Of the Week: Recipes Strange, Old, and Simple

What I'm reading, writing, and cooking

The personal heaviness of January has abated, mostly, and I find myself thinking about my local food economy and how it shows, in miniature, the problems and consequences of an individualistic, capitalist society. More on this next time. First, here’s a look back at the essays I published this month:

January 5: Letting food matter and mean more

“Imbuing the daily act of feeding ourselves with more meaning is good. Good for me, good for local communities, good for the environment. It's easy to slip into fatalistic thinking: Nothing I do matters–it's just a drop in the bucket. That thinking scares me because it makes my world smaller with less room for others as my gaze focuses on my own insignificance.”

January 19: Eating with “... a conscientious desire for knowledge”

“Eating as a way to learn about people and cultures unknown to the eater is a singular, irreplaceable method. My tongue and body knowing what other people taste and find delicious is a type of knowledge different from what I can find in a book or conversation, two other worthy approaches.”

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Reading

I’ve started a new booklist for 2024 on Bookshop, so you can see the books I’ve been reading this month there. The highlights remain Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser and re-reading Small Fires by

Rebecca May Johnson

. I’m also reading Pages of Mourning by Diego Gerard Morrison which will be published May 14 by Two Dollar Radio. It’s very beautiful and sad, and a novel about writing which I always love when it’s done well. Consider pre-ordering (Bookshop link)!

This past week I enjoyed in praise of the strange recipe by Marian Bull and What We Learn from Old Recipes by Tamar Adler (gift link) which I found in Marian’s piece. Also: The Fascinating Cuisine & Traditions of the Bene Israelis of India by Dwithiya Raghavan, found via Layla Schlack’s essay in From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.

Writing

This week started with the whiplash of having a great meeting about a project I’m excited to work on more, and then hitting the wall with a different project and realizing it’s moving much too slow to hit a self-imposed February deadline. Nothing to do but keep going, and have the occasional cry. I’m working on two more author interviews, and an article about an art show in my town. Lots to do!

Cooking

Spaghetti squash peanut noodles with tofu for a very satisfying vegan lunch last week. I baked the squash, used a peanut sauce recipe from Tenderheart by

Hetty Lui McKinnon

, and added sliced cucumber and roasted peanuts. The tofu didn’t get much attention (drained, sliced, doused in soy sauce, and topped with furikake) but was still delicious. I’m on a mission to work through my pantry, which has gotten bloated through the chaos of a cross town move, impulse buys, and generous donations from family, so I’m pushing myself to not buy more shelf stable items until we eat more of what we have. Which means: Soups, beans, finally opening and using the jar of preserved lemons that I’d been avoiding for some unknown reason. A triumph a few weeks ago was when I made Teresa Finney’s Piloncillo Sweet Potato Cake. It was so good I even made a TikTok about it. Next recipe on my list is this focaccia:

Fucking Foolproof Focaccia

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My family and I recently re-watched the 2015 movie, The Little Prince, after my husband finished reading the book (one of our favorites) with our 6-year-old. I was reminded of what a sweet movie it is, and noticed a common thread through recent readings: Being an adult in our capitalist society can drain the joy from life. Fighting to hold onto childlike curiosity and wonder is essential to the kind of life I want to live.

How do you foster imagination and play, while also dealing with the responsibilities of being a grown up?