I like fireworks well enough, but after a while, most fireworks shows feel the same. They feel like something best enjoyed when you live close enough to where a show is going off that you can walk there—I’ve always kind of hated the ordeal of driving to a suburban fireworks show on July 4 and getting stuck in the lot afterwards, but walking to one with a picnic (and maybe having a few glasses of wine after it’s dark) is a good time.
July 4th for me more than anything is about cooking—I tend to plan a four-day menu that hits on some of my favorites, both from cookbooks and more improvised.
So this year, on July 1st, we went with the cheap lobsters from H-Mart. I have no idea how H-Mart keeps their prices down on live lobster but it’s pretty amazing, they’re usually 50-75% lower than any fishmonger in the Philadelphia area. I love H-Mart generally. (One oddity I’ll note is that they don’t seem to stock as many Chinese and Thai speciality products as you might hope, but then again, they do a fair job with the Latino pantry, which I appreciate.) If I’m looking for South Asian speciality foods, lately I go out to Saffron Indian Market at the intersection of PA Route 202 and Baltimore Pike. I wish there was a great Latino/Mexican/Hispanic market similar to either around here, but I don’t think there’s anything as comprehensive as H-Mart. El Paisano combined with 12 Street for fresh masa and a few other places in the Italian Market area in Philadelphia is pretty good. I keep meaning to check out La Jarochita at some point. There are a few decent places way out in Kennett Square as well, but that’s a long haul from where I am.
The trip to H-Mart shaped a lot of the rest of the July 4th menu. Last night I made Maangchi’s bulgogi recipe along with some scallion pancakes from Lopez-Alt’s wok-based cookbook, both of which came out really well. (I made a small sweet-and-sour squid-and-dropwort salad also that I liked a lot but I’m not sure anybody else was wowed by.)
Tonight is a different cuisine—I’m making a long-cooked ragu with pork that I’ll serve over pasta with some mushrooms. Another great surprisingly inexpensive food haul from recent shopping was some allegedly hand-foraged fresh morel mushrooms, which I’d normally expect to pay a lot for. I’m going to try and do my favorite blueberry dessert recipe also, which is a dense cornmeal-favoring dough baked in a springform pan with blueberries pressed into the top.
Then tomorrow I’m going to do ribs, using the Thai-inspired preparation from the NYT cooking app that I recently enthused about in this newsletter. My daughter is going to do an artichoke and spinach dip from the same source and I’ll do a couple of salads as well.
Back on Wednesday with the usual schedule. I found myself pretty worked up about the story of a University of Chicago undergraduate who targeted a professor for teaching a course call The Problem of Whiteness, so I’ll likely be writing about that closer to the end of the week.
Hope you all have a lovely 4th. The menu is really good sounding!