Some Jams to Start Your Summer Off with a Fancy Leg Kick Dance Move

Summer is here and life has been full of good stuff. Setting up the garden, walks, water tables, grilling, wearing shorts, brunches, sunshine, cold beers on the porch, fireflies, little O pulling her wagon around and filling it with sticks and rocks. The list goes on.

One of my favorite things about summer is the music. I’ve made playlists for almost every summer for a very long time. I love putting on an old summer playlist —it brings back beautiful, sensory moments of that year’s summer. It doesn’t matter if it was an awful summer or a great one — the memories of driving down a dirt road, or watching a beach sunset, or falling asleep on a cross-country plane ride stick with me the most.

M and I are collaborating on this summer’s playlist. My contributions so far are only two songs but the summer is young.

Here are a couple of my favorites this year (so far) and a few from years past.

Blame Brett — The Beaches

Two years before the pandemic hit, M scored tickets to see Pearl Jam. In the pit. In Seattle. At T-Mobile Park where the Mariners play (it was called Safeco Park at the time). We decided to go at the last minute. We bought our plane tickets and booked our hotel the night before our departure day, I somehow managed to find someone to cover my shifts at the bakery, and off we went to Seattle for a 36-hour visit. Our hotel had Ricky Gervais pillows (as in, the pillows were screen printed with his image) and a hipster happy hour. We had fresh sushi and tingly soup, we stood in line to get special PJ Seattle show merch (IYKYK), and we got to T-Mobile Park early so we could get good spots in the pit, which means we spent about 2 hours standing/sitting in one general area.

Pearl Jam fans are maybe the nicest fans on the planet (aside from Toad the Wet Sprocket fans), so we ended up getting to know Ray and Lisa. They had kids who were teenagers, and you could tell that they were like, legitimately, a cool mom and dad. I remember two things specifically about them — Lisa was a pro at simultaneously saving spots in the pit and moving all of us further toward the stage. Lisa also recommended The Beaches to us.

M and I talk about Ray and Lisa every now and then — how cool they were, how fun that trip was, how epic that show was (we almost touched Eddie Vedder). The Beaches are awesome, and I still think of Ray and Lisa and that entire whirlwind trip when I listen to them.

Dance (Our Own Party) - The Busker

We were introduced to The Busker, Malta’s version of Chromeo, while watching the Eurovision semi-finals on Mother’s Day while M cooked up a delish eggplant parmesan for dinner. We’re here for the saxophone and the writing on the hands, and the thing about sweaters, and the countless opportunities to work a well-timed kick into your dance. Personally, I think it’s bullshit that they didn’t make it to the finals, and that’s what I have to say about that.

Want You Back - Haim

I recently introduced O to Haim (anything to stop her from asking for Happy by Pharrell for the 400th time in a day), and she was transfixed by this video. I don’t blame her. This song is the absolute best and so is the video. Revive it for your own summer playlist. You’re welcome.

Little Bit More - Jidenna

One summer night out with my dear friend Breon, we split a watermelon salad appetizer that we still talk about to this day. It was dainty pieces of watermelon topped with feta cheese and mint and maybe a couple other things that all came together in a flavor symphony of salty and sweet and juicy and savory. My mouth is watering thinking about it.

Oh, and then we saw Jidenna that night. He was pretty great, too.

Everything Is Embarrassing - Sky Ferreira

There used to be this awesome website called Songza that had incredible playlists. Their 90s Club Bangers mix was what I put on to get shit done at work (I can’t count how many times my boss caught me whisper-rapping, and to her credit, she was unflappable and never seemed surprised ). Their New Goth playlist is unmatched in my house to this day. It was on one of these playlists that I came across Sky Ferreira and this jam that I loved so much, I downloaded it (!!!) and burned it to a CD (!!!!!!!) to play in our beloved and ancient little Toyota Camry on our various summer excursions around town.

Volcanic Love - The Aces

I don’t have a ton to say about this song except that I played it a million times the summer I found it, and love that the video is a spoof of Heathers.

Bonus: Put the Hurt On Me - Midland

Now, I know you’re saying, “Excuse me, you’ve put a country song on this list, I think you’ve made a mistake.” Hear me out. Do you need a karaoke song? This would probably be a great one (or maybe not). Do you need a song to play to wind your night down with a slow dance with your boo? This could be it. I just…love this song and I like this band a lot. They’re goofy and retro, and there’s just a lot to love once you start listening. (After you give this song a chance, check out Drinkin’ Problem and Mr. Lonely. If you want. If you’re curious. *shrugs* Do whatever you want, I don’t care.)

I’ll stop here. If you’re inspired, I’d love to know your favorite summer jam(s). I’ll be back next week, and I might talk about something called a cherry yum-yum. Or I might talk about something else. We’ll see!

Mother’s Day, Prince Harry, and Making Siopao My Mom’s Way

I didn’t intend to miss Friday Bites last week. I tried writing it, and it ended up being a jumble of words. A really tedious play by play of M obtaining pork belly and me pressure cooking it into a beautiful Korean soy-glazed pork belly dish, and then deciding to make it into a filling for siopao. (I’ll still talk about the siopao.) My brain was fried. Raising a toddler can do that.

The other thing was that it was coming up on Mother’s Day, and that’s been an excruciating day for me since my mom died.

I just finished Prince Harry’s biography the other day (is it still called an autobiography if it’s ghostwritten? Or is it categorized as a memoir?). My mom was a Princess Diana fan, so I was too. I remember where I was when I found out about her horrific car accident. It feels like a formative moment for me, though I couldn’t tell you why. My mom was also a Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fan, although now that I think back on our conversations, maybe she was just a Meghan Markle fan.

(We’re a house divided here — to say it nicely, M is actively uninterested in British royalty. I am not obsessed but I like the gossip and I do love Prince Harry and Meghan’s love story from beginning to present.)

I expected a lot of scandalous moments and wild stories from Prince Harry’s early life. Sure, there’s the bit about his frostbitten penis and the sentence about losing his virginity behind a pub. There are the stories behind his decision to go to a party dressed as a Nazi, and the story behind his Vegas butt-nakedry. On the whole though, these stories, their context, and much of Prince Harry’s life is…mundane. It’s not that interesting. These things could have happened to anybody, really, but he happens to be a prince and thus, more visible than a lot of people.

What is interesting to me is how so much of his life and how he lives it is, consciously and unconsciously, built around the mother-shaped hole in his life and his heart. And his grief, which he was unable to process or express from the very beginning — can we even imagine being unable and/or not allowed to even cry when a loved one passes away? And what that repression does to a body, mind and spirit, no matter who you are?

The ways we keep my mother’s memory alive in my house are many. We keep her picture in a prominent place in our living room. We say hello to her every day. Sometimes I bring her food. O sometimes brings her a rock that she’s found. I tell stories to O every day about what her Lola Solly liked to eat or do or say. I do this so O knows my mom, and I do it so I can feel like my mom is close to me.

Whenever I make siopao, I feel my mom close. I feel her when I make the dough using her recipe, I feel her when I make the decision to make it her way (and when I don’t), and I feel her when I roll out each ball of dough, load it with filling and try to seal it up the way she did. I have not been successful at making them look as pretty and cute as she did, even though I’ve taken videos of her rolling, filling, shaping, forming, sealing. I watch her hands and it’s like she’s performing a magic trick before my eyes.

Mom’s siopao, pre-steamed.

Throughout Prince Harry’s book, particularly the third section, I found myself eager to talk about it with someone who was also interested in his story. That someone I was eager to talk about it with, I realized, was my mom.

My mom didn’t read often (except The Bible) but I think she would’ve been excited to read the third section of Prince Harry’s book with me. I think she would’ve been furious on his and Meghan’s behalf. I can see her shake her head, and I can hear her fume about Prince Harry’s father and brother. I can hear her say, “Why don’t they do anything? Why don’t they help them?”

Every time I make siopao, I use my mom’s ingredient amounts but I try different techniques and processes that I find in various cookbooks. This time around, I decided to do it all my mom’s way. I halved her recipe (her original recipe makes enough dough for…a LOT of siopao) and decided to do one long rise. Other recipes I’ve found call for three rises, but I mean…who has the time? My mom sure didn’t, and I don’t either, so I followed her lead instead: one long rise, cut the dough into smaller pieces, let them rise while I fill and shape them (I call that the half rise). I let the shaped siopao rest in the steamer baskets while I fill and shape the remaining dough — I consider that as like, maybe a quarter rise? It’s what my mom did, and her siopao were flawless in flavor and design, so who am I to mess with her recipe?

Mom’s siopao, ready to eat.

(The siopao tasted great with the pressure cooked soy-glazed pork belly, btw. They didn’t look so cute but they were delicious. My mom would probably have laughed at how much these little buns popped open, and then she would have said, “Keep practicing.”)

I ended up having a beautiful Mother’s Day. It’s become a bit more emotionally complicated, but somehow more bearable, since becoming a mother myself. M and I stayed up late on Saturday night reminiscing about my mom in whispers over O’s sweet sleeping face. I made a lemon blueberry Dutch baby for breakfast, M made a delightful eggplant parmesan for dinner. We danced around to Eurovision performances, and I took a leisurely shower (they’re hard to come by these days). We said happy Mother’s Day to my mom. O said my mom’s name, which made my heart swell with happiness and heartache simultaneously.

I don’t quite know how to end this thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is that grieving for a beloved mother never goes away, whether you’re a normie or a royal. Every person’s journey with grief is different, truly. I think we all may just be muddling our way through it, trying different things until we figure out what feels like healing. Or maybe we never find out what works. Maybe there is no one thing that works. Maybe we just figure out what works for this particular moment of grief.

Or this particular batch of siopao.

My siopao, looking nothing like my mom’s.

My Top 5 Bakes of the Past 18 Months

Of course, as soon as I relaunched Friday Bites, I got sick. Again. So yes, this is a Friday Bites, Monday Edition.

Some context: in my household of three, we’ve been passing this absolutely miserable upper respiratory cold thing back and forth to each other for the past month or so. We don’t know who patient zero is, we don’t know where it came from, but it’s been laying M and I out every other week (we’ve been alternating weeks, at least, so the household is half-functional most of the time). The baby gets a runny nose that we wipe down with Boogie Wipes but she’s otherwise fine, thank god. When M and I get it? Stuffy noses that are also runny. Dry sinuses that are also snotty? Being very cold all the time no matter what (I think that one’s just me). Fatigue. A kind of scratchy throat that goes away after the first day.  We’ve gone through at least three boxes of Kleenex in two weeks. When I caught it again this past week, I had the runniest nose and the leakiest eyes. It was pure misery, especially when you add a breastfeeding, contact-napping baby to the mix.

Anyway, I finally feel like a human again and not a leaking skin sack of organs and bones, which is nice. I obviously did not get to bake anything this week, so instead I’m here with my top 5 favorite bakes of the past 18 months.

Why 18 months? Because as of May 5, my kid is 18 months old, which means I have 18 months of bakes with her strapped into the baby carrier on my chest or sitting in the knock-off Tush Baby on my hip. Some of you may also know that getting anything done in the kitchen with an infant/baby/toddler within a 5-foot-radius is a difficult thing to do sometimes (and sometimes it is impossible). Every bake I’m able to pull off these days feels like a huge accomplishment.

So I present to you my top 5 bakes since having a kid.

#5 A First Birthday Cake

I’ll start by saying I’m not a visual artist. I cannot draw for shit (we’ve recently discovered in my house that when I draw hearts, they actually look more like mittens). My presentation of baked goods and cooked food is better because I don’t have to make them look like anything but tasty and themselves.

But when O’s first birthday appeared on the horizon, it felt like the only way she would know it was a special day was if her cake was super awesome (plus there would need to be balloons).

So I made her a cake that looked like one of her favorite animals: a cat. Did I sweat the baking of the cakes? No. When it came time to assemble the cakes, was I nervous? No, I was excited! Piping the fur? Very fun and I felt like I was on GBBO. When I got out my marzipan and food coloring to start making the face? Sweaty palms, racing heart. What if this thing didn’t look like a cat? Would it scare the daylights out of my kid? Would she look at me blankly and be like, “Umm…what’s that???”

Luckily, it looked like a cat, and my kid was tickled.

#4 Wedding Cake Cupcakes

Since we got married, it’s been an annual wedding anniversary tradition of mine to recreate our Milk Bar wedding cake: chocolate chip cake with a passionfruit soak and a passon fruit curd, coffee buttercream and chocolate crumb.

In 2022, I decided to do a remix of our cake and make it into cupcakes instead. Chocolate chip vanilla cupcakes with a passionfruit curd filling, and coffee buttercream. Instead of a chocolate crumble, I went for sprinkles because who doesn’t like sprinkles?

Rows of chocolate chip cupcakes with a tan-colored coffee frosting sit on a cooling rack. They are covered in multi-colored sprinkles.

#3 Buttered Rum Cookies

I baked some stuff over the holidays. I made a double crusted chicken pot pie, I made some baby-led weaning cookies that were basically cardboard (O took one bite of one cookie, put it down and never looked at it again — she didn’t even bother throwing it on the floor, that’s how much these cookies stunk), and I made these buttered rum shortbread cookies that were so delicious that we (M and I, yes, just the two of us) ate them ALL in a matter of days.

#2 Matcha and Black Sesame Swirl Milk Bread

Sometime in the past few months, I’ve decided to make our bread rather than buying it. The pros: I get to practice making bread, which I have not been good at, and we get to spend less money on store-bought stuff that I could make at home for much cheaper (inflation is a real asshole). I’ve made all kinds of bread, but this one — the matcha and black sesame swirl milk bread — was pillowy perfection. Not only did it taste so different and amazing, but it was so satisfying to make at every step of the process. It was the first time in a very long time where I took pictures at multiple stages in the process.

And not only that, O loved it and asked for more, even when it wasn’t mealtime.

#1 Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Cookies

This is the very first thing I baked with O. It wasn’t intentional — this was actually the first thing I wanted to bake postpartum, and M had taken over baby duty so I could make these. About halfway through the process, O got real fussy and the only thing that chilled her out was sitting in her bouncer next to me while I rushed to finish these cookies and pop them in the oven. Because I hadn’t figured out how to babywear yet (and every time I tried, O screamed like she was being torn limb from limb), I had to keep pausing to show her what I was doing and let her touch the cookie dough, etc.

The peanut butter filling ended up oozing out of the cookies, but I kind of liked it that way in the end. They were extremely rich, tasty, and an indulgent snack for me whenever I got nap trapped (which was often in those days). The process of making them is also now a very fond memory for me.

Runners up: Lemon blueberry scones and Stuffed cinnamon streusel muffins

I would be remiss if I left these bakes out. They’re not anything special but they need to be included here because they were baked at ungodly hours of the morning, when the baby woke up and started shrieking because staying in her bassinet was booorrrring. The only thing that stopped me crying hysterically from pure exhaustion was firing up the French press, putting the baby in the baby wrap and baking.

So there you have it — my top 5 bakes of the past 18 months. It’s been a good run, and I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do with a baby attached to my body in some way, shape or form. Now that she’s got a little kitchen helper stool, it’s a whole new world, and I’m betting I’ll have a whole new top 5 bakes list in another 18 months.

Recipes sourced and adapted from:
First Birthday Cake from Coco Cake Land by Lyndsay Sung
Wedding Cake Cupcakes from Momofuku Milk Bar and All About Cake by Christina Tosi
Buttered Rum Cookies from Sister Pie by Lisa Ludwinski
Matcha and Black Sesame Marbled Milk Bread from Mooncakes and Milk Bread by Kristina Cho
Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Cookies from Cook’s Country
Lemon Blueberry Scones from King Arthur Baking
Stuffed Cinnamon Streusel Muffins from King Arthur Baking

Um, i think we’re back…and we’re a lot different.

Wow, hello! It’s been…three entire years since my last post. So much has changed since I was last here.

We’ve lived through a pandemic (that, let’s be honest, is still very much here), and an insurrection. Italy won the Euros and then didn’t make it to the World Cup. My fellow Danish countryman Christian Eriksen’s heart stopped in the middle of a Euros match and he had to be resuscitated on the field. (He’s okay.) The World Cup was so exciting that if I had made an upset bracket (which I normally do but didn’t have time to do this year) I would’ve won lots of money.

