Full Fridge Club: March 2024
Spring forward, look back
Welcome to the club!
March was a craaazy month, so let’s Dish. It. Out!
We’d love to start by focusing on the best part of this club: being able to donate meals to our local, free Kingston Community Fridges. For every Full Fridge Club client, we put at least one meal into our fridges. Since starting back in September 2022, that number has reached over 1300. For the past month of March, we donated around 90 meals!
If you’d like to help us out with keeping our local free fridges full, but you don’t live locally to order a Full Fridge Club service, you can always sponsor meals here!
And, if you are local and interested in learning more about Full Fridge Club, check out our website!
March Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, March 4th
Chef Emmet: If you want to hear about the inspiration for this week's menu, scroll on to read what I wrote about my time working at Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg. This is our love letter to Marlow & Sons and Diner, its sister restaurant which happens to share a basement kitchen.
Monday, March 11th
Chef Emmet: Ok, we just love Thai food. The slaw was the dish that got the ball rolling on this menu— we're always looking for vegetable-forward dishes that can be made with mostly local stuff at the tail-end of winter. This idea from Julia was a perfect fit. The house-made curry paste was a riff on the Massaman curry at the now-closed Uncle Boon's in NYC— it's spicy and deep and a little sweet and absolutely just the right thing for early March.
Monday, March 18th
Chef Emmet: I grew up eating at this ridiculously good Lebanese bakery in Vernon, NY called Karam's. My family would go for lunch regularly and inhale pretty much everything they made— I still contend that Karam's makes the best hummus I've ever had. There was always a table near the kitchen where Mr. Karam's friends and family would sit and chat and laugh (and sometimes argue) over a big pile of food— dips and pita and lentils and lots of herbs and lemon and heavily seasoned meats. It's still my favorite way to eat.
Monday, March 25th
Chef Emmet: Stephen came up with the idea of a tofu schnitzel and we all immediately ran with this German/Austrian/generally Bavarian theme. I love to make sauerkraut and homemade mustard, and we are lucky enough to have a local whole animal butcher, Stefano at The Meat Wagon, who makes GORGEOUS sausages. So— we got to whip up some beautiful, simple but filling, bright and warming food for our clients AND support and promote another small trans-owned food business! Win win.
Editor’s note: The menus and dishes this month were above and beyond! Even my German grandmother, the Queen of Schnitzel, would have approved of our inventive tofu-take. Speaking of familial approval, that reminds me—
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok!
Ugh. I need to shave.
Beard:/bɪəd/ (NOUN)
1: the hair that grows on a man's face often excluding the mustache
The men in my family only ever grew out beards to say something: usually, a fully undiscussed depressive episode. (It was their version of getting bangs.) As the only non-man in my family who can grow a beard (sorry Meema!): what am I trying to say? What am I concealing like the men before me? I think of all of the bearded ladies throughout history: Kathy Bates in American Horror Story: Freak Show, Keala Settle in The Greatest Showman… God, I hated that movie… But I guess… “This is me”... (ugh, that one hurt me too)
“Come one, come all to see the bearded lady!” It’s just a performance: Freak Show, Greatest Showman…
Beard: /bɪəd/ (NOUN)
North American, informal: A woman who accompanies a homosexual man as an escort to a social occasion, in order to help conceal his homosexuality
Right, right… gay slang… do we still use this term though? It seems mildly offensive, like every outdated slang term these days… But, again, it’s a performance… give ‘em a show! Something they can stomach… something they can eat up… something they can root for… Conceal the truth that brings you shame…
Beard, James: (May 5, 1903 – January 23, 1985)
American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality.
I’ve always heard about James Beard, but I’ve never read a single one of his books nor seen a single second of the television cooking shows he’s credited with pioneering. Our friends at the incredible Harana Market just posted on Instagram that Chef Chris is a James Beard Award finalist in the ‘Best Chef: New York’ category!
(If you’re unfamiliar: Harana Market is an Asian Grocery Store and Kitchen, featuring the most amazing Filipino food! Harana also offers their Chosen Family Meal: “on Sundays, Queer and Trans folx and anyone who self-identify as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community eat at Harana Market for free.” If you’d like to support this community program, you can donate here.)
The award! The show! The ‘Oscars of the Food World’!
But who was James Beard? After a quick Google search, I found the face of the man who could have been my Peepa (when he wasn’t in a depressive episode). In typical queer fashion, I jumped to the Wikipedia page and scrolled down to “Personal Life” and to my shock and awe:
…GAY?
Beard being openly gay in the early 20th century would have been… something to conceal. He was expelled from Reed College in 1922 for… homosexuality!
And yet, look at the legacy: a Foundation– an Award– that can openly acclaim openly queer chefs! Something they can root for…
What does it mean? This performance? This show? Beardless James Beard who could have used a beard?
I think it just means I need to shave.
-Timmy Bruck
(We recommend John Birdsall's book The Man Who Ate Too Much (2021) and his 2014 piece for Lucky Peach "America, Your Food is So Gay" to get a deeper insight into James Beard’s queerness.)
Side Dish!
Side Dish is our monthly newsletter garnish. In the future, this section will only be available for paid subscribers, but this month we are offering it free to give you all a taste!
A few weeks ago, our Full Fridge Club menu was a love letter to Brooklyn’s Marlow & Sons and Diner— two little restaurants nestled together in Williamsburg. I, Emmet, worked at Marlow & Sons right out of culinary school, entering that kitchen greener than green and leaving it very inspired and honestly a little windblown, too.
The short time I spent working under kens_asian_taste and buscando_el_andyalexandre had a huge impact on me, and so, a love letter was written— in the form of buttery silky gigante beans and crisp potatoes served with housemade aioli (a task I failed at over and over in that kitchen: aioli as humility practice, aioli as science experiment, aioli as WHAT THE FUCK), a Caesar with aged parmigiana, chicken under a brick.
My favorite memory from Marlow & Sons:
It was early Spring, and I was in the basement kitchen at Marlow, setting up my brunch station, sipping coffee and avoiding climbing the narrow staircase to Diner’s kitchen— where I nervously fried potato chips each morning, elbow-to-elbow with the Diner cooks. Suddenly there is a flurry of whoops and cheers, and Chefs Ken & Andy come running around the corner, smiling, holding bunches of long green stalks aloft.
I was confused and asked: what is it? I learned that the first green garlic of the season had arrived from a local farm— a harbinger of Spring, foreshadowing of the bounty to come, something fresh to cook after months of storage roots.
Ken chopped the green garlic up, carefully folded it into softly scrambled eggs, and passed it around for us all to eat. Eating those buttery garlicky eggs, I started to understand.
This enthusiasm and joyful reverence for local produce, for down-to-earth, simple food prepared with extreme thought and care has stuck with me, and is now what guides us at Common Table. We, too, are excited for the green garlic to arrive— sometime soon, inching closer to spring as the light gradually returns.
-Chef Emmet
And that’s our first newsletter! You’ll find two recipes below from our March Menus available for our paid subscribers: Vegetarian Caesar Salad Dressing and Lemony Lentils with A Lot of Parsley & A Little Quinoa.
See you next month!
Full Fridge Club Recipes
These two recipes from our March Full Fridge Club menus have been scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen.
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