Full Time This Needs Hot Sauce

A big announcement!

I’ve been waiting to tell you this for so long so here goes nothing.

This Wednesday, May 25th, is my last day at the part time job I started in the spring of 2018. I’ll teach my last class and celebrate with so many of you at our happy hour the next day (RSVP here). I made the decision to fully focus on building This Needs Hot Sauce Inc. which includes this newsletter, my freelance writing work, projects with brands, cooking classes, and more.

I have a lot of emotions (and plans) for the months ahead and am looking forward to having more freedom and control of my time and workload. I’m also actively looking for new projects—publications to write for, brands to work with, cooking classes to teach, and things I haven’t even had the brain space to think about yet—so please get in touch if you’d like to connect or work together. I’m here for coffee dates or phone calls to brainstorm all kinds of things.

The financial instability is absolutely the hardest part of being self employed and it’s one of the reasons why I waited to make this leap. I’ve been preparing for about six months on that front, but I’m still concerned (and will be living on a budget this summer). On that note, if you’ve been waiting for the right time to upgrade to a paid subscription, this is it! Payments from third parties can be notoriously slow (I’m talking net 90) and your support is invaluable as I make this transition.

Many thank yous are in order. Thursday’s newsletter will talk more about how I made this decision and prepared for this moment (if you have questions, reply to this email and I’ll answer them on Thursday). Thank you to my coach, Leah Wiseman Fink, who helped me feel ready for this in all the ways (could gush about her magic all day). Thank you to the wonderful school where I taught for four years—it’s not a full goodbye. Thank you to Dale, my friends, and family for listening to me stress out about this for months and telling me you were proud of me. And thank you all for being here, for sharing TNHS with your friends, for sharing your dinners and memories with me and so much more.

I’m really excited for this next chapter! I hope you are too!

Now let’s dive in.

Something to cook:

Erica and I cooked up a well chopped feast in our knife skills class. It was really fun to have such a focused class and we made ratatouille, kale salad, and garlic bread, which did catch on fire. If you’ve been here a while, you know I set off the smoke alarm teaching my first ever cooking class. The culprit: garlic bread. Lesson learned—broilers require your full attention. If you want to cook with us soon, we’re running our only sale on meal prep classes right now! Use SUMMER10 to take 10% off our summer meal prep series, which kicks off on June 12th.

I combined the leftover ratatouille with some rigatoni and Rao’s marinara for a pasta dish that tasted like I had spent hours on it.

Other cooking adventures included fried rice with scallions and kimchi, popcorn with nutritional yeast, oatmeal with lots of blueberries and granola, and breakfast tacos with avocado.

I’m prepping snacks for Thursday’s happy hour so I made a big batch of cookie dough on Sunday to freeze. Very excited that Common Mollies allows outside food.

Something to order:

I got to meet Rachel IRL for the first time and we had such a lovely chat at the Think Coffee near Union Square. It’s a very convenient meeting spot (or laptop spot).

Here is the one two punch you need for any event at MSG: grab pizza at NY Pizza Suprema and then get a drink at Molly Wee Pub across the street. The slices at Pizza Suprema are so good and the crust is crisp enough to handle the heavy toppings. It’s pricy but feels worth it, especially given the location. Try the mushroom and the burrata slice. Julia, Julianne, and I did this itinerary before seeing Haim put on an incredible show—we love to see Jewish sisters bring down the house!

There’s a new sandwich spot in Williamsburg: Mission Sandwich Social on Bedford. They invited us to try some sandwiches and we were throughly impressed (don’t browse the menu when hungry). Almost every sandwich has a vegetarian option, which is rare and appreciated. I tried the Tim Howley with spiced tofu and Peruvian green sauce and Dale loved the Peking Turkey. These are big, messy sandwiches (they come with a wet wipe).

We got Julianne a birthday cake from Fortunato Brothers. Their cheesecake is truly excellent, and I’m not always a cheesecake person. It’s light and not too sweet and the version topped with fresh strawberries is a delight. There are never any leftovers.

Dale and I escaped the heat on Saturday with lunch at Yellow Rose. I love their salsa and queso. The tacos are really big, you need one or two depending on what else you order.

Something to read:

I share more reads in Thursday’s newsletter!

Reconsidering anchovies and tinned fish

An easy to bookmark website full of abortion resources and ways to give

Would you order a sexy birthday cake?

I chatted with Courtney for Apartment Therapy about taking a side hustle full time

Progress: Love Island dumps its fast fashion sponsor to work with Ebay and give contestant secondhand wardrobes

Pill decor is everywhere, are you a fan?

The joy of restaurants where it’s easy to get a reservation

GrubHub’s free lunch promo was predictably, a disaster. Really unfair to put restaurants and delivery workers in this position, especially when they already screw them over with fees. Many didn’t know about the promotion and 6,000 orders a minute were coming through.

An Alicia Kennedy series on oysters is very relevant to my interests

The New York Times did a huge piece on Haiti, the Haitian Revolution and how France demanded reparations for enslavers. It’s worth a read (and so is this thread about how historians have been studying this for years and deserved more credit in the piece).

The Mass Shooting In Buffalo Targeted Black Shoppers, But It Was Also A Huge Hit To A Vital Community Resource

Ignore drink trends and drink what you like this summer!

Meet Charles Gross, TikTok’s King of Luxury. Let’s talk about it.

The infinite possibilities of beans

For restaurant owners, Instagram hacks create major headaches. Everyone set up 2 factor authentication now and Meta needs to be way more responsive to these issues.

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In honor of this weekend’s heat, I want to know your favorite cold beverage. If I’m in a bodega getting something to cool down, I love an ice cold seltzer. Coconut water is very good as well. If I’m at a bar, I’m into a spritz (and a water). Reply to this email with your chilly drinks of choice and I’ll share them next week.

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Next week’s newsletter will arrive on Tuesday due to the long weekend. I’m headed to DC to visit Natalie and can’t wait! See you at happy hour on Thursday!

xoxo, Abigail