burrata with crushed cherries and pistachios

Last summer, a friend came to a barbecue and said, “We had soccer and then a birthday party and I had no time to make anything but I brought this” and started unloading items from a grocery bag. There were no clean cooking utensils so she and I proceeded to use our hands to break open balls of burrata and spread them on a plate, smash open cherries and pit them, sprinkling them over, crushed pistachios with the bottom of a pot, and finished the whole platter with olive oil, lots of sea salt, black pepper, and fresh mint we picked from sprigs. We lined the plate with rounds of storebought crostini, I snapped a picture and later when I shared it, dozens of you messaged me to demand a recipe or tutorial.

Honestly, Iloveit when you guys are bossy. Because my brain can be such a drag, telling me that “is this even a real recipe” and “it’s probably been done a million times” and “probably we should just stop with the burrata already” which is a malady one can catch after spending nearly 20 years sending out cooking content on the internet, forgetting that things that can seem “overdone” are, in fact, wildly delicious to people in the real world. And it was. The platter was demolished by a pride of revelers in under 15 minutes.

And so for a week in which many of us are heading out of town and cooking in unfamiliar kitchens that might lack such creature comforts as (gasp!) a cherry pitter, this no-recipe recipe feels suddenly timely: hands-on, a little messy, but also impossible to mess up. The cherries are fantastic this year; this allows every single one I don’t snack on first to shine.