy greens cooked in the Roman style (ripassata) are really the way to my heart.

If you haven’t heard me gush about this technique before, let me explain: ripassata is the art of twice-cooking vegetables like kale or dandelion greens — first boiling them until tender, then removing the excess water and sautéing the drained greenery in olive oil, garlic, and chili flakes. Now, whenever I feel like my body needs some nourishment, my first instinct is to reach for a bunch of kale and bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

The New York Times recently published a Clare de Boer recipe for Simple Boiled Greens, which is a similar idea, but without the sautéing step. Her approach is closer to that of Greek yiayias, demonstrated here by another of my cooking idols, Mina Stone. After draining the greens and letting them dry completely, you serve them as is, with some olive oil, salt, and lemon juice. Also worth noting: greens cooked this way (whether Roman or Greek) are as delicious at room-temperature as they are warm.

What led me to write about ripassata today is that I’ve been on a real kick lately. Maybe it’s the winter, and everything feeling grey and bleak makes me crave color. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia for Rome, and the fact that you could order a side of perfect greens for pennies at even the simplest restaurant. Who knows? All I know is that I currently have two enormous bunches of Tuscan kale waiting in my fridge for me to strip-boil-steam-sauté for dinner tonight.

As I once doodled in my notebook (see below): I am ripassata monster, ripassata monster is me.

Meditations for Mortals

Although I admittedly enjoy the self-help genre, I’m also wary of it — and sometimes fearful that it stirs up more internal dilemmas than it solves. Nevertheless, I recently discovered the author Oliver Burkeman, a self-described “self-help skeptic,” through his book Meditations for Mortals, and I’m getting SO MUCH out of it. The book is broken down into brief, bite-sized chapters (meditations), which are the perfect length for my morning subway ride, so I’m slowly making my way through the book, chapter by chapter, subway ride by subway ride.

One thing I appreciate in Burkeman’s book is that his observations are just that — observations, not prescriptions. Burkeman is intelligent, realistic, and proudly imperfect, and understands that quick fixes and “life hacks” are never really the answer.

I won’t drag on about everything I’ve learned so far, but I’d like to tell you about one lesson that’s helping me. In Chapter 4, Burkeman introduces the idea of “productivity debt,” or the feeling that you’re running on a never-ending to-do list treadmill. Every day, you wake up with a new set of expectations for yourself, and you already feel behind. Burkeman muses on what it means to “have to” do something in the first place, and he questions whether we ever really “have to” do anything. He hypothesizes that many overachievers operate from a place of insecurity, striving to prove their existence and worthiness through their accomplishments. These people are in a constant state of productivity debt, which is, as he puts it, “no fun at all.” As a person with a LOT of expectations for myself and a long self-imposed to-do list every day, I very much relate.

One tangible piece of advice he offers to counter productivity debt is to keep a “done list.” Update and review it often, and reflect on all that you have already accomplished, from big stuff like graduating college to small things like folding the laundry yesterday. I’ll close this sweet something with Burkeman’s final paragraph in his own words:

“This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.”

Nostalgia in a Dessert

Pitt’s is a new restaurant in Red Hook from the chef and owners of Agi’s Counter in Crown Heights. I’m writing it up for work, so I won’t reveal all my thoughts (spoiler: it’ll be a rave review), but I did want to write about the pancake soufflé. It’s exactly what it sounds like — a soufflé that tastes like pancakes — but somehow even more delightful than I imagined.

You have to order it at the beginning of your meal, which makes sense given that timing is everything to pull off a soufflé in a restaurant. A happy consequence is that it builds anticipation! The soufflé is served with maple syrup and salted butter, and when it’s delivered to your table, the server cuts into the top and pours in some maple syrup. Flavor-wise, it’s malty and sweet like diner pancakes (pure nostalgia), balanced with the right amount of salt in the batter and the accompanying butter. Crisp-topped, tall, and airy-yet-custardy on the inside, it checks all the boxes of a classic soufflé done right.

I loved it, clearly. As I understand it, we have head baker Goldie Flavelle to thank, so consider this my official thank you, Goldie Flavelle!!!