This week: the many uses of mayonnaise, how to quickly make the best mayo you’ve ever had, transforming cherry tomatoes into three different intense ingredients, weird German bread, an 8-year-old teaches me to make emergency halvah, a good country kitchen song.

Here’s a roundup of things you can do with mayonnaise, one of the most versatile ingredients in your fridge. For complicated ethnocultural reasons, I grew up suspicious of mayo and I don’t think I knowingly ate any until I was maybe 15. This is silly, of course; mayonnaise makes almost any savory sandwich better. But it’s only in the last few years that I’ve also come to value it as a utility player in cooked food.

At heart mayonnaise is just eggs, oil, salt, and vinegar, so it makes sense that it’s as useful as those things are separately when you’re cooking. Right now I have three kinds in the fridge: a jar of Trader Joe’s house brand, a big squeezie of Kewpie, and a pint container of homemade. They’re all getting used this week. How?

Kewpie mayonnaise is the best storebought mayonnaise for most cold uses—because it has MSG—but it turns weird and unfriendly when you cook with it. So keep an American-style mayo on hand also. But the very best mayonnaise is the kind you make yourself. If you have an immersion blender this takes one egg, some mustard, oil, lemon juice, garlic and literally two minutes and there’s no reason not to do it every time you run out. If you have never tried this I strongly suggest it.

(If you DON’T have an immersion blender you can still make mayo at home—here’s a video of Alton Brown explaining how in detail—but personally I’m not doing that regularly.)

Oh and, perhaps obviously, homemade mayonnaise involves eating raw eggs, so if you’re nervous about that you shouldn’t do it. There’s probably a way to pasteurize the eggs first. Worth a Google.

It’s past the end of proper tomato season here in southern California, but there are still delicious cherry and grape tomatoes in the markets. I don’t love eating cherry tomatoes raw, but nearly every week in August and September I get a pint or two and confit them.

Here’s how: put rinsed tomatoes in a baking dish with peeled garlic cloves, some peppercorns, salt, bay leaf, and thyme or rosemary. Add olive oil to about halfway up the tomatoes, then bake in a low oven (275° F / 130° C) for an hour or so, stirring a few times throughout.

From this you get garlicky, tomatoey oil you can use for salads or just to drizzle on bread; soft, spreadable garlic cloves that you can, inter alia, stir into your mayonnaise; and, best of all, concentrated umami-bomb confit’d tomatoes for sandwiches, salads, pasta, whatever. Bake a slab of feta in the oil and then mix it into hot pasta with the tomatoes and garlic for a very easy dinner. The tomatoes are great with homemade mayonnaise on a sandwich with cold chicken, or tuna salad, or just some hard cheese.

(By the way, I always store the garlic cloves separately from the oil because of something I half-remember about food safety. You should probably do the same?)

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Spotted on the r/Breadit subreddit. “Biblically accurate challah” is so good.

The last of summer’s sugar snap peas with mint and walnuts; a dramatic soft yellow braided German butternut squash bread (pictured below); butternut squash soup with the roasted squash that didn’t go into the bread; some pesto. The squash bread is mild, but toasted with butter and a light drizzle of honey it comes into its own.

I know that normal people don’t have rotisseries for their grills but, well, I do, and I rotisseried two farmers’ market chickens, basted with butter and rosemary that, along with the chicken juices, dripped into a pan of potatoes, onions, and carrots I set up below the spit. It was so good. We’re still eating the leftovers, which are also so good.

Excavating the freezer I found a bag of frozen french fries that I turned into a snack with a combination microwave / air fryer method I’d been wanting to try—pretty good! We ate them with homemade mayonnaise! See above!

The most suprising cooking event of the week happened when my son’s 8-year-old friend strolled into the kitchen and announced he was going to make halva. He spooned out some tahini, added honey and a splash of water, and then mixed it like crazy. The result was a soft, spreadable halva—not the chewy stuff that requires you to heat up the honey and usually has pistachios and things in it, but a really good substitute and something I will definitely be experimenting with in the future.

A kitchen song is a song I like to listen to in my kitchen.

“And I Haven’t Seen My Love in Quite a While” by This is Lorelei. Good peeling-potatoes song.

Reader Katie writes: “… in response to your wowee tweet i saw someone suggest bringing two boiled eggs (unpeeled) with you as portable hand warmers you can eat later and thought that was brilliant.” Good stuff, thanks Katie!

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Simmer Down is a weekly newsletter about cooking real food at home for people who want to do that but think they’re too busy to, written by me, Yossi Langer, a busy person with kids in Los Angeles.

I don’t use AI to write Simmer Down. Any emdashes are my own. I do use Claude to generate what’s called the SEO summary for the web version. This is not a statement of belief, just a personal preference: I’m writing this because I like to write. Any mistakes are my own.