FROM ME TO YOU.

hope you like it.

Hello and welcome to this paid subscriber-only edition of Unruly! Thanks for being here. Tell your friends.

As promised, this is a sort of Peak Summer™ offering, including my Pioneer Valley faves and a workhorse recipe for the utilization of esoteric greens. I’m also linking to the first subscriber-only virtual tasting with me on June 20th at 3PM, which will be a fun and casual review of the current state of the natural wine movement through the lens of someone (me) who’s been here since its inception. I’ll be answering whatever questions you bring, and I’ll assign you some wines to seek out for the summer. I’ll also ask for topics you’d like to explore in the Autumn tasting, so please come and weigh in!

Let’s get to it.

THE RECIPE

We eat some version of this at least once a week in my house. I love this recipe for many reasons, chief among them being that it’s nearly impossible to screw it up. You can throw it together in any season, for any meal, for any size group, and once you’ve made it, you’ll likely never need to reference it again. It’s the ultimate in utility cooking, which of course means you can trace its origins back to cucina povera—now a very good cookbook of the same name, but also a style of cooking necessitated by low income and limited ingredients. I tend to prefer this ascetic approach now that I have a kiddo scouring the floor for things to choke on, which restricts my ability to focus on knife skills and building sauces. This is the ancient origin of one-pot “weeknight” cuisine. (It’s also vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free, which makes it a great contribution to a potluck.)

The success of this recipe relies entirely on the flavor of the olive oil and the beans, so I suggest you get fussy about these two things: