Full Fridge Club: November 2024
It's giving thanks...
Welcome to the club!
Editor’s note: In order to share all of our musings and photos, this newsletter will be clipped by most email providers. To read our entire newsletter, click on the link that says “view entire message” or you can read in full on the Substack app.
What’s this? Cups of new-fallen snow?
No, no, my dears… It’s just our housemade ricotta, garnished with silk chili for our roasted honeynut squash dish— with a side topping of pistachios, of course!
That’s right: ‘tis the season. And what better way to enjoy your gay happy meetings than with Common Table’s seasonal eatings? We’re back again this year offering our Holigay À La Carte menu.
Locally-sourced, vegetable-forward, and made with love by Chef Emmet & the Common Table crew, our menu contains vegetarian, vegan, & gluten-free dishes to round out your holiday spread. And for every five dishes we sell, we will put one hefty meal into one of our local community fridges!
Orders close this Friday, December 20th, so if you live in or near Kingston, NY and you’d like to purchase any of these beauties:
Then place your orders here! Pick-up is at our kitchen in Kingston on Monday, December 23rd, and we have limited delivery available.
Okay, okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. November began as a warm blanket and went out like a cold snap, so… Let’s Dish. It. Out!
November Menus
These are our previous month’s menus, along with photos and insights from one of our chefs…
Monday, November 4th
Julia: This menu had one main jumping-off point. I realized we had never made French Onion Turkey Meatloaf— one of my favorite recipes from one of my cookbooks— for our FFC clients and I thought it was about time. It is a truly unattractive dish, but so delicious (ground turkey + slowly caramelized onions + tons of cubed gruyere cheese) and nothing that some chopped parsley can’t help… The rest of the menu came together around the meatloaf and thinking about what we’d want to eat with it, plus figuring out the best way to use late fall produce like sweet potatoes, kale, and cabbage.
Monday, November 11th
Julia: The inspiration for this menu was the Vinegar Chicken from Bernie’s, a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that none of us have actually been to (!!), but I have coveted this dish on IG for years (see here!). When I saw that they had published their recipe, it seemed like a no-brainer to try it out for FFC. We designed the rest of the menu around it, all with a slightly Italian-American bent, but nothing overly predictable (just like us!).
Monday, November 18th
Julia: We keep everything gluten-free for our FFC menus because we have a number of gluten-free clients and it just feels easier to make stuff everyone can eat rather than multiple versions of dishes. With this in mind, we’re always looking for gluten-free carby options that aren’t just rice, polenta and quinoa (no offense to those! we love you!). Japchae, the Korean glass noodle dish made with sweet potato starch noodles, has become such a welcome item on our menu rotation. The rest of the menu came together around the japchae, including a meatball version of a meatloaf we made a few months ago, plus a simple and excellent tofu dish from the iconic Maangchi!
Monday, November 25th
Julia: Since this was the Monday before Thanksgiving, we thought it’d be good to offer our clients food they most likely wouldn’t be eating on Thursday. We decided to go in a Mexican direction with enchiladas and tofu milanesa providing lots of vegetarian protein, brown rice with the last of the summer corn we had stashed in the freezer, simple roasted sweet potatoes with salty cheese and pickled onions, a colorful chopped salad, and luxuriously rich slices of slowly roasted pork with sour orange.
*Intrusive Queer Thought*
This is where one of us of the Common Table crew let our little queer minds run amok! This month, we share a few recent auditory offerings that have connected us to our community…
And that was our November!
Below, for paid subscribers, you’ll find our Side Dish, where Timmy gives the solutions to last month’s crossword and delivers another from the holiday vault! You will also find two recipes from our October FFC Menus, scaled down and tested by Julia Turshen: French Onion Turkey Meatloaf & Tofu Piccata.
If you’d like to help our work 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.
Thank you all for joining the club and we’ll see you next month!
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