SIDESSALADS

Eat

Asparagus with Prosciutto and Poached Eggs

Mostly Pinterest functions to make me feel bad about myself. My hair, my nails, my smoky-eye abilities, the scarcity of silk trench coats in my closet, and oh my god my dinners.

It's not that my dinners are bad; they're usually pretty good ifIdosaysomyself - they're just not...I don't know, accessorized. Surrounded with little trimmings of locally sourced flower buds, or resting on snow-white plates with attractive little drip-drops of olive oil scattered about the edges, or whatever. (A caveat: lately my dinners have actually been rawther lovely, but that's because of Trader Joe's, not because of any exceptional food-styling abilities on my part.)

Anyway, this dinner - actually a "brinner,"* if we're being specific - is, like, the Kirsten Bell of meals (I'm watching Frozen with Indy right now - try not to be shocked - and this is the first cute actress who popped to mind, but it actually makes sense because she seems like, were she a food, she would be quite delicious).

DIARY

Back In The Day

Back in the day, I wrote a whole bunch of movies and TV show pilots. It's a byproduct of being an actor; you spend your days reading script after script after script, and at some point you start thinking to yourself: "Dude. I could TOTALLY do this." And so you pick up a copy of Final Draft and start tapping away on your keyboard, and sometimes what comes out is an extremely unfortunate (but not autobiographical at all, oh no no) tale of a girl who moves to Los Angeles to be an actress and ends up wildly disillusioned (oh yes; it was as bad as it sounds). And then sometimes you end up with is something that's actually sort of...okay.

I've written a lot of stuff over the years, but I still think that one of my favorite things that I've ever written is a script that I wrote for a college course I took on the 1950s, and that was read by exactly two people: my professor and Kendrick (the latter only because he found a copy of it at some point and asked to read it). It's a coming-of-age story (because that tends to be what people who are still coming of age themselves write), but it's - shockingly, I know - not about me, which is a bit of an achievement in and of itself.

Something you learn very early on in Hollywood is that every script has to have a "log line" - a punchy, easily-digestible, 1-2 sentence explanation of what, exactly, the film is about (or what, exactly, you think will make people want to pay money for said film). So Armageddon, for example, could be "Die Hard meets Independence Day, with asteroids." Pirahna 3D would be...well, actually in that case the title pretty much does the trick. My script, Meridian Planet, was The Wonder Years, but with a girl.

Recipes

Pea And Pesto Crostini

sandwich crostini pesto pea mozzarella

OK, confession: I LOVE Sandra Lee. I'm basing said love on the only two facts that I know about her, which are as follows:

1. Girlfriend does not cook without a glass of wine in hand;

2. Girlfriend also does not cook when cooking is not necessary.

Recipes

Heirloom Tomato, Cucumber & Avocado Salad

Yay for easy, pretty salads that taste as good as they look.

This is the kind of dish that is all about the ingredients, so they really do have to be as good as you can get - and right now we're heading into prime farmer's market season...so: get them now. And then get them again next week. And then get them over and over until fall rolls around and you can no longer get them.

I probably make this salad with 90% off my spring and summertime meals; it's that good. (And it takes thirty seconds to make, which is nice, too.)

Eat

Farro Salad With Peas, Pine Nuts And Goat Cheese

farro salad pine nut

When Indy and I were in California together, we stopped into a little cafe in a very expensive town (the town that it turned out would permit us to buy a one-room cabin with a ladder instead of a staircase). The sandwich that I got in that cafe - which was seventeen dollars and consisted of exactly what you traditionally find in sandwiches and not, as one might imagine, diamonds - should have perhaps indicated to me that we were in FancyLand, but I was less dismayed by the price tag of that sandwich than you might have expected, because oh the side salad that it came with.

Now, I recognize that food that you get in restaurants is generally good because it's full of secret things like All Of The Butter, and is often quite tough to replicate at home. But this little side salad seemed to me to be just a whole bunch of pretty simple stuff mixed together, and so I took out my handy little notepad, jotted down the ingredients that I could see, and when I got home:

made it.


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