Bathed bread.

Fridays are Family Favorite Feast nights for us, that I make as much as possible from scratch each week, with a sort of a rotating menu; one week it’s pizza (homemade dough that’s started Thursday, sometimes Wednesday night; slow-roasted tomato sauce; pancetta or speck and mushrooms and peppers, though the kid’s always gonna want her Hawaiian variant); the next it’s burgers and fries (hand cut fries and turkey burgers, with a bit of roasted eggplant added for body, and whatever tomatoes look good, and thick rings of raw red onion and once or twice I’ve made the mayonnaise from scratch, too); the next it’s nachos (beans cooked all day in wine, and ground turkey, and I’m getting better with chilies, but the stars are the pico and the tomatillo guacamole and the seed salsa, oh my, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be at a point where I’m making my own chips, but that’s okay, we’re in Oregon, we have Juanita’s); and the fourth is a wild card slot—sometimes it’s sushi (I’ve gotten pretty good with the rice, but I am terrible at rolling), and sometimes it’s katsu sandos (homemade milk bread, and the chicken breasts are brined all afternoon before being breaded with panko from the ends of the fresh loaves), and last week it was what I usually make when it’s summertime-hot, which is pan bagnat: tomatoes grated to a pulp and smeared over the bottoms of small round loaves, and more tomatoes, sliced, and thin-sliced red onion quick-pickled in balsamic vinegar with capers and olives and an anchovy or two, and French breakfast radishes and poblano peppers and fava beans tumbled with olive oil, and oil-packed tuna, and quartered eggs just this side of jammy, and you tear out some of the crumb from the tops of the small round loaves so there’s room, and then put the tops on the bottoms and press and smash and squish, and set a weight on top to keep smashing, for a couple few hours in a cool dark place, until it’s time to pour some green wine and slice them open, and anyway I just had a leftover slice for lunch, so here, go read Talia Lavin on the pan bagnat.