I'm Sick

Cough, cough.

This is going to be a very halfhearted newsletter for reasons explained by the subject line. At the beginning of 2024 I got sick three times in rapid succession, a miserable experience that bought me a nine-month reprieve from minor but very irritating illness. That reprieve is now over. On Thursday, mere hours after I filed a column about the vanishing Oscar aspirations of Emilia Pérez, I felt a soreness in my throat that could only mean one thing: Karla Sofía Gascón’s evil eye had worked and my weekend plans were off.

Before that, though, I managed to squeeze in a half-decent week of eating, which I will now document because I’m going to stick to the schedule no one is enforcing but me, dammit. Just look at this beautiful bird! It’d be a shame if no one documented her via email dispatch.

Roast chicken is my death row meal, and every few months I get the overpowering urge to make and devour a whole one (with some minor assistance from Hunter). This bird, a rather overpriced one from the farmers market, was about as simple as it gets: dry-brined in the fridge for 24 hours, roasted at 400 for an hour over a bed of leeks, carrots, and potatoes, and doctored up with a gremolata situation for some punch.

Those beans were cooked down with some leftover jamón hock and tasted like salty pig, and therefore excellent. Was this the best chicken I’ve ever roasted? Hardly. Was it a great set-it-and-forget-it weeknight dinner? Duh.

Blissfully ignorant of what was to come, I made a valiant attempt to be “healthy” with another pair of recipes from Justine Doiron’s cookbook. Had I known this would fail to prevent me from turning into a sentient ball of snot in less than 72 hours, I wouldn’t have bothered.

This was good, though! The fennel was roasted plain for half an hour, then tossed in a mustard-and-balsamic sauce that was really a vinaigrette rendered (even more) idiot proof by industrial amounts of an emulsifier. The salmon — really trout, because Whole Foods was weirdly out? — was under-sauced, which was ultimately my bad for not properly doubling the recipe, but used my favorite technique for crispy skin: searing the fish skin-side down and then finishing it in the oven without flipping.

For my last hurrah before things took a turn, Hunter and I tried out Zira Uzbek Kitchen, which was conveniently close to our 7:30pm screening of Tampopo at the New Beverly Cinema. The New Bev is located in a classic RDZ, or Restaurant Dead Zone. Yes, there are technically lots of places to eat in that stretch of Hollywood, but few of them are actually good, let alone in that not-too-fancy, not-too-casual sweet spot you want for a pre-movie dinner.

That reduced competition means Zira has likely rocketed into our regular rotation. Central Asian food is pretty rare in LA; the closest I’ve had is probably one of the Uighur spots, like Dolan’s, in the SGV. Zira is more centrally located, but the plov pictured above — fatty, cumin-y, studded with carrots cooked to the point of disintegration — would be worth traveling for regardless. We also had manti, fried eggplant salad and samsas, but the menu is big and the portions generous enough that we feel the need to return soon with reinforcements.

The next day was when my luck ran out, but it turned into a neat lesson in using the freezer as one’s pantry. Between that, the actual pantry and Hunter’s garden, we happened to have Italian sausage, pasta and collard greens on hand, which were all the building blocks of a Molly Baz recipe from her second book I’ve tried before.

You basically make a quick-and-dirty sauce out of pasta water, tomato paste, Calabrian chiles and parmesan. The greens cook down shockingly fast if you use enough liquid, and you’re left with a carbs-protein-veggie mix that can sustain you through a few days of rotting in sweatpants while using Love Is Blind screeners to distract from the fact that you can’t breathe through your nose. You know, hypothetically!

That’s all for this week. Next time, I’ll hopefully have my sense of taste and smell back.