Hi everyone,
It’s almost a hundred degrees here in New York, and some of my most favorite minimal-heat-application recipes are collected below. It’s also Pride month, and Queer Soup Night: The Cookbook — a community-driven, one-of-a-kind, independently published collection of recipes celebrating 10 years of Queer Soup Night — has just been announced for pre-order. So I have a short Q&A with Clare Lagomarsino from Combos Press about how the book is coming together. Scroll down for more — and stay cool!
—Lukas
For me, summer also means halloumi season. Around where I live and shop, halloumi is absurdly expensive — except for the summer months, when Trader Joe’s stocks it as a seasonal item. So it’s time make these salty-sweet, stupid-simple, stuffed dates that are so fun to serve with a glass of very cold wine.
With crunchy cucumbers, juicy tomatoes, briny olives, and smoky charred scallions, this was my salad of the summer in 2024. I’m bringing it back for 2026. Wild rice has a grassy, nutty flavor that works so well with everything else going on, and the salad tastes even better the next day.
I’ve unlocked this from the archives, because I really think that it’s a comfort to have cold soup in the fridge when it’s hot out. This yogurt-based soup includes a marinated chickpea topping, so that it both quenches and fortifies with plenty of protein. When I next make it, I’m going to try blending in silken tofu, which I expect to be delicious.
This recipe has two important takeaways: One, that it’s never too hot to cook beans from scratch (use a slow cooker! Or remind yourself, as Steve Sando does in our SALT PIG podcast episode, that the best hot soups come from hot weather climates — so why on earth should we think of beans as only a cold weather food?). And two: we should all be drizzling honey on our ripe summer tomatoes.
Are you going on a hike or a road trip anytime soon? Let lunch be a highlight by packing a few of these into the cooler. They have so much freshness and texture. And reminded recently of a “health cafe” sandwich I used to love, I’m going to add a thick slab of sharp cheddar when I next make them.
A fresh sauce can make almost anything taste summery, including a humble bowl of lentils, and the minty green yogurt sauce included here is a great way to beat the heat until peak-season produce arrives. Also, check out my mint plant (below)! In April, I thought this thing was fully deceased, but apparently it’s true what they say, that you can’t kill mint. Time to make Martin Sorge’s Fresh Mint Chip Ice Cream, too.
Thanks so much to everyone who listened to SALT PIG. Elinor Hutton and I had such fun chatting about life in the kitchen, and I found it to be kind of freeing to discuss home cooking in a way that didn’t feel completely tethered to aspirational practices and service journalism.
In our final episode of Season 1 (we’ll be back in the fall), we close in on an over-arching theme: Intentionality in the Kitchen. Ellie and I cook under very different circumstances (her for a family of four that includes two 7-year-old twins, me for a house of two grown adults and a dog), but we come to the realization that the difference between cooking feeling like work and pleasure can be the same for both of us: setting the intention of enjoyment, and taking a few small steps to ensure it’s a smoother operation.
Other favorite episodes include Beans at Home, with Steve Sando, Is Costco Worth It?, and Living through Our Salad Days, but you can find the full catalog on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
It’s been a strange couple years for Pride, reminding me of something a professor once said about how history moves not so much in a straight line across an axis as in a coil. It feels to me that Pride is returning to its roots: not so much a party but a call to action, and that is probably good.
So what better time than Pride month to spread the news that Queer Soup Night is working on a cookbook. Queer Soup Night straddles the line of fun and activism in such a unique way for us food folk, with parties that always highlight queer chefs slinging soup (I’ve been lucky to make soup before) and raise money for deserving local nonprofits across the country.
Next year will be ten years of Queer Soup Night, and to commemorate the occasion, they are publishing Queer Soup Night: The Cookbook with Combos Press. I had a quick exchange with Clare Lagomarsino of Combos Press below, to share a little bit more about the project.
Preorder Queer Soup Night: The Cookbook
Liz Alpern and the Queer Soup Night team had been thinking about doing a QSN cookbook since the pre-pandemic days, but the stars just hadn’t aligned to make it happen. Liz and I met at the Queer Food Conference in 2024 and had vaguely talked about doing a book together, and in the fall of 2025 we started seriously envisioning what a Queer Soup Night Cookbook could look like. Queer Soup Night’s 10 year anniversary is in January 2027, so the timing felt right to release the book then as a celebration of all that QSN has done in the last decade.
Our team (of about 15 volunteers who are making this cookbook happen) has been joking recently that there are so many chicken soup recipes in this book — it really is the most global, universal soup that can be adapted in so many different ways! We’ve also noticed that the recipes have neatly split themselves up by effort level. There are a big portion of soups that are totally cookable, easy weeknight soups, and also a lot that are “project soups”—they’ll take all weekend, you’ll make the stock from scratch, there are toppings and garnishes, etc.
Thank you! I love talking about design. We talk a lot about “queering the cookbook,” which means examining what a typical cookbook looks like (usually 8x10”, hardcover, starts with an intro and ends with an index, etc.) and which parts of this format do and don’t serve us. The Queer Soup Night Cookbook will have lots of fun elements like essays and charts in unexpected places, potentially a zine accompaniment, an alternative size (no 8x10” vertical book here!), and many more details that will make it feel different and special. That’s part of the fun of publishing independently as well. We’re less focused on sticking with a traditional format in order to make a million sales, and more focused on making a book that commemorates QSN, is extremely cookable and accessible, and will be a special object in people’s homes.
I cook from Simply Julia by Julia Turshen all year long, but love the asparagus and snap pea salad (and other cold veggie sides from that book) for this particularly hot pride month we’re having. She contributed a recipe to my first ever book, Queer Earth Food, and is involved in the Queer Soup Night cookbook as well, and is just brilliant. The other book I’m reaching for this month is The Bloodroot Calendar Cookbook from the pioneering lesbian-owned vegetarian restaurant that closed last December after nearly 50 years in business. I have my eye on the ginger peach ice cream once peaches are in season (soon).
Thank you, Clare! For more information and to preorder, visit the Queer Soup Night: The Cookbook page or head to the project’s FAQ page here.
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