In my personal life, at the end of 2020, my mom finally laid down her sword in her fight with cancer and transitioned to whatever comes next. In November of the next year, I became a mom to a bright and curious warrior girl with big brown eyes and a great sense of humor who loves Lizzo, Pharrell, and dancing to literally anything with a rhythm.

Those are the biggest things. It feels weird to summarize them in two sentences. There have been other, painful losses along the way, and there have been many, many moments of joy and celebration and love. All of it is too much to recap. I think of it all as happening when my mom was still on earth or after she left it. If you know, you know.

Anyway. I’m here to say that I’m trying to get back to writing Friday Bites. Of course, I’ll be writing about the food I’m making these days. I might also write about motherhood, daughterhood, grief. Music, horror movies, books (boooyyyyy have I read a TON since bringing a little human into the world). And maybe gardening adventures????

For now though, I’ll keep this one short. I made Nutter Butters (recipe from Stella Parks’s Brave Tart cookbook) a month or so ago. These are the only pics I got of them. I made them as my kid and M wandered around our backyard, checking on our newly planted saplings, on one of the first beautiful days of the year. (Oh yeah, we have a backyard now — that’s new, too.)

Pale biscuits decorated with a criss cross pattern, resting on a wire baking rack
Rows of pale biscuits decorated with criss cross patterns. The middle biscuits are flipped smooth side up and have dollops of peanut butter cream filling on them.
Rows of nutter butters on wire baking racks, waiting patiently to be eaten.

Here’s to a new era. I’ll see you next Friday.



How We Live Now: On Not Being Emotionally Ready to Bake, Cook, Read, Write, Listen to Music or Binge-Watch Anything In Self-Isolation

I…don’t even know what to say or where to begin. The only thing I know is that I’m here, with my laptop, and finally emotionally ready to write. Kind of.

I’ll start here. I haven’t been able to make it to Friday Bites for the past few weeks. Not only because of the coronavirus, but because my mom was in the hospital one week and I was sleeping in a vinyl recliner at her bedside, getting canker sores in my mouth from stress. And then the week after, I was busy trying to catch up on rest and also making panna cotta for my mom’s birthday because that was a better dessert for her chemo mouth sores than cake. And then I was flying back to Indiana through eerily half-empty airports while washing my hands at every opportunity, not touching my face, wiping everything in my general vicinity down with antibacterial wipes, and not touching anything I hadn’t already wiped down.

It’s been two weeks since I returned to Indiana, and I’ve only left the house five times. Twice in the past couple days to go for a walk in the sunshine (it’s been cloudy, gloomy, and stormy for days at a time), and three times for grocery runs. Every time we leave the house, M and I are vigilant about washing our hands, not touching our faces, staying 6 feet away from everyone we see, and wiping high-touch areas and everything else down with disinfectant. We’re doing our best to eat well and stay hydrated. I video call my mom every day. I try to check in with my friends to make sure everyone is healthy and okay.

You would think that with all this home time I’ve had, I would be cooking and baking up a storm. That hasn’t been the case. I’ve cooked plenty and I’ve baked a cake, but it hasn’t been an adventure and I haven’t really taken photos of anything. Surprisingly, I’m not interested in the fact that everyone else who’s self-isolating is suddenly learning to cook, and they’re learning the value of dried and canned beans. In fact, I’m annoyed that everyone is suddenly a baker, and the flour and the sugar and the butter is all gone.

It’s actually a thing that should make me happy, but instead, I’m irritated.

I cannot recall from memory what I’ve cooked in the past two weeks. When I look through my camera roll, I remember that the first dish I made during self-isolation was shepherd’s pie.

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The second was a black-eyed pea stew (sorry, I don’t have a link for a recipe because I made this one out of my own brain and the notes I took on my mom’s recipe).

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The next food photo in my camera roll is chopped butter and pieces of baking chocolate in a bowl, ready to go on top of a saucepan of boiling water for a double boiler situation.

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That was for a Lisbon Chocolate Cake. It’s a recipe from the cooking section of the New York Times, and I made it because all I knew I wanted was a rich chocolate bomb of flavor. Just chocolate on chocolate on chocolate. It’s like a brownie cake with a layer of chocolate mousse on top with cocoa powder sprinkled on top. It turned out delicious, even though I knocked all the air out of the cake itself.

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One night, I fried up some lumpia that my mom and I had made and stashed in my freezer a few months ago. To go with it, I microwaved some frozen veggies and mac and cheese. It was a meal that made no sense, but it also was one of the most comforting things I’ve eaten recently. There was one night where we had sausage and rice and brussels sprouts.

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Last night, I made creamy braised white beans with garbanzo beans, great northern beans, garlic, milk, radishes, and kale with toast.

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Which brings us to today. I have a vague idea of what I want to make for dinner. I keep forgetting what my idea is, and then I remember it again.

So here’s the thing. We’re grieving and we’re anxious. I don’t just mean me. I mean all of us who are in self-isolation. We all thought we were going to be incredibly productive with our home time. Or some of us are introverts and/or some of us work from home already, and we thought things were going to proceed as normal because being inside all day is already our lives.

It turns out that needing to stay home and distance from people because of a global pandemic is vastly different from choosing to do these things because it’s just want we want to do. For the first week of isolation, I kept forgetting why I was staying inside and then I kept remembering why I was staying inside. It felt like a lightning bolt kept hitting me. Over and over and over and over again. That sensation of everything feeling normal and then suddenly remembering that everything is not normal at all and there’s potential danger everywhere is jarring.

Then the anxiety of knowing that the world is different, and it’s constantly changing, and there’s no end in sight to this chaos. And whenever it finally does end, we don’t know what the world will be like. There’s no way to know.

And then the fear and worry — what if M gets it? What if my mom gets it? What if my dad gets it? What if my brothers get it? What if I get it? When will I get to see my family in person again? What if I have it and have been spreading it to others when I go to the grocery store? What if what if what if. I don’t let myself dwell too long in the What-If space because it’s a recipe for a panic attack (one of which I’ve already had in this time period).

And then the rage — this administration and some of these politicians are truly heinous, and I have to believe in hell and that they will rot there because otherwise, I will drown in my own anger. And all the people who are panicking and treating grocery store workers terribly and hoarding toilet paper (who knows why) and food. And the people who don’t care that they may be spreading the virus to vulnerable people. The people who think there are no consequences for them.

And the despair and helplessness — all the people who are losing their jobs, the small local businesses and restaurants that I love shutting down, all the people who cannot pay their rent but their landlords are demanding full on-time payment, student loan service providers and credit card companies who are carrying on as if the world is exactly the same.

It’s a lot. So much. On top of all the personal crises and emergencies we all may be experiencing without all of this chaos.

So we’re grieving and we’re anxious, and we can’t do anything but flit around the house, and not focus on anything. Even the things we love. I want to read, but I can’t focus on anything. I don’t know what music will soothe me. I don’t know what I want to cook. I don’t know what to bake. I don’t know what to watch on tv. I don’t know what to do.

My therapist reminds me: I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing: staying home, washing my hands, not touching my face, staying away from people. That’s the best possible thing I could be doing right now. There will be plenty of time for “helping” later.

As for the rest: focus on the things I do want, the things that soothe me and comfort me, rather than on the things that irritate me. If I don’t know what I want to cook: open a cookbook, randomly choose a recipe, and cook it. If I don’t know what to watch: just choose something; if I don’t like it, I can stop it and choose something else.

The point is to just make a decision and try something. These decisions have the lowest possible stakes; if I don’t like it, I can always choose something else.

The second week of isolation has gone by faster and also slower. Individual ten-minute increments of time feel an hour long; a week feels like it’s only been three days. I’ve decided to limit my time on social media because even though it’s important to be connected to the world and know that we’re not alone, it feels like a giant room where everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs in anger and panic, and it’s exhausting.

This has all actually been a preamble to what I really wanted to write about: all the things that have brought me comfort and joy this week. It’s my favorite: a top 5 list, in no particular order and with probably more than 5 items on it.

Life of the Party, by Olivia Gatwood

This week, I was finally able to read a book cover to cover, and I loved it. That book was Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood. It’s a collection of poetry inspired by true crime, which is the last thing I expected to bring me joy, but it did. I highly recommend it for those who love poems, for those who love true crime, for those who are, have been, or love girls.

The Great British Baking Show

When I’m in the shit, I rewatch episodes of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix. I know most of the contestants’ names from the Mel and Sue and Mary Berry seasons, and I remember exactly who the final three were for each season. I have favorite bakes and favorite contestants and favorite episodes. It’s calming and nerdy and fun and I am forever learning something new every time I watch.

All Elite Wrestling

The past two episodes of All Elite Wrestling on TNT, sans audience, have been awkward and brilliant and the most entertaining avant-garde black box theater. Because I didn’t love wrestling growing up, I didn’t know I could love any wrestler or wrestling show this much. But I do.

Dispatches From Elsewhere

Dispatches from Elsewhere is created by Jason Segal. I fell in love with him as Nick Andopolis on Freak and Geeks, but you probably know him better as a stoner in a Judd Apatow movie or from How I Met Your Mother. Dispatches is based on an actual documentary, and it stars Jason Segal, Sally Field, Andre 3000 and Eve Lindley. I won’t say more about it because watching it is like unwrapping a mystery present, but it’s refreshing and funny and profound and heartbreaking and so, so good. The last time I checked, you could stream the first 4 episodes on the AMC website.

The Detectorists

After years of nudging from our good friends, we’ve finally started watching The Detectorists on Amazon Prime. It stars Mackenzie Crook (who was in the British version of The Office as the original Dwight) and Toby Jones (I know and love him from Berberian Sound Studio, but he’s in lots of things that you’ll know better than that (brilliant) obscure art horror film) as two men who are avid metal detectorists. It’s quiet, and it’s funny, and it’s nerdy, and I love it so far.

The Highwomen

The Highwomen are what you call a country supergroup, comprised of Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile, and Natalie Hemby. They released their album pretty recently, and I’ve loved it from the moment I listened to it. It’s just so good. If you listen to it, you’ll understand why it’s brought me comfort these past two weeks.

There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it there for now. I want to leave on a love note. I’m already planning my bakes for the next week, and I’m kind of excited for them. I might even write about them, but I can’t promise anything.

I hope that each of you are washing your hands (and counting to 20 when you do it), not touching your face, staying home, and holding close to every thing and person that brings you comfort and joy. We really are all in this together, and even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, we are going to make it out the other side.

xoxo

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To People Who Complain About Having To Read a Bunch Before They Get To Food Blogger Recipes

These days, there aren’t too many things that whip me into an immediate, spiraling frenzy. I feel so inundated every day with horrifying headlines and Am I The Asshole reddit posts that the biggest reaction something might get from me is an eye roll and a head shake. There are very few things in this world anymore that really surprise or devastate me, and not much makes me instantaneously viscerally angry.

But there is one topic that grinds my gears these days: the sentiment I see every few months or so, where people complain about the “endless” paragraphs that they have to scroll through to get to a recipe on a food blog.

I have SO many thoughts and feelings about this, but the gist is: if your Google-searching ass is too inconvenienced by skimming through a wordy prologue, or you can’t be bothered to just scroll through it to get to the (free) recipe, then find your recipe elsewhere. There are plenty of websites that will give you just a recipe, so take your search there. Try Epicurious or Food 52 or All Recipes, to name a few.

So many food bloggers put time and work into every single blog post and recipe, and many of them give that content out for free. Writing is work; developing, adapting and writing recipes is work. Giving that work away for free is a gift to the world, and if you want to be a dick about it, you don’t deserve the content.

Last week, I tackled my first test version of a pie that I’ve been planning to make for quite awhile. It all started with Joy the Baker’s recipe for a no-bake Dark and Stormy Cream pie. For those who don’t know, a Dark and Stormy is an alcoholic beverage that is made of rum, ginger beer and lime juice. It’s one of my favorite drinks, and to have that in pie form? An obvious no-brainer.

So I made it to take over to a friend’s house for a dinner party.

Joy’s recipe calls for a ready-made pecan crust and relies on gelatin, pasteurized egg yolks, chilling, and time to hold everything together. The pecan crust she called for wasn’t available in my area, so I made my own crust out of home-baked gingersnaps. I followed the rest of the recipe pretty exactly. By the time I realized I should have chosen to make a baked good that I had extensive experience with, I was knee-deep in the process, so I crossed my fingers and prayed that it would all set in the fridge and no one would get food poisoning.

When I took the pie out of the fridge 6 hours later to put the whipped cream and candied pecans on top, I sensed something was terribly wrong. The filling was jiggly, but it seemed to be firm on top. When I watched the whipped cream sink into the filling a little bit on contact, I started to panic. Since the whipped cream didn’t sink all the way into the filling, I held out hope that everything would be okay.

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Long story short, this pie was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made, but turned out to be 100% soup. It was delicious and boozy and my homemade gingersnap crust with a thin layer of chocolate complemented everything, but it was soup just the same. I was mortified and quietly talked myself out of crying actual tears at the dinner table.

Since then though, I’ve wanted to make the pie again, but I wanted to make it my way, without the gelatin and raw egg yolks (sorry, Joy the Baker!).

So what I did first was look at a pie recipe that I’m familiar with and have executed successfully at least twice — Cook’s Country’s North Carolina Lemon Pie. The crust is made out of saltines, butter (I use salted butter because I love that salty-sweet combo), caro syrup and salt. The filling is made from sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, heavy cream, lemon juice and zest, and salt. The result is tangy, lemony, a hint of salty, and sweet-but-not-too-sweet. I’ve made this pie for the past two Thanksgivings, and I’ve never regretted it.

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And then I took Joy the Baker’s recipe and made a color-coordinated spreadsheet, where I compared the two: ingredient by ingredient, stage by stage. This seems a little nutty (and maybe it is), but breaking down the two recipes side by side really helped me visualize what happens at each stage of the process so I could see where each recipe was similar and where they diverged in ingredient or process.

And then, I added my own test recipe to the spreadsheet. I put together my own ingredient list and wrote out the process I would go through to make my very own version of the Dark and Stormy pie.

I don’t consider myself a food blogger, at least not in the traditional sense. I started blogging about my food adventures because food and writing about food was a way to keep myself alive. Learning to cook and bake while writing about everything I learned in the process helped remind myself that I was a human being who was still very capable of learning new things and self-reflection and skill-having when a lot of things in my life kept telling me that I wasn’t doing enough or good enough or capable enough to accomplish anything.

Actually making this pie took 2-3 days. On the first day, I made gingersnaps for the crust. I opted to go with the same gingersnaps I made for the first disaster pie. They’re softer than your standard gingersnap, but I figured it would be fine. They tasted great with the soup I made the first time around.

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The next day, I used a Martha Stewart gingersnap crust recipe to make the crust, which entailed crushing up gingersnaps in the food processor, mixing the crumbs with melted butter, brown sugar, flour and salt, and then pressing them into my 9-inch pie plate. I popped the whole thing into the oven at 350 on a baking sheet for a few minutes, and then took it out to cool on a rack.

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These days, I don’t blog in hopes of finding sponsors or monetizing it (although, dang, that would be nice), and I’m not so concerned with SEO or being an influencer, and I don’t blog so I can share my mom’s empanada recipes with the masses for free. I guess I continue blogging because it helps me explore and learn things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise without cooking and writing about the cooking.

That probably doesn’t fit under the definition of a food blog, and it certainly doesn’t exist in the same universe with SEO, trending search terms, cute influencer Instagram posts, posting 3 times a day at peak times, etc.

I embrace the slowness, the messiness, the uncategorizable-ness of whatever this is I’m doing.

While the pie crust cooled, I made the pie filling by whisking together condensed milk, egg yolks, heavy cream, ground ginger, fresh ginger, and lime zest. When that was fully combined, I whisked in lime juice and a lot of spiced rum from our favorite local distillery until it was all fully incorporated. I poured the filling into the crust and baked at 350 for about 15 minutes, until the edges were just set and the center still jiggled a little bit.

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When I took the pie out of the oven, the consistency was what I wanted, but it looked like the filling had split a little bit at the edges. Maybe I hadn’t incorporated the rum and lime juice as thoroughly as I thought? Maybe I had added too much rum and lime juice?

I let the pie cool on a rack for a few hours, and then I popped it into the refrigerator to chill and fully set.

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There are some weeks or months where everything you plan goes pretty much according to schedule. You can predict how much time and energy you’ll have that week, you set your goals accordingly, and you follow through on every single thing on your list for the week. I love those weeks. I used to never have them, and now I have them on a regular basis. I love that feeling of crossing to-dos off my list, even if my to-do list is made up of a bunch of basic stuff.

And then there are some weeks or months where nothing goes according to plan. Where you overbook yourself, set too many goals, and plan your time far too ambitiously. For example, you think you’ll be in the mood to write a Friday Bites post while on a plane flying across the Grand Canyon, but when it really comes down to it, you’ll only have the energy to pretend you’re asleep and turn up the volume on your podcast when your airplane seat mate tries to talk to you. And then, you think you’ll be able to bang out a post while you’re sitting with your mom as she goes through a chemo treatment, but when it really comes down to it, all you want to do is eat snacks with your mom, read recipes for people going through chemo, chat with your mom and the nurses, and finish the book you’re reading.

And when I say “you,” I mean, “me.” I think you’ll be able to relate though. I hope.

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A day later, I made whipped cream, spread it on top of the pie, and then garnished it with candied pecans. The crust was welded to the pie plate. I wondered if it would still weld itself to a disposable aluminum pan. The filling was appropriately firm, but it was so boozy that even Mary Berry would’ve taken issue with it. Don’t get me wrong — I love a boozy dessert, but I could taste mostly the (delicious!) Lake House Spiced Rum and only hints of the ginger and lime that, to someone who didn’t know what the pie flavors were supposed to be, were rumored to be in the filling as well.

Still, M and I ate slices of that pie every night, and I made notes every night about what I wanted to do differently the next time I made it. I’m becoming obsessed with getting this pie just right.

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I don’t have the baking knowledge to adapt a recipe exactly right the first time. When I tell you I’m testing a recipe, I mean I’m testing it over a period of months. Because ingredients don’t come cheap, I don’t live or work in a test kitchen (can you imagine if I did though?!), and who wants to eat versions upon versions of the same dessert week after week (unless you’re practicing for Bake Off)?

If you’ve made it this far, I’m so very pleased to tell you that I’m not going to give you my recipe for my version of the Dark and Stormy Pie. Partly because it’s not right yet, and partly because…I don’t feel like it?

I guess what I’m trying to say is: so much work goes into blogging (and writing in general) that a reader never actually sees. The same is true for recipe testing and recipe writing. This is why I get so irritated with people who complain about food bloggers and their stories.

That writing is important. It took a lot of work. It gives you context for the recipe. Food and recipes don’t exist in a vacuum. They tell you a story, sometimes very personal ones, and if you don’t want to sit there for it, go buy an issue of Bon Appetit or Food & Wine (no offense, honestly, I buy them both every time I fly). They’ll give you plenty of recipes without bothersome context or stories.

Plus, the people who write those recipes get paid. There’s so much to say about that, too, but I’ll leave you there for now.

When I get this recipe right, I might share it but you’ll probably have to read a lot of words before I actually get to it. :)

A Primer in Grief Horror Films, Just In Time For Valentine's Day

We all have feelings about Valentine’s Day. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m not grumpy about it either. Originally, this week’s post was going to be a “real love song” playlist, but I just couldn’t get excited about it or make up my mind about what the theme would actually be.

And then my brother and I started talking about one of my all-time favorite topics: horror movies. Growing up, I unintentionally traumatized my little brothers with all the horror I used to watch, so neither of them are big horror fans. My brother watched The Babadook recently and loved the way the entire movie was a metaphor for grief, and he got intrigued about the potential of horror movies to serve as metaphors for grief/loss/guilt.

And then I got excited because that’s one of my favorite subgenres of horror — horror as a metaphor or analogy for grief/loss/guilt. You can make the argument that a good horror film is always serving as a metaphor for something, which would be true, but I especially love ones that star grief, guilt and loss.

So I decided to write up a crash course in this subgenre for my brother and for all of you. In no particular order, I present to you: a primer in grief/loss/guilt horror:

Pet Sematary (1989)

If you’re on Twitter, you might know that Stephen King has really stepped in it recently and shown his cis-male white privilege on a few occasions. While that’s unfortunate, it doesn’t change the fact that Stephen King is a true master of horror, and Pet Sematary is no exception. A doctor and his wife move to a new town with their too-adorable-for-their-own-good kids, yadda yadda yadda, an ancient Native American ritual site whose soil has “gone sour” gets involved (I know, I know, it’s a…questionable choice, but here we are) (although, you might be able to argue that the crux of the film resting on an ancient Native American ritual site is also some kind of commentary on colonialism, I don’t want to start reading things into the text that aren’t really there), things get weird with a zombie cat, and then things get REALLY creepy. This movie is iconic for a reason.

The Babadook

Obviously. The catalyst for this list. There is so much to love about this film — that it’s about a woman whose husband died while she was giving birth to her son is heartbreaking enough. To watch her struggle to be a “good” mother to her son, who is a constant reminder of her husband and his death is so real and gut-wrenching. It upends tropes about what it means to be a “good” mother and what “good” parenthood looks like, and asks questions about what it means to be a mother and parent when you’ve experienced devastating trauma alongside an event that is supposed to be one of the happiest of your life, and what it means to struggle with a grief that threatens to consume you. UGH. Plus, it’ll keep you double-taking the shit you see out of the corner of your eye for at least 24 hours after you watch it.

Dark Was The Night

A favorite trope of mine is “small town law enforcement suddenly has to deal with a whole bunch of supernatural shenanigans and MAN, is it above their pay grade” and Dark Was The Night fits that bill. A creature feature shot mostly in frosty, moody blue tones, this one follows a small town sheriff who is swimming in grief and guilt following the loss of his son. His backstory is revealed bit by bit in tandem with his investigation into what exactly is terrorizing his small town. We grow to really love the sheriff and his deputy, and all you want for them is love, happiness, lively earth tones, and some sunshine, for god’s sake. Creature features (another absolute favorite horror subgenre of mine) can be hit or miss with the creature effects, but Dark was the Night keeps the mystery alive throughout most of the film and saves the big reveal for the very end, which is the best move they could have made. I’ve watched this movie three times now, and still, every time, my heart just wants that sheriff to open himself to love again.

The Final Girls

I love a good horror comedy, and The Final Girls is such a pleasant surprise. Taissa Farmiga stars as a woman whose late mother was an actress whose claim to fame was the lead role in a campy 80s slasher flick (that is clearly a spoof of Friday the 13th). Through some weird inexplicable twists, Farmiga’s character gets to see her mother again, except they’re all inside the campy 80s slasher film. This film will startle you with slasher scares while making you laugh and breaking your heart and sending up the campy 80s horror genre, all at the same time. Also, you can’t beat this cast: Malin Akerman, Nina Dobrev from The Vampire Diaries, Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development, and Adam Devine from Pitch Perfect and Workaholics. SO GOOD.

The Ritual (2017)

This is a British creature feature that follows 4 friends who go on a backpacking trip through northern Sweden in honor of their murdered friend. One of them busts an ankle, and they opt to take a shortcut to their hotel through some ominous-looking woods. We all know what happens next, but also…we don’t. I’ve watched this one twice, and get a mood for it more often than you’d think. This film is a seamless blend of creature feature, Swedish folklore, and a metaphor for an overwhelming grief and guilt that forces you to bow down to it.

The Void

A small-town cop finds a drugged out guy in the middle of nowhere and brings him to a hospital that is in the process of shutting down. The bare-bones night staff includes his wife, from whom he’s separated, and things get real intense, real quick from there. Many reviews of this movie call it an homage to low-budget ‘80s horror, which it is, but it really is so much more than that. There are nods to Lovecraftian horror and even ‘80s Italian horror director Lucio Fulci, and it’s clear that horror video games like Resident Evil are an influence here too. Aesthetics aside, at its heart, The Void is about different facets of grief, and all the ways it can destroy a person’s humanity.

Phantasm

Now, this one might be stretch, but I can’t not put it on the list. Phantasm is a Don Coscarelli film, and it’s a bonkers one at that. Jody and Mike are brothers whose parents have recently passed away. When Mike begins to be chased by a creepy entity they call the Tall Man, Jody tries to protect him, and things get pretty bananas from there. This movie is full of bonkers one-liners and WTF moments, and you’re probably never going to fully understand what’s going on. You’ll just have to be okay with that, and go along with wherever the movie takes you. It’s like a glorious, hilarious, campy, gory poem. In the midst of all its disorientation, Phantasm has great moments of tenderness and its characters live out emotions that will feel familiar to anyone who has been stricken with panic about the possible death of a loved one or has felt fiercely protective of a family member for whatever reason. I’ve seen this one countless times, and it hits me just as profoundly (and hilariously) every time.

These are only the first few that came to mind when I started this list — I’m sure there are many obvious ones that I’ve forgotten to add, but this is a good start. There are also movies I initially wanted to put on this list that didn’t make the cut because they featured grief, but not as a metaphor (see: Hereditary and Midsommar). If I left a film off this list that you think would be a good addition, tell me about it!

If you have a dark, broody, twisted side, like me, then this actually feels like the perfect Valentine’s Day post. So happy Valentine’s Day anyway, everyone. Hang out or snuggle up with your preferred scary movie partner and please, please, please, for the love of god, watch and enjoy these movies. These ones are some of my favorites, and I hope you all love them as much as I do.

I’m hard at work this week testing a recipe for a (hopefully) super delicious pie for M’s and my own V-Day celebrations, and I’ll tell you all about it next week. It might even have a playlist to go with it. And you might need to get ready for a lot of Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves.

What I Cooked for The Big Game, or How Do We Enjoy Anything During the End Times?

Friends. Readers. Y’all. I’m tired. You might be, too.

What am I tired of?

Well…where do I begin?

The impeachment trial proceedings? The seemingly-75-candidate-strong Democratic primaries? The Iowa caucus debacle? The spread of the coronavirus in China that feels like we’re in the beginning stages of the board game Pandemic? The Harvey Weinstein trial? Children being separated from their families at the border?

Since transitioning out of my nonprofit life, I got my news from Twitter for a year and a half, which was a big mistake. I tried listening to NPR, which is a better option, but listening to a news cycle that repeats itself and goes in depth into every infuriating news item gives me actual anxiety. One morning, after listening to the news, I felt a literal rage-ache in my body that I haven’t felt since working at a non-profit.

I didn’t feel good about completely shutting myself off from the news entirely, though, so I decided that I would rely on two news podcasts to tell me what I needed to know every day: NPR’s Up First (a 15-minute daily podcast that tells you the top 3 news stories of the day) and the New York Times’ The Daily (a 30-minute-ish daily podcast that goes in depth into one facet of one news story).

Last week, I had to take a break from even those.

M’s and my house is not one that is dedicated to American football. We are mostly a fùtbol, baseball, and pro wrestling house, but there’s something really cozy about having football on in the background while we do things. There’s even something cozy about watching it when it’s cold outside, and you’re inside, warm and boozed up and full of good food.

We don’t make it a point to watch the Super Bowl (or, I’m sorry, The Big Game), but this year we wanted to. The 49ers were in it, and we decided it’d be fun to have a whole Big Game spread — even though we’ve never had the hankering for such a thing before and not many of our local friends are football fans.

In the midst of everything, planning a Big Game spread for two was a welcome distraction.

For a successful Big Game spread, I figure you have to have the following categories of food:

The Dip

When I think of a dip to eat during The Big Game, It has to be gooey and cheesy and potentially contain Velveeta or some other kind of chemically-created cheese substitute. While doing research, I entertained the healthier options of a salsa or a hummus or a smoked eggplant dip, but I ended up settling on a happy medium: M’s co-worker’s white queso dip. It’s full of white American cheese, milk, pickled jalapeños and green chiles. You don’t even have to put anything on the stove — you just throw the cheese, milk and a splash of water into a microwave-safe bowl, put that sucker in the microwave, and alternate between microwaving and stirring until the cheese has melted.

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Then you add the jalapeños and chiles, stir it to make sure everything is evenly incorporated and put it in a crockpot on the warm setting. I didn’t get any photos of the final product because I’m a terrible food blogger.

The Snackable

Now, there’s some overlap between categories. I originally envisioned something that could be eaten by the handful throughout the day, like a Chex Mix or a flavored nut combo. Something that wouldn’t require an entire plate. I thought about tackling Melissa Clark’s Tamarind Spiced Nuts with Mint, but eliminated it from the list right before we went shopping because it felt like the white queso and chips fulfilled this requirement. It killed two birds with one stone.

How about the rollbacks of a whole bunch of vitally important environmental protections our dear leader has enacted?

Maybe, more than anything, it’s these that enrage and exhaust me the most. It’ll be a slog, but we can rebuild society. We can’t rebuild nature and our natural resources.

In maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, when I learned the rate at which rain forests were being logged (it was an astronomical rate even back then), I felt such horror and sadness and anguish. I thought of all the animals and plants we’d lose and never see again, of all the animals and plants we’d never see at all. How irreplaceable these ecosystems are. How once these ecosystems and resources and wildlife are gone, they will never come back.

And how overwhelming that thought was to my very young self, and how powerless I felt to stop it.

That overwhelm and powerlessness is something I feel in abundance now.

The Hors d’oeuvre-y Finger Food

Who doesn’t love a tray of small perfect-bite-sized things that you can just pop in your mouth? You can load your plate up with them, or you can pop them into your mouth while standing over your Big Game buffet or on your way back to the TV. Also, the aesthetic delight of making an entire tray of tiny edible items that look mostly the same is not to be dismissed — think a good tray of deviled eggs or mini-pistachio chocolate chip cookies. It’s always a delight, and I bet you will find anyone making these in the comfort of their own home cooing to the tray and calling them “babies.”

I chose to make Priya Krishna’s Mushroom-Stuffed Mushrooms from her cookbook, Indian-ish (which I wrote about for Hyphen magazine! Go check it out!). While fatty and fried things feel like the traditional theme for a Big Game buffet, I wanted to stay healthy-ish when I could because I’m 34 years old, and my digestive system isn’t what it used to be.

These are so simple to make and so tasty. You take the stems out of regular white mushrooms, and then chop the stems up very finely. You cook them up with olive oil, garlic, ginger, a chile pepper (I chose a serrano), olive oil, salt, pepper, turmeric, Parmesan, and cooked quinoa. Then using a small spoon, you put that stuffing into the little cavities of your patiently-waiting mushroom caps, put them on a baking tray, and put them in the oven.

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When you take them out 12-15 minutes later, I guarantee you’ll coo at them and say something like, “Look at these babies!”

The Hearty Side Dish

At some point in the course of your Big Game celebrations, you’re going to want something that feels like you’re eating at least half of a meal. Hence, the hearty side dish.

I made two hearty sides: Chrissy Teigen’s chicken lettuce wraps from her cookbook Cravings, and my own mac and cheese creation topped with Chrissy’s cheesy garlicky bread crumbs. For the sake of my own sanity (and yours), I’ll only recap the lettuce wraps because they are SO good.

I first had a version of these many moons ago, when a supervisor treated me to P.F. Chang’s and asked if I liked their lettuce wraps. I said, “I’ve never had them.” She literally gasped and put her hand on her heart. Say what you will about P.F. Chang’s, but their lettuce wraps have never steered me wrong.

Chrissy Teigen’s chicken lettuce wraps are no different. This recipe is all over the food blogosphere, so you can just google it if you want it — or do yourself and your local library a favor and check her cookbook out because there are so many drool-worthy delicious recipes in there. Plus, Chrissy’s headnotes are hilarious.

You make a sauce out of Thai sweet chili sauce, hoisin, soy sauce, Sriracha, vegetable oil, sesame oil, rice vinegar, garlic and ginger. Then you cook up a pound of ground chicken along with scallions, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, water chestnut and red bell pepper (all of which is chopped up very finely). Once it’s cooked, throw that sauce you made on top, stir, let the sauce reduce down, take it off the heat and let it cool so you don’t burn the hell out of your mouth, and spoon the filling into a leaf of butter lettuce and shove it into your mouth. Repeat.

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Wings

Wings are a category all on their own. I considered many options, decided I didn’t want to fry chicken, and went with a Sweet Chili Chicken Wing recipe from Food52 because M and I are big suckers for anything that has Thai sweet chili sauce as its main ingredient. These bad boys get marinated for a few hours (I opted to go overnight) and then get baked for 45 minutes or so. After you take them out, you toss them in the chili sauce you make and then you eat them. When I make these again, I’m going to marinate the chicken in a ziplock bag for more even flavor, and I’m going to double up that sauce recipe because it’s too good not to double up on.

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Even watching the Big Game feels exhausting. The game of football can be excruciatingly tense and/or completely deflating or invigorating if your team is playing (which they were) and, and this year had great moments and terrible moments. My only neutral public comment on the actual game is that Jimmy Garoppolo’s eyebrows are impressive.

Aside from the game itself, knowing what we know now about football players and the high likelihood that they will develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease from repeated head trauma, makes it doubly difficult for me to enjoy a game where we watch in slow motion as players smash their helmets together during every single play or make headfirst tackles. (In many ways, it feels like watching pro wrestling, except the wrestlers know how their bodies will degenerate and can take action to lessen the effects. (See: DDP Yoga.) Research on CTE is still fairly new and, at this point, a person can only be diagnosed with it after they die. That’s horrifying.)

And the gall of the NFL to air their brand of “we’re not racist!” commercials while they’ve actively destroyed Colin Kaepernick’s football career for his peaceful protest against police brutality.

There’s that rage-ache again.

The Veggie-Forward Thing

Sure, a veggie plate could do in a pinch, but overall, I’m thinking about something that would cut the heaviness of everything in your spread and help your guts digest a little bit. I recently watched Sohla El-Waylly’s first Bon Appetit video (yay!), where she cooks Zucchini Lentil Fritters with a lemony yogurt. They looked so good, that these were actually the first Big Game item I decided on with certainty.

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Since they’re made out of lentils, zucchini and onion, I’m assuming they’re fairly healthy even though they’re fried? I don’t care, these were so delicious and I can’t wait to make them again.

(Also, I’m making an effort to give YouTube views to every Bon Appetit video that features a Black or brown cook — join me! (It also, sadly, won’t take you very long.))

The Sweet

I don’t think a sweet thing is actually necessary for a Big Game spread, but sweet things are necessary for every day, so I made something sweet anyway. I went with Diced Cinnamon Donut Cakes from Odette Williams’s Simple Cake cookbook, which is basically just baking off her Cinnamon Spice cake, cutting it into squares, brushing each square with melted butter and sprinkling cinnamon sugar on top.

These were the perfect bite-sized conclusion to a giant day-long bite-sized meal.

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I guess the big question is: how do we live and thrive when everything feels like it’s burning down around us? AND that’s not even mentioning any personal or professional stress that we might have on any given day?

I don’t have an answer. It astonishes me, the amount of infuriating things happening in our country that I haven’t even begun to mention. Almost every day feels like trying to scramble up a gravelly mountainside. More and more, I’m embracing the idea of a “slow lifestyle,” which I imagine looks different for everybody.

I’m still working it out, but for me, it feels like it starts with controlling the speed and quality of information that I consume. It means taking the time to listen to an in-depth podcast on a single news story rather than skimming its Twitter moment and all associated hot takes. To live with the possibility that human beings and the things they say and do are nuanced and complex and messy. And that nuance and complexity and messiness deserve consideration and thought and a little bit of empathy. Not many people are deserving of the pedestals we put them on, and not many people are entirely deserving of being “cancelled,” as the kids say (but so many of the “cancelled” deserve a firm and substantive hold toward accountability). And we also cannot and should not tolerate ideologies and behaviors that have historically led to and currently are very clearly leading toward genocide and dictatorship.

It also means taking the time sit with discomfort and rage. To feel it, breathe through it. To listen to it, and listen to what it’s calling me to do. Is my rage telling me to fire off a hot take on social media or is it telling me to do something more sustainable, something that will have a greater impact? In the long run, what will nourish our hearts and minds and souls while also creating long-lasting change?

I don’t have an answer for you.

There is a balance we have to strike, and that balance will look different for each person. The work of figuring it out is something we all have to do for ourselves. I don’t know what it looks like for me just yet. What I do know how to do: cook a lot of food while I figure it out.

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Dancing While Cooking: A Kitchen Dance Party Playlist

So…I’ve been thinking about reviving Friday Bites for a solid month now, but does that mean I’ve planned or prepared to actually start it? No. Have I been cooking? Absolutely. Have I been documenting my efforts step-by-step? Not really. I’ve fallen out of the habits of documenting my cooking and baking adventures — taking photos, jotting down notes, etc.

Taking a break from Friday Bites for the past year or so has given me the experience of being present with my cooking and baking. It’s allowed me to take a step back and see how much I’ve learned over the years from cooking/baking while writing Friday Bites. It’s allowed me to recognize that I don’t need to follow recipes to the letter anymore, that I am honing more accurate instincts and gut feelings about food. It’s felt really good.

What I’m excited to think more about these days, along with the process of cooking/baking, is what happens alongside the food. The days we decide to dance while we prep our ingredients, or the nights we decide to belt out Britney Spears songs while we broth and stir our risotto in perfectly timed increments, or the times when we put on a podcast or try to catch up on The Bachelor while we try out a new recipe, or the days when silence is the only thing we want to hear. I’m excited to think about the food “studying” I’ve embarked on in the past year, and food genealogies and food memories and histories and stories, and making family recipes and honing my own dishes (!!!).

So anyway, that’s a very clunky way to tell you that this week, I’m going to come clean about what Spotify says I’ve been listening to the most while I’ve been away from Friday Bites, and I’ve spent a lot of that time listening to music while cooking. Also, January 2020 has felt 6 months long. Every time I log onto twitter dot com, I want to scream and rip my hair out while also rolling my eyes all the way back into my head and muttering, “Jesus fucking Christ.” I have to take a break from even my news podcasts because…well, you know why. I think we all need a dance break.

#10 - Sorry Not Sorry - Demi Lovato

As usual, I’m several years late to this party, and I honestly don’t care. This song is SO good. I have a Fuck ‘Em Up playlist that I’ve been adding to since 2008, and this is the latest addition. Do you need to an extra shot of ‘tude before you head in to a meeting where you’re going to have to do some stuff that gives you anxiety? Are you doubting a decision you made or are about to make? Do you just need to shake some shit off at the end of the day? Listen to this song. It will give you superpowers.


#9 - Cross Me - Ed Sheeran feat Chance The Rapper & PnB Rock

So look. Ed Sheeran is…Ed Sheeran. I feel like if you really love music, you won’t be afraid of a good pop song. Ed Sheeran is good at pop songs, and I love this one in particular because the speaker tells us that if “you cross her, then you cross me.” If you fuck with my girl, I’m going to fuck with you. I think it’s the pop love song we all need right now. And I’m not ashamed to say that it’s come in the form of Ed Sheeran.


#8 - Please Me - Cardi B. and Bruno Mars

Speaking of good pop songs, everything Bruno Mars touches turns to gold. And everything he touches with Cardi B turns into a glorious glowing ball of sweat and sex and ‘90s throwback vibes. Come for the jams, stay for the iconic Cardi B lines. You know the one I’m talking about.


#7 - Slow It Down - Charlie Puth

In 2016, Charlie Puth came out with the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life. It was called “Marvin Gaye,” and he did it with Meghan Trainor, and it was the most atrocious and sacrilegious thing I’ve heard in recent memory. The first and only time I heard it, I was still working in an office, and I fully stopped what I was working on to research the song and make sure that I never heard it again.

In 2018, Switched on Pop, one of my all-time favorite podcasts, analyzed a Charlie Puth song from his 2018 album, Voicenotes. It was a decent song, so I reluctantly dove into the album. It turns out that Charlie Puth can write a good fucking pop album when he’s not churning out garbage like “Marvin Gaye.”


#6 - The Way I Am - Charlie Puth

Even though Charlie Puth has a babyface and it feels like he’s constantly trying to look and act older, I do really love this song. You can go ahead and put this on the Fuck ‘Em Up playlist alongside Demi Lovato.


#5 - The Distance - Mariah Carey

I’ve loved Mariah since I could consciously love music. I had Daydream on cassette and I literally carried it around with me everywhere, just in case I had an opportunity to play it somewhere. I haven’t listened to a full Mariah Carey album after The Emancipation of Mimi, but I still love her and I love this song. (P.S. If you’re making a playlist of solid love songs, you can throw this one on there along side the Ed Sheeran song.)


#4 - Empty Cups - Charlie Puth

So here’s where I think Spotify is lying about my most-listened to tunes of the past year. I know there’s an algorithm and numbers don’t lie, but…three (3) whole Charlie Puth songs? I can think of at least 5 other songs that I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to more than these three (3) Charlie Puth songs. I thought about subbing out this one for an Ariana Grande song that I’m nearly positive I’ve listened to more, but in the interest of shining the light on guilt and shame, I GUESS I’VE LISTENED TO CHARLIE PUTH THIS MUCH.


#3 - Look What God Gave Her - Thomas Rhett

Spotify told me that I listened to like, 20 hours of Thomas Rhett’s music in 2019????? I also think that’s a lie, but here we are. For those of you who are not fans of country pop (I don’t blame you), Thomas Rhett is a baby-faced Georgia boy who writes pretty catchy pop songs and has some pretty terrible dance moves that will give you second-hand embarrassment for him. There are other songs of his that I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to more, but Spotify doesn’t think so.


#2 - Emotion - Carly Rae Jepsen

I’ve fallen in actual love with Carly Rae Jepsen over the past year and a half, thanks to my baker pals. I read a tweet some time ago (I can’t remember who said it, otherwise I’d give credit) that said Carly Rae Jepsen makes music for 30-somethings who were in fucked-up relationships in their teens/20s, and are now figuring out what good, healthy love looks and feels and sounds like. AMEN.

(Also, Hanif Abdurraqib wrote an amazing essay on Carly Rae Jepsen’s music. You can find it in his book of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Highly recommend.)


#1 - Juice - Lizzo
If Spotify had told me anything different, I would have deleted my account. Honestly. I have loved Lizzo for a long time and I’m so happy that she has blown up over the past year. I don’t know if we deserve her, but we need her so much right now.

So, there it is. What I’ve apparently been bopping around to in my kitchen over the past 12 months. I hope you’ve found something new to dance around to, and I hope it’s gotten you excited about your own faves. And because I’m curious and always on the hunt for new music — dear reader, what are your favorite songs to dance around and cook to? Tell me! No guilt, no shame, no judgement. I really want to know. Tell me in the comment box below, tell me in a comment on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Shoot me a DM, whatevs. Let’s dance and cook together.

What I Did In 2019

WELL. Y’all. Here we are at the beginning of another year. 2019 wasn’t a year for blogging for me, but it was a year full of cross-country travel, family, baking, cooking, food, and writing. I love this time of year, not because of the holidays, but because it gives me a chance to reflect on what I’ve been up to and what I’ve learned over the past 12 months. I look back at the intentions I set at the beginning of the year and see how well I worked toward them (or didn’t). And after that, it gives me a chance to set intentions for the next 12 months. There’s almost nothing I love more than a fresh start. A clean page. I love these moments (and they don’t happen just once every twelve months) because they remind me that I can always start over. If I haven’t been doing so great at something I set an intention for, I can try again. I can even modify my intention this time (!!).

They remind me that, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel like it, I’m never actually stuck.

***

One of my intentions for 2019 was to not be afraid to be seen. I wanted to stop second-guessing myself and my abilities. I wanted my dear little poems to go out into the world and be seen, I wanted to trust that I had something valuable to say that would mean something to someone somewhere, and I wanted to continue following the paths that have been laying themselves out for me when I say Yes to them, in professional and personal capacities.

Though I don’t think there will be any end point to this journey, I’ve worked really hard to get to where I currently am. I published a fair amount of work in 2019, and I’m so proud of all of it.

***

First, my dear poems. Tahoma Literary Review took my John Waters-inspired poem “Girl Gone Rogue” for their spring 2019 print issue and featured it on their website in May. A journal I’ve long admired, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, took two of my Kelly Kapowski poems: “Kelly Kapowski Unplans A Pregnancy” and “Kelly Kapowski Gets An Abortion.”

Honestly, I can’t tell you how much I truly adore each of these poems, and how often I’ve looked at them and thought, “WHO is going to publish you? WHO is going to love you as much as I love you?”

***

Over at Hyphen Magazine, I was so honored to be a part of their Deconstructing Cookbooks series, which set out to examine the ways in which food creates identity for Asian Americans and/or immigrants through the lens of conventional cookbooks and ones that were cookbooks and a little something else. To make it simple, I told people I was writing cookbook reviews, but I was really writing something that was a hybrid of personal essay and cookbook review.

My first piece, “‘And yet, we meet there’: On Resistance, Memory, and Transformation in Sarah Gambito’s Loves You” was on Sarah Gambito’s latest poetry collection which is, itself, a hybrid of poems and recipes. Sarah has long been a personal hero of mine for her poems and for the work she does to champion Asian American literature through Kundiman, and writing this essay was an honor and a struggle for me. I had flashbacks to college when I spent hours and hours writing papers on poems and struggling to find the right words to express what I saw each poem doing, but in the end, I got there, and I’m so glad I did.

When I took on writing “‘This Cookbook is Really A Love Letter’: On Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish,” I didn’t know that I would end up cooking the majority of the recipes in it with my own mother, who had never eaten Indian food before. It ended up informing the way I experienced Indian-ish itself, and I love the piece that came out of it.

***
In April, I got an incredible opportunity to go to San Francisco and attend a Food In Two Worlds immigrant food journalism workshop. It was a crash course in all things audio — how to record good audio, how to edit audio, how to tell a story through audio, why we should tell stories through audio, how to write good recipes, how to pitch a story to a publication. There was so much information packed into two days that, at the end of each day, my brain felt at max capacity — there was no further information it could absorb. And not only did I get a chance to learn an entirely new skillset, I got a chance to meet and have great conversations with incredible and talented people who want to tell new food stories.

During the workshop, we teamed up with a partner, recorded ourselves interviewing each other, and edited the results into vignettes about food objects. My vignette partner and host of the podcast Queer the Table, Nico Wisler and I talked about my empanada press and my mother teaching me how to make empanadas, and how cooking arroz con gandules helped Nico process grief and create community after the Pulse shooting in Miami. The vignettes that Nico and I produced on each other’s stories ended up on the Feet in Two Worlds podcast.

And then the vignette Nico produced featuring my empanada story ended up on Public Radio International’s show The World. It was all very exciting and also made me want to hide under a table a little bit, but I kept reminding myself that this was the year that I would be unafraid to be seen.


***

And that’s just the work that’s been put out into the world in 2019. I did a couple poetry readings in Bloomington alongside my forever partner-in-crime; at one reading, Ortet, the experimental band that featured between readers, recorded lines from the poems that M and I had just read and mixed them together into a surprising and awesome track that they played during the breaks. In October, I got to read poems at a Kundiman Midwest poetry reading with other Kundiman fellows (who are some of my favorite people in the world) in St. Louis (which is one of my favorite places in the whole world).

It’s been a wild year. While all these exciting professional-type things happened, I increased the frequency of my trips home so I could see my mom and family more often. I’ve done so much self-reflection on who I am and how I came to be the way that I am that at times, it’s felt like I’ve been locked in a room surrounded by mirrors and bright lights. I’ve learned a lot about being vulnerable and asking for help and communicating my struggles to the people around me.

***
So that’s been 2019. In a nutshell. I have no idea what 2020 holds. I haven’t even made my intentions yet. And who knows, maybe I won’t even make any (see my post 2017: The Year of No Intention). It’s kind of feeling like 2020 is that kind of year.

What I do know: I’m working on an essay about adobo that will be a part of a food anthology that I’m very excited about. I’m working on putting together my first full-length poetry collection (finally!) and sending it out into the world. I’m starting to write more essays, and I’m going to blog regularly again. I think I’ll be blogging more about food and horror and maybe even books?

And that’s all I know.

I hope everyone who reads this was able to find spots of joy and gratitude throughout their year, no matter how great or how down they felt. Here’s to the end of a real doozy of a year, and here’s to not knowing what comes next.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, 2018 edition

Some of you might know this already, and maybe a lot of you don’t. Blogging is actually hard.

It’s especially hard for writers like me, who have periods of creativity and then periods of drought. (I actually think of it less like a drought and more like living life, priming the pump, re-filling my stores.) I’m also an Aries sun sign blessed with Virgo SOMEwhere in my chart, which means I get excited about my projects, organize the hell out of them, start them, and then get tired. I’m also a Scorpio rising, which means a lot of my projects stay private, so no one ever knows what the fuck I’m doing.

I digress. What I was saying: blogging is hard for writers like me, who started out writing so many years ago with notebook paper and pen. Who carried notebooks and binders around with them everywhere so whenever they had an extra minute or an idea, they could sit and physically write everything down.

I used to be a prolific writer. Poems used to come easily, and prose even more so. The real work was in the revision, and I did it, but not with so much attention. Because I was also busy being young and living and not understanding that revision is not only about what’s on the page — it’s also about reading the self and understanding what it’s trying to say to you. These days, I sit with poems in their revision phase for months at a time. Sometimes years. I think about intent. I think about voice. I think about character. Who is the voice that is speaking through me? Why are they speaking through me? Is it me? Is it someone else? What do they want? (What do I want?) How are they saying it? What matters about how they say it?

So anyway. I forget where I was going with this. Oh yes. My point: blogging is hard for me. When I’m writing for the page, I do not (and cannot) blog. When I am not able to write for the page for whatever reason, I blog instead. And when I cannot do either, I live. I try to stay present, in the present.

This summer, I’ve been doing a little bit of everything. I went on my first-ever writing residency in Knoxville, Tennessee. I stayed at Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms, caring for a dear donkey named Jayne, a sass-machine goat named Munchma, tons of sheep, and some pesky (but entirely relatable) chickens. And when I wasn’t throwing down bales of hay or hand-feeding Jayne treats, I was reading and writing. I wrote pages and pages of prose about food and family and memory and relationships and everything in between. I wrote more poems than I’ve written in the past year. And I’m excited. I finally feel like my full and actual writer self again.

***

M and I moved to a new place. It’s a townhouse in the same neighborhood we’ve been in for the past 6 or 7 years. We weren’t expecting to move, but when we made the decision to do it, it felt like exactly the right thing to do. We hit hiccups here and there, and there was sweat and there were tears, but I’ll tell you one thing: if you can, hire movers. I can’t tell you what joy I had watching two young college-aged men efficiently carry all our furniture and all our heavy boxes out of our old apartment and into our new place. If you can afford it, it’s well worth it, even if you can only afford to hire them to move your heavy stuff. I swear to you. Worth. All. The. Pennies.

Channeling the strength, agility, perseverance, and charisma of the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah today. It's a big one and I already need coffee, lots of bourbon, and a beach vacation. #movingdiaries

19 Likes, 3 Comments - Rachel Ronquillo Gray (@medusaironbox) on Instagram: "Channeling the strength, agility, perseverance, and charisma of the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah..."

***
We also took a spontaneous trip to Seattle to see Pearl Jam. I came home from work one night, and M said, “So…you want to go to Seattle tomorrow? To see Pearl Jam?” It’s been a dream of M’s to see Pearl Jam in their hometown, so we did it. We spent 36 hours in my favorite city, and we didn’t get to see or do much outside of waiting in a merch table line for 4 hours, or actually watching Pearl Jam perform a truly epic 3.5 hour show, or getting within an arm’s length of Eddie Vedder.

Last night, there were twists and turns, and twists within the turns, and turns within the turns, AND there was this. 💖💙💖💙 (video credit : @archpoetdauro) #pearljam #thehomeshows

26 Likes, 1 Comments - Rachel Ronquillo Gray (@medusaironbox) on Instagram: "Last night, there were twists and turns, and twists within the turns, and turns within the turns,..."

But we did have some delicious and unexpectedly comforting noodles though. I still think about them.

The name of this had the word "tingly" in it. These noodles and this soup made me supremely happy. Good call, @amayablues. (I also splashed a lot of it on my shirt because I'm three years old, apparently.)

29 Likes, 4 Comments - Rachel Ronquillo Gray (@medusaironbox) on Instagram: "The name of this had the word "tingly" in it. These noodles and this soup made me supremely happy...."

***
What else did I do this summer? I got a new job. At a bakery.

Do you remember that scene from Office Space? The one at the end when Ron Livingston’s character is finally free of his cubicle job, and he’s relishing in his new job as a construction worker? That moment when he stops shoveling for a minute, smiles at the sunshine, takes in a deep breath of fresh air, and finally looks content?

That’s me these days. It’s not easy work, and some days I come home with my body aching and cramping in places I didn’t know could ache and cramp. Sometimes I find gigantic bruises on my legs that I don’t remember getting, but then I vaguely remember that something happened and it hurt a lot, but I kept moving and then I forgot about it. (Kind of like life.)

But I learn something new every day. How to make neat-edged cookies. How to wrap treats and box them neatly. Remembering complicated orders. How to work quickly without fucking up, which I am not always successful at, but I’m learning. All of these are little things that, if you’ve never worked in the service industry, you take for granted.

(Also, an aside: tip your servers. Always. At least 20%. If there is an option to tip (do you see a tip jar? when you pay with your card, does it give you the option to tip? etc.), always do it. The people who serve you bust their asses every fucking day and they don’t get paid enough to do it with the amount of patience and grace that they do. Believe me. Okay, stepping off my soap box now.)

So anyway. I’m doing something completely new and different. It’s hard work, but I like it. It’s teaching me a lot in terms of tangible skills, but also more important things about truly and actually caring for the self physically. I’ve learned so much over the years about emotional and psychological self-care, but physical self-care has come as an after-thought. This new work is forcing me to pay attention to my body and listen to it. If I don’t, I literally cannot do the work.

***

What’s ahead? I don’t know yet. I’m working on some things. After the heat and excitement and ever-changing days of summer, I’ll be shifting my attention to writing projects outside the blog for awhile. Friday Bites will not be making its regularly scheduled appearances, but I’ll still be writing about cooking and baking and sharing my home creations on the blog. Scary movie season is upon us (although it’s really year-round for me), so I might jump back into my Days of Horror series soon.

The name of the game these days is staying open and flexible, working with what I have, and, as always, staying grounded amidst the vast fields of uncertainty that life is made of. Stay tuned.

An Ode to Anthony Bourdain (feat. Banana-Rum Icebox Cake)

I’ve started this post over and over. A lot has happened in the past month and a half. I got married. I went on an epic mini-honeymoon road trip. We had a second reception in my hometown, right next door to my high school’s prom. I couldn’t decide on whether I wanted to write about my wedding cake, or make a top 5 list of the things we ate on our honeymoon, or whether I should just steam ahead and write about what I was cooking.

And then Anthony Bourdain died.

***
I always forget how torturous baking can be in the summer in Indiana, whether or not you have air conditioning. No matter what you do, the oven turns the entire apartment into a sweatbox. There’s an icebox cake cookbook that I’ve been checking out of the library for the past couple years, but I’ve never made any of the recipes.

This year, I’m determined. There are so many good options. A Milk Dud cake. A black pepper rum cake. Peanut butter cup cake. Lavender-blueberry.

What I decided on: banana-rum cake.

***
I’ve loved Anthony Bourdain for a very long time. Over the past few years (that, interestingly enough, coincide with the years I spent at my last job), I lost track of him. I think part of me had given up on him. I was tired of seeing and hearing about the world through the lens of a snarky white guy. I was disappointed with his choices to do things like hang out with Ted Nugent. I was tired of the “bad boy” thing, of the Hunter S. Thompson-inspired aesthetic thing. Of all the testosterone and macho stuff.

In the last few months, I began following him and his girlfriend Asia Argento more closely on Instagram. I watched as he vocally and strongly supported Asia, particularly at the Cannes Film Festival when she publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her. I watched as he supported the #MeToo movement, and modeled what it looked like to be a self-reflective man who realizes that he’s been contributing to rape culture. He asked himself why the women in his life didn’t feel comfortable enough to come to him with their stories of assault? He asked himself not only what he did, but what did he let happen? What did he let the men around him get away with?

***
The technically-late-spring weather here has been erratic. One week, it’s unbearably humid, sunny, and in the mid-90s. The next week, it’s overcast, humid-ish, stormy, and in the low to mid-80s (which feels a whole lot better than a humid 95 degrees, trust me).

This week is a stormy one, which means it’s cool enough for me to cook. So I started to caramelize bananas.

The bananas had been ripening on the counter for the past week or so, so they had lots of brown spots. I sliced up six of them, then threw them into a large sauce pan that had a nice chunk of nearly-browned butter in it.

Yes, I have a shitty red, plastic cutting board that has been with me for the past 10 years. I want to get rid of it, but I also love it?

Yes, I have a shitty red, plastic cutting board that has been with me for the past 10 years. I want to get rid of it, but I also love it?

As soon as the bananas hit the butter, the sweetest and best smell filled the air. I love the smell of browning butter and I love the smell of bananas. I didn’t know that, together, they make a knee-buckling aroma that I would gladly swaddle myself in for the rest of time.

After letting the bananas soften up a bit, I put in some brown sugar, a healthy glug of spiced rum, and a pinch of salt. Caramelizing things is the best thing.  

***
It feels important for me to tell you that the day Anthony died, I made boxed macaroni and cheese for dinner. I also made an avocado cream out of yogurt and spices (and avocado), and a lime sour cream made with lime zest and spices. I ate the mac and cheese along side my veggie burrito leftovers, and topped them both with that lime sour cream.

I took my weird, oddly comforting meal to the living room and ate it while I watched the Manila episode of Parts Unknown. I had never seen it before.

At the beginning of the episode in a voiceover, Anthony says, “Filipinos are, for reasons I have yet to figure out, probably the most giving of all people on the planet.”

I began crying into my weird sour cream and mac-and-cheese dinner, and I didn’t stop for the entire episode.

***
Next: the pudding. I threw sugar, cornstarch, salt, whole milk and heavy cream into a saucepan, whisked them all together, and then whisked an egg in. Then I turned the stove to medium-high and whisked the mixture constantly.

Banana Rum_3.jpg

While doing all this, I listened to Anthony Bourdain’s 2011 interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. He must have recently done the Ted Nugent episode, because he talked a little bit about it. About how, in all his travels, you can always find something in common with someone, no matter how different your worldviews are. Those common things are usually food and drink. He talked about how he had argued with Nugent and gotten him to agree that Michelle Obama’s lunch meal program was a good thing.

Three years ago, in a pre-45 world, I would have written this whole thing off. I would have said (and did say) that it wasn’t enough. Ted Nugent is a pretty disgusting human being, and he’s said some unconscionable things.

As it stands, it’s still not enough. But I also wonder, with the world we live in today, would Anthony have done anything differently in the same situation? Would he still have agreed to do the segment? Would he have leaned harder into difficult conversations? Would he have felt an obligation to try to straighten out Nugent, white dude to white dude? Would he have felt there was something at stake?

***
After the pudding thickened and began to bubble, I did a final frantic 45 seconds of vigorous whisking and then took it off the heat. I mixed in another healthy glug of rum, some butter, and vanilla extract.  I set it aside to cool a bit, next to my cooling-to-room-temp caramelized bananas. (My room temp was probably 83 degrees, so *shrugs*. Was that the temperature the cookbook authors had in mind? Probably not, but that’s how shit goes in my house.)

***
The day Anthony died, a friend sent me a New Yorker piece written by Helen Rosner. It’s a beautiful piece, and one of the best ones written in memory of him.

In it, she outlines exactly why I gave up on Anthony all those years ago:

““I asked him, point blank, if he considered himself a feminist. His answer was long and circuitous, what I’d come to think of as classic Bourdain: more of a story than a statement, eminently quotable, never quite landing on the reveal. He talked about his sympathy for the plight of women and gay men, his formative years as a student at Vassar, his forceful resentment of the “bro food” movement with which he remained entwined, and his unwavering support for reproductive rights. “I don’t know if that makes me a feminist,” he said. “It makes me a New Yorker. Doesn’t it?””
— Helen Rosner

Honestly, Tony. What’s so hard about admitting to being a feminist? For all his “bad boy” stuff, he could sure avoid actually answering a question.

***
After chilling my mixing bowl and whisk attachment in the freezer for about 10 minutes, I took them out, loaded them into my stand mixer and poured in a whole bunch of heavy cream. I whisked that creamy stuff at a medium speed until it just started to thicken, at which point I threw in another healthy glug of rum, some powdered sugar, and some vanilla extract. I turned the stand mixer up to a medium-high speed and meant to whip the cream until it formed stiff peaks. I’m pretty sure I overmixed it a hair, but it still tasted amazing.

And then: construction.

Banana Rum_5.jpg

***
The day Anthony died, I read so many Twitter and Instagram tributes, and so many from Black folks and people of color and women. They talked about how he didn’t exoticize or appropriate their culture. How he turned the cameras on even the “ugly” things, like politics, race, culture. About how he never presumed to know more than the people who cooked for him. How he never said ‘no’ to any dish. How, when he visited our home countries, we felt seen and validated.

And so often, more than I was expecting, he was described as “kind.”

***
So I took my brightly colored 8x8 baking dish and poured in a generous layer of boozy pudding, then lay some graham crackers on top.

Then came a layer of caramelized bananas. Then a layer of pudding. Then graham crackers. Then bananas again.

Banana Rum_7.JPG

I should have stopped there because the dish was full to the top. But I went against my instincts. I poured more pudding on top. It began to spill out the sides a bit, but I carried on. I plopped my slightly-overmixed boozy whipped cream on top, and that’s when things started to get real messy. As the laws of displacement began to the place (that’s the official scientific name for it, right?), pudding started to dribble over the walls of the dish and all over my kitchen table.

Before putting saran wrap over the top, I set the baking dish precariously inside a slightly larger one, so that the pudding that oozed out would pool somewhere that wasn’t all over the top shelf of my refrigerator.

Banana Rum_9.jpg

***

On the morning that Tony died, I took out my copy of A Cook’s Tour. It’s an old edition, and it’s dog-eared and well-worn. I flipped to the passage where he wrote about coming to the devastating realization of the impact of the Vietnam War on the country that he was clearly falling in love with. He wrote about the loathing he felt for the U.S. and its mindless destruction, and the loathing he felt at himself for his complicity in the U.S.’s actions and his privilege as an American tourist in Vietnam. I remembered how I felt when I read that passage. How he had put words to all the anger and helplessness and rage I felt when I had traveled to Thailand. When I read A Cook’s Tour, I finally felt like I wasn’t alone. That I wasn’t asking too much by wanting to see everything and acknowledge everything when I traveled or read about travel or watched someone travel somewhere. It wasn’t too much to ask to see the whole damn picture. It was okay to have complicated feelings and still see the world, engage with it.

Tony wasn’t perfect. He has said several things over the years that I still cringe thinking about. But he was human, in the best possible way. Which means that in these past three or so years while I was busy giving up on him, he was evolving as a person. While I wasn’t paying attention, he became a person I could stand behind again, look up to.  

***
After 24 hours, the banana-rum icebox cake was ready. And good lord, is it boozy and incredibly delicious. I eat a piece and feel a warmth in my chest, like I’ve just done a shot of bourbon in a Wild West saloon. Sweet, but not too sweet. So much booze. It’s the perfect treat for these hot days.

Banana Rum_10.jpg

***
I love the end of Helen Rosner’s article. She wrote:

““The last time I saw Bourdain was a few months ago, at a party in New York, for one of the books released by his imprint at the publishing house Ecco—of his many projects, his late-career role as a media rainmaker was one he assumed with an almost boyish delight. At the bar, where I’d just picked up my drink, he came up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Remember when you asked me if I was a feminist, and I was afraid to say yes?” he said, in that growling, companionable voice. “Write this down: I’m a fuckin’ feminist.””
— Helen Rosner

***
The things that I have made in honor of Tony in the past week, whether inadvertently or purposefully, have been incredibly strange. The Annie’s boxed mac and cheese with lime sour cream. This banana-rum icebox cake. He’s not particularly known for being a desert kind of guy. I’d like to think that he’d appreciate all the booze in it. I know I do.

Banana Rum_11.jpg

***
In a way, Anthony ended up modeling my ideal of human behavior. He was imperfect, flawed in so many ways. But he was self-reflective. He looked inward without flinching and with nuance. He held himself accountable. He spoke out about things that matter. He was endlessly curious, asking questions and really listening to the answers.  He traveled just to travel, but he also traveled for the people. To let them tell their stories. To show his viewers that they shouldn’t be afraid of the world, to pay attention to people and their food. To always say ‘yes’ to whatever is put in front of you.

***
I should end there. I'll leave you with this interview that Anthony did with Fast Company. I'm 90% sure that the answers he gives them are not what they're looking for. Their questions want quick, superficial, easy responses that they can turn into sound-bytes. His answers are long, reflective, and incredibly deep. That is, I think, the essence of Anthony. To never give an easy answer, to always take in the bigger picture. To examine not only that we're here, but to look back with nuance at how we got here.

Rest well, Tony. Thank you for everything.

This Week's Recipe:

My Top 5 In-No-Particular-Order Wedding Rom-Coms

This Friday Bites has nothing to do with food, but everything to do with what is currently occupying all my energy these days: weddings. By the time you read this, I will be in Vegas, bachelorette partying in a pool that is also a shark tank (?!) with my very best friends in the whole universe. I'll be a little over 24 hours away from marrying the love of my life, after being together for 9+ years. (WHAT?!) It's an exciting time, and it's also one that's full of details, timelines, obsessing over things like wedding veils, travel steamers, and my "dream" nails.

In the middle of all of the wedding planning I’ve been doing over the past couple weeks, one of my besties texted me to ask what my favorite wedding rom-coms were. I haven’t consciously been keeping a mental list of my favorite wedding rom-coms, but with ZERO hesitation, I listed off my top 5.

And so, the inspiration for this non-traditional edition of Friday Bites: my favorite wedding rom-coms, in no particular order.

***
27 Dresses

I realize that by putting 27 Dresses as the first in this no-particular-order list, I may lose a lot of you, and I don’t care. I love this movie. Katherine Heigl plays a woman who has been a bridesmaid an obscene amount of times (27 times, to be exact) and unironically loves weddings. James Marsden plays a cranky, cynical journalist who is stuck writing up fancy wedding announcements for a national newspaper. Can you even imagine the shenanigans these two get into?

Sure, this one is full of un-feminist tropes: the woman who spends her life caring for others and always putting herself last, and she isn’t bitter about it (mostly). The curmudgeonly dude who doesn’t believe in marriage, blah blah blah. Intellectually, I know it’s all wrong and silly and stupid. But goddammit, when Judy Greer’s character slaps Katherine Heigl in the face after Katherine whispers after her dreamboat boss (played by Ed Burns), “I love you, too,” it makes me laugh every time. And the “Bennie and the Jets” scene? Forget it. Have fun with your eye-rolling, I’m going to be over here singing about electric boobs with Katherine and James.

***
The Wedding Date

This one…this one is pretty terrible, I’ll admit it. Debra Messing plays a woman who hires a male escort as her date to her sister’s wedding and help her brave a minefield of ex-boyfriend sightings and fucked up family dynamics. Dermot Mulroney plays the male escort, who’s full of charm (obviously), wisdom, and romantic one-liners.

I don’t know what it is about this movie that technically makes it fall flat or why I continue to love it so much in spite of that. I just want Debra Messing’s character to blossom and be her best self. I want her to admit her love of Air Supply and belt out “All Out Of Love.” I want to believe in the chemistry between Debra and Dermot. I want to believe the dreamy one-liners. This one misses the mark in a lot of ways, but I kind of don’t care. I love Debra and I love Dermot, and this movie has enough funny moments to keep it as one of my fave rom-coms.

***
My Best Friend’s Wedding

If you haven’t already watched this movie by now, I can’t help you.

Just kidding. But honestly, this one is so good.

Julia Roberts plays a food critic (a-HA! There IS food in this edition of Friday Bites after all!) whose best friend, Dermot Mulroney, is a handsome sports writer. A million years ago, they made a pact to marry each other if they hadn’t found love by a certain age. On Julia Roberts’ pact birthday, Dermot tells her that he’s found the love of his life and they’re getting married. Julia realizes she loves Dermot, and the rest of the movie is dedicated to Julia plotting to destroy her best friend’s relationship. This movie has everything: Karaoke! Plotting and scheming! Devastating good looks! A gay best friend! Julia Roberts’ laugh! A bread truck car chase scene! Slow dancing! Etc.

This was one of the first rom-coms I loved and watched over and over again, and I’m not sorry about it. It’s also one of the few rom-coms whose characters (and audience!) don’t always get the ending they want, but the one they need. I’ve always loved that about this one. And also, this was the world’s introduction to Dermot Mulroney, and I don’t think the world was ever the same. Am I right? I’m totally right.

***
Wedding Crashers

This might be surprising, but it’s hard for me to pass up a Vince Vaughn movie. Swingers? Love it. Four Christmases? I might hesitate, but I’ll watch it. (I actually don’t remember this movie all that much, if I’m being honest.) The Break-Up? One of my favorite movies EVER. Wedding Crashers? I will say YES to this movie every time.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play two D.C. lawyers who spend their free time crashing weddings and sleeping with women. One weekend, they crash the holy grail of weddings (a politician’s family!) someone falls in love, Will Ferrell makes an appearance, Vince Vaughn is Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson is charming, Bradley Cooper plays a convincing DUDE, Rachel Adams plays sweet and uncertain really well, some questionable things are said and done, etc.

It’s a rom-com with enough silliness and raunchiness for the dudes (I say ‘dudes’ as a non-gender-specific aesthetic. I hope you know what I mean) among us, and enough sweetness and romance for the sensitive hearts. I have a little bit of both in me, and Wedding Crashers strikes the balance. It definitely has its problems, but whenever I just need to have a good, ridiculous laugh, Wedding Crashers is it.

***
Bend It Like Beckham

So, technically, Bend it Like Beckham is not a wedding movie. But it has a wedding IN it, and that’s good enough for me.

Parminder Nagra plays an Indian girl in Britain who idolizes David Beckham and dreams about playing football (or “soccer” for all the ‘mericans reading this) professionally. The dream begins to come true when she meets Kiera Knightly, who invites her to try out for a girls’ team coached by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. She makes the team, but has to walk a tightrope between her obligations to family, their expectations for her future, and her own goals and dreams.

I fucking. love. this. movie. I loved this movie when it first came out because it starred Indian women, and even though my own culture and theirs are vastly different, it still felt like I saw myself on the screen. A fellow brown girl trying to live up to her family’s expectations but wanting to pursue a path that might disappoint them. Growing up in a culture where family bonds and obligations are strong and inescapable. And crushing on a white guy who kind of doesn’t get it, but kind of does, and is cute, so why not?

Honestly, the story of my life.

***
Bridesmaids

Last but certainly not least.

Kristen Wiig, a failed baker (a-HA! More food!), plays best friend and maid of honor to Maya Rudolph, who just got engaged. The whole movie is the most hilarious shenanigans: Kristen Wiig’s character is honestly all of us, as she tries to do all the things a maid of honor does, but keeps getting outshined by Rose Byrne’s character, a snooty rich woman who is clearly competing for the title of best friend and maid of honor.

This movie is everything: it’s about best friends, it’s about making new friends. It’s about dancing to your favorite ‘90s jams with your bestie whenever and wherever. It’s a cautionary tale about eating rare meat and then getting horrific diarrhea in a fancy bridal shop after. It’s about how well Jon Hamm plays a douchebag. It’s about finding your footing and direction when you’re feeling uncertain about your place in the world. It’s about knowing the exact ratios of ingredients to make exactly ONE cupcake. It’s about finding your voice and being confident in it. It’s about breaking old patterns and receiving the love that the world brings to you.

***

WELL! I’m getting married tomorrow, and then I’m going off the grid for a bit, so no Friday Bites next week. I’ll be back the week after, and I will talk about all the food I ate (what if I dedicated a whole post to my wedding cake?! or the second reception we're having in my hometown?! or our reception meal?!), and I'll talk all about what's coming next.

The Plague, Birthday Donuts, and Labors of Love

So, here’s what happened: I woke up on my second to last day in Nevada with my throat on fire. It was as if some kind of tiny rat had crawled into my sinuses and used the inside of my face as its clawing bag. Everything inside my face felt swollen.

For the last two days of my visit, I was on the maximum dosage of DayQuil and NyQuil, just so I could make it through the day without collapsing into a heap somewhere and screaming for someone to just rip my sinuses out. And when I traveled back to Indiana, I was heavily dosed on DayQuil and kept my fingers crossed that my sinuses were clear enough to keep my eardrums from exploding.

When I finally got home, all I did for the rest of the week was sleep, eat, and watch television. That’s how you know I’m actually sick: my body forces me to do nothing but sit around and watch my favorite romantic comedies, guilt-free. I guess you could call my love of romantic comedies a guilty pleasure, but I don’t feel guilty about them.

I dragged myself out of bed for a wedding dress fitting that first Saturday after I’d come home, and I barely made it through. I felt entirely like shit, a cough had added itself to my symptoms, and I couldn’t even muster up excitement for my dress.  Afterward, I came home, changed into sweats, and fell asleep on the couch for 4 hours.

***
Finally, I went to urgent care after another few days of feeling like shit, and after M and my mom bugged me repeatedly to go get checked out. The doctor put me on an exciting 14-day rotation of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and codeine cough syrup.

I finished up my cycle of antibiotics two weeks ago, and I finally, FINALLY feel 100% like myself again.

***
So, being ridiculously sick for almost 3 weeks has meant no Friday Bites (though, believe me, I tried to write them). It’s meant no writing at all. I’ve been cooking, but haven’t had the wits about me to document my dishes properly.

It also means that instead of spending my post-plague time preparing action-packed Friday Bites posts, I’ve been wedding planning instead. Since emerging from my plague-cocoon, I’ve been doing almost nothing but wedding planning and cooking.

More on weddings in my next post.

For now, I’m celebrating chocolate. Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate.

And birthdays. And good friends. And chocolate.

***
I am not saying anything new by saying that baking is a labor of love. I bake for the people in my life that I love the most — my family, M, my friends. I used to be shy about sharing my baking with friends because I was afraid that whatever I made wasn’t good enough. I don’t know at what point that changed.

When I bake, I am thinking of the person for whom I am laboring, whether they are near or far. My fondness for each person goes into the whisking, the kneading, the mixing, the scooping, the shaping, the cooling, the sprinkling, the glazing. It probably also goes without saying that I don’t bake for just anybody.

One of my very closest friends’ birthdays is 3 days after mine. She’s a fellow Aries, and she is one of the best people I know. For her birthday this year, I made Joy the Baker’s double chocolate cake donuts.

***
When I discovered I could bake donuts instead of deep fry them (I am wary of the deep fry), it was game OVER. I have Joy the Baker to thank for that. For a period of time, I made all kinds of donuts, including browned butter and pistachio ones (also a Joy the Baker recipe).

The recipe I return to the most, and the one that gets the most requests, is one for the double  chocolate donuts.

***
Donuts are so magical. If you’re making cake donuts, they’re really easy to make.

I whisked together all my dry ingredients: flour, dark chocolate cocoa powder (Joy’s recipe calls for unsweetened cocoa powder, but I love the depth of flavor that dark chocolate cocoa brings), baking soda, salt and brown sugar.

ChocoDonuts_step 1.jpg

In a separate bowl, I whisk together buttermilk, an egg, melted butter and vanilla extract. I love the smells that come out of this particular bowl at all stages — the tanginess of the buttermilk, the smoothness of that butter, and the punch of sweetness from the vanilla. YUM.

ChocoDonuts_step 2.jpg

After the buttermilk, egg, butter, and vanilla are whisked to smooth, you pour them into the dry ingredients and fold the wet ones in with a spatula. Fold everything together until combined into a glossy, dark, and glorious cake batter. My batter was a little bit dry, so I added a splash more buttermilk to soften it up.

ChocoDonuts_step 3.jpg

Then, using a spoon, I spooned the batter into a well-greased donut pan. This is probably the trickiest part for me, and the reason why I didn’t get a photo of it — because my hands, somehow, got covered in batter. After wrestling the batter into the pan, I popped it into the oven for about 11 minutes.

After taking the donuts out and waiting for them to cool, I made the glaze by mixing together powdered sugar, more dark chocolate cocoa powder, salt, coconut milk and vanilla extract.

This is not a picture of the glaze, but it IS a picture of the donuts waiting to BE glazed.

This is not a picture of the glaze, but it IS a picture of the donuts waiting to BE glazed.

***
Honestly, the glazing and the sprinkles are the funnest part of donut making (aside from licking the bowl). The glaze makes the donuts look so dressed up and classy. On its own, with just the glaze, the donuts look amazing. The sprinkles though…they make these donuts a party. Every time I use them, I get so excited. I also feel like I’m being transported back to the ‘90s for some reason. If someone were to film me every time I made these donuts, they could probably put together a montage of me saying, “YAAAAYYY!” every time I throw sprinkles on the donuts.

ChocoDonuts_step 5.jpg

***
My favorite part of baking is the act of giving the finished product to a loved one, whether it’s M or a friend, or my mother, or whoever. I boxed these donuts up for my friend in a cute little cupcake box, wrote her a card, and put it in an envelope that matched the donuts’ sprinkle party perfectly.

ChocoDonuts_step 6.jpg

***
I made 10 donuts — 6 for my friend, and 4 left-overs for M and me. By the end of the evening, those 4 donuts were settled very comfortably in M’s and my bellies. I love sweet treats, but I don’t like sickly sweet ones — the dark chocolate cocoa powder made these babies just the right amount of sweet.

***
By the time I post this, there will be only 5 days left until our wedding. (!!!!!!) Stay tuned for a super fun wedding-themed Friday Bites this Friday. It won't necessarily be food-related, but it will have LOTS to do with weddings.

On Potlucks, Being Brown, and Belonging in the Desert

About an hour after getting off the plane in Reno, my mother started handing me food to “try” on the 2.5-hour drive back to my hometown Winnemucca. Since I got off the plane, I’ve been eating Gilmore Girls-quantities of food in the sometimes-indecorous style of Nigella Lawson. For those of you who are not fluent in either of these languages I’m speaking: I’m eating a lot of food and I’m stuffing it into my face without giving any fucks about looking demure.

***
I haven’t made anything this week. But I have eaten incredible amounts of good food. My mother’s birthday was last Saturday, and her friends threw her an impromptu potluck lunch.

***
I often describe Winnemucca’s location as being “the literal middle of nowhere,” not out of derision, but because it’s a little bit true. I guess you could describe any town in Nevada, excluding Reno and Las Vegas, as being in the middle of nowhere.

(Fun fact: Nevada has more ghost towns than actual towns. That might explain why I love spooky stuff so much.)

When I was growing up here, as I’ve written about before, I hated it. There weren’t any coffee shops until I was a junior or so in high school. There weren’t any bookstores or music shops or anything. There were only casinos, restaurants in casinos, Walmart, the public library, the volunteer-operated thrift store Poke-N-Peek, and one or two small clothing stores.  

What this town did have, though, was an unexpected and healthy (for the town’s size) Filipino population. My memories of Winnemucca are full of Filipino parties and potlucks. I met my childhood best friend, Chris, on Halloween night at a Filipino party when we were around 6 years old, and we’ve been BFFs ever since. (Our BFF status was cemented that very night in a very strange and inexplicable way, but that story is for another time when I can explain our weird behavior. Which will probably be never.)

Nevada seems like a great empty expanse in the western U.S. (and in a lot of ways, it is), but I grew up surrounded by people who (kind of) looked like me, and helped me know who I was and where I came from. At the time, I didn’t realize how lucky this was. To be familiar with the cadence and sounds of Tagalog and Ilocano, to know the smell of every good food and every stinky one, to know that every person has their own adobo or pancit recipes with their own trick or twist. To have a best friend who wouldn’t blink at the “weird” food you ate and wasn’t intimidated by large groups of Filipino women talking away in Tagalog.

Look at these skinny brown kids. Taken during a Filipino party in the early days.

Look at these skinny brown kids. Taken during a Filipino party in the early days.

***
What was on the menu for my mom’s potluck lunch this year: ceviche, a spicy Thai yellow curry, pancit, papaya salad (drooooool), fried chicken, mini quiches, squash pancakes with a vinegary garlicky sauce (more drool, especially with that sauce!), rice cooked with coconut oil and coconut milk (but not quite full-fledged coconut rice), cassava cake, meatballs, guacamole, baked beans with cocktail sausages (I’m dedicating an entire post to that dish, I promise you), marinated chicken breast strips, and fruit.

I haven’t even gotten to the cake yet. (More drool.)

And this potluck was smaller than last year’s. Can you even imagine? (No, no, you can’t.)

potluck_2.jpg

***
A year ago, my mother had been on her cancer treatment for about 5 months or so. At that point, the cancer was responding so well to treatment that her tumors were shrinking down to almost nothing. It was the best possible news we could receive, and we were all relieved. Things were slowly going back to normal, but I didn’t want to get too comfortable because I knew that things could go pear-shaped at any moment. Cancer can be a real shitshow in that way. So I flew home to spend a few days with my mom for her birthday. That’s when I learned that her friend was organizing a big birthday party for her.

***
My mother is notoriously late to everything. She was two hours late to her own birthday party that year. And why? She was busy cooking like 5 extra dishes because she was worried there wouldn’t be enough food. (I had also been roped into cooking two dishes, somehow. I honestly don’t remember what they were — a spicy chorizo and shiitake mushroom soup and maybe browned butter chocolate chip cookies?)

This is one of two photos I took at the party that year. This is that chorizo and shiitake mushroom soup, presented in a styrofoam bowl.

This is one of two photos I took at the party that year. This is that chorizo and shiitake mushroom soup, presented in a styrofoam bowl.

By the time we arrived at the party, people had started to lose hope that my mother would ever show up. There was already a ton of food brought by the guests, and my mother and I just added more to the spread. It was excess of the best kind.

Looking back, I didn’t really take any pictures. I was just happy and thankful for my mom’s health, and that so many people had come to celebrate her. The party was big and loud and joyful. People from every aspect of my mom’s life were there. Church friends, volunteer friends, Avon friends, Filipino friends, Thai friends — the gang was all there.

***
The complexion of the Filipino party in Winnemucca, Nevada, has changed since I left here nearly 14 years ago. (!!!) It doesn’t feel accurate for me to call them Filipino parties anymore. Though there has always been a large Latinx community and there is still a steady Filipino community, there are more kinds of brown people: Cambodian and Thai are the newest communities (to me) to grow roots of some kind in this area.

Often, when I come home, it feels like I can finally relax and take a big breath of fresh air. For me, that feeling has always been more about the landscape than anything else. In this town, I’ve always walked the tightrope between feeling at home and feeling like an outsider. These days, I still feel at home, but also know that people who are current residents have a hard time believing that I grew up here.

potluck_extra.jpg

Now though, when I come here, I know that I will be around more brown people than I’ve ever been around in Indiana. I will feel more able to take up space as a woman of color here in rural Nevada than I do in Indiana. Even when I live in a college town that boasts an international appeal.

***
I haven’t even mentioned the birthday cake yet. It was perfect. The cake itself was spongy and light -- and the frosting! I’ve been telling everyone I know about it. It was a strawberry whipped frosting — so light, and fluffy, with just the right amount of sweetness. Most frostings I’ve tasted are heavy, both in texture and sweetness, but this one was divine. I honestly cannot stop thinking about it.  

Where was it made? A local grocery store.

potluck_5.jpg

***
I don’t want to make rural Nevada seem like some kind of magical oasis. Don’t come to Winnemucca expecting to eat all this great food and attend great parties.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you are visitor to this town, you will not see the things that I see. You will not see all the people that I do, and you will not be able to eat the food that I get to eat when I am here. If you visit Winnemucca unaccompanied by a local, you will not remember anything about it except maybe the McDonalds, or the fact that the Burger King overlooks the cemetery, or that we have a giant (and I mean, truly giant) “Welcome to Winnemucca” marquee perched on the border of said cemetery if you come into town taking the West Winnemucca Boulevard exit off I-80.

The point of all this, I guess, is that no matter how small the town, how white it seems, how incredibly desolate it appears to be — we’re out here. We’re feeding and caring for each other. We’re creating and thriving our own communities when the larger world makes us feel like we’re walking a constant line between belonging and forever being seen as an outsider.

I don’t want to speak for anyone else. But this is what I’ve experienced and felt and remembered.

Sometimes, I worry that I’m remembering all this with a heavy filter. I worry that I’m forgetting all the bad shit. Not everything was or is amazing. I know that. I still get stares everywhere I go here. If you happen to accidentally interrupt a bingo game, you will get some intense glares. I can't find dried figs anywhere in town, which is maybe the most egregious insult of them all.

But memories are memories. Feelings are feelings. Delicious food is delicious food. The heart knows when things are good.

***
Also: happy birthday, Mom!

Bread, Bread, Bread.

Friday Bites is coming to you a few days late. I guess technically it’s a “Monday Bites,” at this point, but here we are. I spent my writing days last week running wedding errands and traveling across the country to visit my parents. Since I booked a 12:30pm flight, I thought that I would have the gumption and energy to write either on the 4-hour plane ride to Vegas, or during my 4-hour layover there.

Unfortunately, all I had the energy to do was sleep, eat, read a romance novel, and ignore the uber-Christian wedding party that surrounded me on the plane. (They talked over me, handed each other jelly beans and inspirational literature in front of my face, and, at one point, a bridesmaid crawled over me (without permission or even acknowledging that she was being rude AF) so she could sit next to the bride for 5 minutes while the groom used the restroom (he, on the other hand, was very polite). What did they talk about for that 5 minutes? SCRIPTURE. Whyyyyyy.)

***

In the days leading up to my trip, I decided it was time to make something completely new to me: bread. While searching for Great British Bake Off cookbooks at the library, I stumbled across Paul Hollywood’s new cookbook, A Baker’s Life. Depending on your tastes, Paul Hollywood is either an attractive man or a creepy one. For some of us, he’s a little of column A and a little of column B.

Regardless of how you feel about Paul’s blue eyes or the cryptic looks he gives GBBO contestants, this is a beautiful cookbook. He writes about growing up the son of a baker, and includes lots of pictures from his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The book divides the recipes into sections, beginning with childhood favorites or uncomplicated bakes and then progresses into more and more involved recipes. Paul does a lot of explaining between chapters, which is always my jam. He says novice bread makers should start with soda breads and then go from there.

So, I started with his Caramelized Onion Soda Bread. Easy enough.

***

Have you ever caramelized onions before? Like, really caramelized them? It takes a hundred years.

Okay, maybe not that long. Maybe it takes an hour or so. I’ve always heard that actually caramelizing onions takes a long time, but when you’re actually caramelizing, you start to realize that maybe you should have started doing this much earlier in the day. Maybe you should have started this at a time when you’re not super hungry and maybe you shouldn’t have thought that you could also make a soup that needs at least 90 minutes to simmer tonight.

soda bread_step 1.jpg

Did you know that, when caramelizing onions, you throw in brown sugar at some point in the process? I didn’t. It’s magic. At Paul’s suggestion, I also threw in leaves from “two bushy sprigs of thyme.” Which, who knows what that means. I’m not Barefoot Contessa enough to just pluck two fresh sprigs of thyme out of my garden. Not yet, anyway.

soda bread_step 3.jpg

Cooking those onions slow and low, though, pays off. When the onions start to get soft and juicy and golden is when you start smiling and stop being upset with yourself for your errors in time management judgement. This shit is going to taste GREAT, you whisper to yourself.

soda bread_step 4.jpg

After the onions are done and cooling on a plate, you start your dough. It’s simple: two kinds of flours (plain white and whole wheat), baking soda, and buttermilk. Paul advises that you mix everything with your hands. He doesn’t tell you whether you should actually knead the dough or not? And he also doesn’t tell you if it’s possible to “overwerk” soda bread? I can’t remember the details of that particular episode of GBBO.

What I do remember is that you have to make the cuts in your dough fairly deep. Why? I can’t remember that part. I just remember that Mat the firefighter in season 3 didn’t make the cuts in his soda bread deep enough and he got schooled on it by Paul during the judging. I wasn’t about to make that same mistake.

IMG_9016.jpg

Paul says the soda bread should be ready in about 35 minutes. You should be able to tap the bottom of the loaf, and it should sound hollow. I made my cuts too deep maybe, and the loaf began to break in half when I tried to pick it up. When it did, I could see that it wasn’t baked through yet. Also, the bread was really hot, and I don’t have what Nigella Lawson calls “asbestos hands” yet.

I finally took the bread out after 50 minutes or so. I did what Mary and Paul do on GBBO, which is cut a slice out of the middle of the loaf and press a finger into it to feel the texture and see if it springs back.

So I did it, too. It didn’t spring back. The outline of my finger stayed molded into the bread.

I’m not quite sure what went wrong — did I put too much oil in with the caramelized onions? Was there just too much moisture from the onions in the bread? Did I not mix the onions into the dough well enough? Was my conversion of Paul’s Celsius oven temps to my shitty American Fahrenheit oven off? Did I overwork the dough?

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I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what happened to my soda bread. I do know, however, that despite it all, that bread was delish AF, and I ate at least two and a half slices while I was cooking soup and then ate another slice with my soup.

The caramelized onions have a deep, complex, savory sweetness that is unlike anything I’ve eaten before. Honestly, caramelize onions the right way whenever you get the chance — it’s worth it. You don’t have to put them in bread. You can put them on a burger, or eat them on their own if that’s your thing, or whatever. They’re incredibly delicious, and I’m converted.

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Though I’m home with my parents right now, stuffing myself with all kinds of good food (guess what this Friday’s bite is going to be ALL about), I miss that caramelized onion soda bread a little bit.

Okay, a lot.

This Week's Recipe:

On Comfort: Chicken Soup, Chocolate Cake, and Ani

This week has been full of paradox: sunshine and non-stop rain, feeling stuck while also feeling propelled forward, feeling exhausted and also feeling energized, weather warm enough to not need a jacket and needing a jacket, enjoying my favorite feminist musician and being annoyed by the douchy white guy behind me. Instead of getting frustrated, I’ve been trying to accept the contradictions. Embrace all the things that are opposite but true at the same time.

I did double duty and frontloaded my week by making two things in one night. Who am I?!

***
The craving for something brothy and healthy struck again. M requested a chicken soup of some kind, so I pulled out an oldie but goodie: Immunity Soup from the January 2017 issue of Cooking Light. (I was actually looking for a spring vegetable chicken soup, but had to settle for this one this time around.) Indeed, another soup that purports to boost your immunity. It certainly can't hurt.

When the weather is 70 degrees one day, and cold enough to snow the next day, it feels like my body is constantly trying to find its bearings. Am I warm? Am I cold? Do I need to wear 4 layers and wool socks today or can I show off this cat print short-sleeve shirt I just got? Am I feverish or is it allergies? Am I achy from sickness or am I sore from yoga? It’s impossible to tell these days.

***
This soup starts out with your favorite soup base layers: a tablespoon or two of oil heated in a Dutch oven (or heavy-bottomed pot), then diced onion, sliced carrots and celery tossed in. I used olive oil, but you might use whatever you’ve got — vegetable oil, canola oil, whatever. The sizzle of the veggies as they hit that oil is so satisfying, along with that continual sizzle as they cook gently, getting soft and releasing their juices (*insert a sly Nigella look here*) into the pot.

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As I chopped and diced and minced the veggies, I decided to turn on some of my favorite Ani DiFranco tunes. Ani has been a part of my life since I was 16 or 17. I don’t actually know how many times I’ve seen her live. Her music has been formative for me in so many ways — politically, emotionally, artistically, interpersonally, worldview-ally. Her music was friend to me through hard times, and was, at times, one of the few things to get me through whatever darkness I was in.

***
Next comes the pound of sliced mushrooms (I got pre-sliced ones this time around, though I usually don’t mind buying a pound or so of them in bulk and washing/drying/slicing them myself) and 10 entire cloves of garlic, minced. I may have thrown in an extra 2 or 3 cloves because however much garlic a recipe calls for, it usually isn’t enough for me.

Toss these into the pot, and let the mushrooms release their moisture. Savor that sharp smell of the garlic and let it fill your kitchen. I mean, you don’t really have a choice.

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I sang along to every single Ani song that came into my kitchen that afternoon, though I haven’t listened to many of them for years. I haven’t forgotten the airiness of Both Hands or the clipped turns of Swan Dive and those lines about pulling out your tampon and splashing around in shark-infested waters. The ambitious moodiness of Gravel (“I stood out on the porch, thinking ‘Fight, fight, fight at all costs’/ Instead, I let you in, just like I’ve always done/ and I sat you down/ and offered you a beer” and “Maybe you can keep me from being happy/but you’re not going to stop me from having fun”). The raw anger and anguish of Dilate.

***
Next come the chickpeas, the broth, the thyme, and the bay leaves. Stir, and bring it all to a boil. Once it begins to boil, throw in two pounds of uncooked chicken breast, along with some salt and crushed red pepper flakes. Turn the heat down, cover and simmer for about 35 minutes.

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The very first time I saw Ani perform live, I burst into tears as soon as she stepped onto stage. The song she started that show with was “Shy.” I started crying and didn’t stop until 20 or 30 minutes later. The sobbing was uncontrollable; I didn’t know it was coming and when it came, it hit me like freight train.

That trend would continue every time I saw Ani, and it seemed that she always opened with a song that was particularly meaningful for me in the moment.

***
As I started making the frosting for Nigella’s Dark and Sumptuous Chocolate Cake, I could feel the sobs building in my chest as I sang along to Fire Door. I still knew every word and belted them out along with her as I combined water, espresso powder, cocoa, brown sugar, and butter in a saucepan, heated, and stirred.

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These songs felt like a homecoming. They felt like being able to finally breathe big and full in a completely safe space.

***
And then something happened. It occurred to me, as I was mixing the dry ingredients for the cake and checking on the soup, that I was a different person listening to these songs. The songs that got me through my adolescence and early and mid-twenties were still gorgeous and clever and everything that I remembered them to be — but I understood each song differently. I was hearing each song through ears of wisdom? Experience? Through a body and mind and heart that had finally found dry land after weathering storm after storm in a shitty, disintegrating lifeboat? I related to each song completely differently. It’s like… looking back and realizing that when I was in my teens and twenties, I thought I knew what Ani was talking about. And now, in my early 30s, I see that I actually didn’t know shit back then, but I do now.

I guess that’s just part of being a human. Growing up. Maturing.

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***
The Ani concert was the centerpiece of my week. Everything revolved around it. I braced myself for the tears and the swells of emotion.

I was excited, for sure. But this time around, the sobs stayed put wherever they were hiding out. Ani opened with Names and Dates and Times, a song that I actually don't know all the words to (*gasp*). She played Napoleon and Shameless and Anticipate and To The Teeth and Hypnotized and My I.Q. and Not a Pretty Girl. She played a lot of newer stuff that I didn’t know.

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The crowd was also different from any other Ani show I’ve been to. The Ani shows I’ve been to have been attended by mostly women and women-identified people. Dudes in the audience have been few and far between. In between songs, people shout things at her, like, “We love you, Ani!” The audience usually sings along so loudly that she has to stop at least once and tell everyone to stop so she can hear herself play.

At this show, some things were the same. Audience members kept yelling “We love you, Ani!” People recited My I.Q. along with her so loudly that she had to stop in the middle and say, “Oh, honey, you have to let me do this one.”

But a lot of things were different. Someone yelled, “I love you, Annie!” (Ani responded, “It’s Ah-ni, but thank you, I feel the love anyway.”) Men were everywhere. A drunk-off-his-ass douchebag know-it-all guy sat behind us and talked loudly over Gracie and Rachel, the opening act, and then continued his tone-deaf, useless commentary during Ani’s performance. When Ani sang, “I’m gonna take all my friends/ and I'm gonna move to Canada/ and we’re gonna die of old age,” he shouted, “Yeah! Let’s go!” (I stopped myself from turning around and saying, “You’re not invited, bro.”) Some people got up to leave immediately after Ani finished the main set, not realizing there’s a thing called an encore because you should and will never get enough of being in the same room with her.  

***
After the show, I stopped by the merch table to buy a t-shirt. When I made my way through the crowd, made eye contact with the merch table person and bought my shirt, I had apparently “cut” in front of a group of (white) women. After we left, M told me about all the passive aggressive shade they had thrown in my direction while I was buying my shirt.

One woman had said, “WELL. You know what happens when you ASSUME…”

Yes. I do know what happens. I get to buy my Ani t-shirt before you.

(Also: like, please. There are no lines at merch tables. You see your opening, you get in there and buy your shirt before they sell out of your size. It’s not hard. How many times in my 32 years have I waited politely for everyone to go before me, and when I finally get to the front, the t-shirt I want is sold out of my size. Sorry, not sorry. Get yours. I'm gettin' mine. Like Ani says in 32 Flavors, "I'm not between you and your ambition." What a metaphor/analogy this shit is in so many ways.)

***
After the soup simmers, covered, for about 30-35 minutes, you place the chicken on a cutting board, shred it, and dump it back into the pot. You take a bunch of kale, rip it into smaller pieces and stir it into the soup. You let it all simmer for another 5 minutes or so. It’s done when that kale is wilted just a little bit.

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***
Now, this cake. Nigella’s instructions tell you to make the frosting first because it needs time to cool. She says that the time it takes to make the cake, bake it, and let it cool, is the perfect amount of time to let the frosting cool. I’ll be honest — I had my doubts. When I couldn’t wait any longer to finish the cake, I took a look at the frosting and shook my head. “Nigella, I don’t know about this. This frosting seems a little stiff.” But I gave it a stir and poured it over the cake.

It was perfect.

On Nigella’s instruction, I joyously decorated with chopped pistachios. No edible rose petals or edible flowers even, but just the pistachios were perfect.

(Baking notes: Nigella's recipe is vegan -- she uses coconut butter and coconut oil. I, however, love regular butter too much to go vegan, so I used regular unsalted butter and canola oil for this recipe, and it turned out just as dreamy.)

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***
This week seems to have been all about comfort — the food and music of it. Chicken soup, chocolate cake, Ani. They all came as I remembered them, but with twists. Chicken soup with mushrooms, chickpeas, and chili pepper flakes. Chocolate cake with espresso and salty, savory pistachios on top. Ani with the same good songs (as well as new ones), a wiser me, and a weirder crowd.  

It’s good to go home. To bring your older, wiser self there. To love the same things, and to love how they’ve changed. To love the same things, and love them differently.

Ani sings in Good, Bad, Ugly, "Strangers are exciting/ Their mystery never ends/ But there's nothing like looking at your own history/ in the faces of your friends." It feels a little bit like that, but...different.

***
I'll end this week's Friday Bites with some vintage Ani. Happy eating, happy cooking, happy being, y'all. 

This week's recipes:

Banana Cream Pie, Miso Salmon, "Mole" Tacos, and Instinct

FINALLY. It is here. (At least, it was here.) That blasted Banana Cream Pie.

After I posted last week, I realized that I was actually ready to make the damn thing. My bananas had been doing the last of their browning in the freezer, so when I woke up on Saturday morning, I took them out to thaw.  

***

If you know me at all, then you know that I follow recipes TO. THE. LETTER. In order to be able to cook any recipe with any amount of confidence, I need exact measurements, exact ingredients, exact equipment. None of this a pinch of this, a splash of that nonsense. If the recipe calls for baby bella mushrooms, but the store only has creminis? Forget it — the whole thing is ruined. If the recipe says I need to use a chinoise, but I only have a regular ol’ mesh strainer? You best believe I’m ordering that unwieldy chinoise off of Amazon.

This is why I love the Milk Bar cookbook. Christina Tosi writes with so much of the detail that I crave — not only is she very specific about the ingredients and equipment and temperatures, she also is very specific about why each of these details matter. I love that I get to learn exactly why all of these things matter to Tosi, so I can figure out whether it matters to me. Sometimes it’s a matter of chemistry; sometimes it’s a matter of preference.

***

So I started off with making a chocolate crumb on Friday night. I mixed dark chocolate cocoa powder (which, I’ll note, was NOT the fancy Valrhona cocoa powder that Tosi insists on) with some salt, a little bit of sugar, some flour, and some melted butter. Once it all came together to make little clumps of dark chocolate-y goodness, I spread it out on a parchment-lined baking sheet and popped that bad boy in the oven for about 20 minutes. Once it cooled down after coming out of the oven, I put those little flavor nuggets in a Tupperware container and hid them (because they were in danger of getting snacked on until they disappeared into M’s and my bellies).

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The next morning, I used the chocolate crumb to make the pie crust. I threw the crumb into the food processor to grind everything down to a sandy mixture, and then mixed the sand with some melted butter. Once the mixture held its shape, I transferred it to my pie dish and smooshed it around until it resembled something like a pie crust. (This is only my third pie crust ever -- these kinds of pie crusts have lots to teach me about patience, presence, and a gentle touch.)

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And then came the banana cream part. Those god damn bananas were so slimy, and smelled sweet with a hint of rot. It sounds alarming, but I put all my trust in Tosi and threw those bananas in my blender along with heavy cream, milk and some other stuff.

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I won’t describe the rest of the process because it would be tedious and probably boring for you. The highlights, though: heating the cream mixture slowly on the stove and whisking the hell out of it and also feeling like I was on the Great British Bake Off. Blooming gelatin for the first time ever. The heavenly smell of the banana and the cream and the butter, all combining to create something magical. Using food coloring for the first time in literally decades.

The final product was divine and well worth the wait. The banana cream was packed with banana flavor (from only two bananas!) and sweetness with a hint of butteriness. Paired with that salty dark chocolate crumb crust to cut the sweetness a bit, it was a perfect-tasting pie.

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The pie was demolished in two days.

***

I love Nigella Lawson and her show, Nigella Bites. (And, as I write this, I’m realizing that I’ve been inadvertently inspired to name this project after her. Honestly, I didn’t mean to do it, but it’s a lovely homage, I think.)

Nigella is deserving of her own ode entirely, but I’ll briefly say that I had no idea who she was until about a month ago. I had an episode of Iron Chef America on in the background, and became captivated by one of the judges, who turned out to be Nigella. I asked M if he’d ever heard of her, and he looked at me like I’d just asked him if he'd ever heard about a delicious treat called chocolate. So we watched the entire second season of Nigella Bites (it’s all we could find on YouTube or any streaming service), and I proceeded to fall in love.

Now, if you don’t know about Nigella, here’s what you need to know: she’s not a classically trained chef. She started out as a journalist and somehow fell into having a cooking show. She delights in the process of cooking, as well as the end result. For her, taking the time to run a finger over the “crocodile skin” of a bowl of capers as she pours them into a bowl or marvel at the brilliant red “jewels” of pomegranate seeds as she drops them over a platter of shredded pork is as important as the finished meal itself. She emphasizes that the process of cooking should bring you as much joy as eating it does. In Nigella Bites, she does not give the viewer exact measurements and she does not measure exactly, except when she bakes. She adds spices to her dishes without measuring, and tells you, “Don’t be apologetic with the spices.” I actually don't know what that means, but I like how it sounds.

If you know me, you might think that Nigella’s style might drive me nuts. And in an earlier version of my cooking self, she might have. Now though? I love her.

***

All this is to say that I fucked up no meals this week, and one of the meals that I did not fuck up was Nigella’s Miso Salmon recipe from the Simply Nigella cookbook. While I was making preparations, I muttered something like, “Nigella says I need xyz for this, buuutttt…I’m going to do this instead.” M looked at me and said, “Whoa. What’s going on here? Look at you, going off script!”

What can I say? Nigella gives me confidence.

Since we bought double the salmon, I doubled the marinade with no problem. And then — and then — I improvised the sides. I cooked up some quinoa with leftover vegetable broth and some smashed cloves of garlic. I sautéed some on-the-edge kale and seasoned it with salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon.

The salmon was perfect — the miso, fish sauce, soy sauce, and garlic all combined to make a dish that was savory, with a depth of flavor and salt that only umami can give. It was so delicious, and so easy to make. It also felt healthy. You know those meals that just feel satisfying and clean? This was one of those.

Alas, I took no pictures because I was too busy eating. I’m terrible at writing about food, aren’t I?

***

My other success of the week was Slow Cooker Chicken Mole Tacos from the January 2018 issue of Cooking Light.

I’m 100% aware that the stuff I made is not mole. BUT! It’s still super tasty and was so easy to make. I simply salted a little over 2 pounds of chicken thighs and put them in the slow cooker.

Then, in my food processor, I put a can of whole tomatoes, a diced onion, smashed cloves of garlic, some chopped semi-sweet chocolate, raisins, toasted sliced almonds, chicken stock, cumin, cinnamon, adobo sauce, and chipotle chiles.

Nowhere in the recipe did it say, “Oh, by the way, this is a lot of stuff and you might need to process this shit in two batches.” I also ignored the maximum liquid fill line on my processor because who pays attention to that stuff anyway. I turned the processor on, and the mixture leaked out of the lid and all over my counter and the base of the processor. So, I'm here to tell you that you should pay attention to those markings. Unless you really enjoy cleaning red sauce out of every nook and cranny in your prep space, which I do not.

And then I poured everything into the slow cooker, put the lid on, plugged it in, and turned it on low. 8 hours later — tacos. They were delicious. The sauce is not mole, but it really wants to be, which is to say it is more like a hearty smoky salsa sauce with mole-esque undertones.

The result? Tasty-ass tacos. The recipe makes a lot of extra sauce, and I’m excited to use it in something else. (More cooking improv?! Who am I?!)

***

While making food this week, I thought about instinct. Trusting my gut and my knowledge.

The banana cream pie wasn’t perfect. The filling didn’t hold its shape, even after a good chilling in the refrigerator. As soon as we cut a piece of pie, the filling oozed all over the plate. It oozed deliciously, of course, but oozed just the same.

The recipe had told me to heat and whisk the cream until it became a really thick glue, almost like cement. I whisked until my arm got tired and then kept going, and the mixture wasn’t thick like glue, but I thought it was good enough. I thought about continuing to heat and whisk, but I didn’t want to overdo it. I had a conversation with myself in the kitchen: “Should I keep going? No, I’ll stop here. Well, wait. Yes, maybe I should keep going. Hmm… no, I’m going to trust myself. This is good enough.”

Instinct isn’t coming out of the womb knowing how to do everything right the first time. So much of what we call “instinct” is just trusting your gut, your knowledge, your resiliency and ability to learn. It’s trusting your gut and what you know, and knowing that if you fail, you’ll figure out how to get it right the next time. Or the time after that, or the time after that. We get “instinct” from learning from others, from following directions, but also, paradoxically, from taking risks. The only way we can develop a gut instinct and build our knowledge is to learn the basics, make mistakes, adjust, and try things over and over again.

While I was heating and whisking that banana cream, my gut feeling wasn’t correct and neither was my knowledge. But that’s okay. I’m already planning the next banana cream pie, and, fingers crossed, it’s not going to fall out all over the place.

More Disasters, Stubborn Bananas, and a Meditation on Creating as a Response to Violence

Wow, y’all. I have not fucked up this much food this many times in recent memory.

I started this week off with a Nigella Lawson recipe from her cookbook, Simply Nigella: Thai Noodles with Cinnamon and Shrimp.

It sounds amazing, right? I was so excited to make this and then eat it. My mouth watered just imagining the umami flavors of the soy and oyster sauces fusing with the sweetness of the cinnamon and cloves to create a flavor bomb of awesomeness.

What I made was the exact opposite of that. I had double the noodles and double the shrimp, so I thought I would just double the sauce, which has large quantities of light and dark soy sauces (??? I don’t know the difference ???), oyster sauce, a concoction of dark soy sauce and brown sugar, pepper, chicken broth concentrate, and water.

I thought I had everything under control. I marveled at the darkness of the sauce and the smell of the garlic and ginger and the cinnamon sticks and the star anise as it simmered and bubbled in the pot. It truly smelled incredible. Then, I dumped in my shrimp. I stirred them around and realized I had made a huge mistake. The shrimp were so coated in the sauce that I wouldn’t be able to tell when the shrimp turned pink because the sauce was so dark.

I shrugged and thought, oh well. Shrimp don’t take too long to cook, and when I put the noodles in, they will soak up the sauce, the shrimp will turn back to a normal color, and everything will balance out.

I dumped the noodles into the pot, and they also turned dark. The more I tossed the ingredients together, the more everything simply turned full dark, no stars.

And not only was every ingredient of the dish just the same shade of dark, they were amazingly, incredibly salty. I tasted one shrimp and thought it wasn’t too bad. When I ate an entire bowl, though, I had to chug water every couple of bites because I was afraid of shriveling up like those aliens in The Faculty. 

Even through the saltiness though, I could taste the sweetness of the spices. I could taste what the dish was like under all its darkness.

***
These goddamn bananas are driving me nuts. They are still ripening.

So still no banana cream pie this week. My baking fingers are itching to make something.

***
I’ll be honest. For the past week and a half or so, my body has been preparing to shed its uterine lining. (Yes, I’m going to talk about periods. Deal with it.) This means that my energy has been super low, my ovaries have randomly felt like they were trying to rip their way out of my body, and I’ve been hungering for moderately salty foods  (i.e. NOT the monstrosity I made of Nigella's recipe) and deeply chocolate foods. Sometimes, even at the same time. (Gasp.)  

On Wednesday, I could feel the cramps coming. It’s like watching a train come down the tracks really slowly. I can hear its whistle, I know it’s on its way, and I know I have only a brief amount of time before it flattens me on the tracks.

So I hurried and made this Spicy Beef Noodle Soup from the latest issue of Cooking Light. Cooking Light reports that the soup is immune-system boosting. It’s brothy, it’s spicy, it cleans out your sinuses. It’s got a million cloves of garlic in it (okay, fine, it actually has only 15+ garlic cloves), it’s got little nuggets of beef, crisp baby bok choy, and earthy mushrooms. It’s delicious.

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Two hours after I finished the soup, my cramps hit. I spent the rest of the night on the couch with my trusty heating pad and a comfortably full belly.

***
Usually, when I mess up a dish, I want to forget it ever happened. I want to bury the recipe and my mistakes in a cemetery along with all my other botched things (food and otherwise). I usually make notes on the recipe for myself, for when I've forgotten the disaster at hand and want to try again. But that amnesia and ensuing motivation usually comes long after. Weeks. Months. Maybe even years.

I was so disappointed in my Thai noodles miscalculations. I was disappointed that I didn't get to enjoy what I could tell was a tasty dish underneath all that salt, and I was disappointed in myself for not trusting my intuition (which had been yelling and waving its arms at me frantically as I ignored it and continued to pour unthinkable amounts of salty ingredients into the pot).

This time, however, I wanted to get right back on the horse. I wanted to try again. I want to try again.

***
I’ve been waiting around for these bananas to ripen because I really want that banana cream pie. But it occurred to me that I don’t have to wait around to bake, just because the bananas aren’t ready. I can bake something else while I wait.  I don’t have to deprive myself of baking for however many weeks, just because these bananas are taking forever to rot.

So simple a revelation, and so duh, but, man.

And so, I’m ending on another culinary cliffhanger this week. I’m going to make a Nigella chocolate cake. I have no idea where I’m going to find edible rose petals for this thing, but I trust that I will find a suitable substitute somewhere. 

Who knows. Maybe next week’s Friday Bites will chronicle the making of a dark and sumptuous chocolate cake and the world’s tastiest banana cream pie. Here’s hoping.

***
I’ve realized that cooking is nice and all, but baking is what makes me feel like everything is going to be okay in the world. The precision and order of baking is comforting in times of chaos and violence, which is the world we live in. It's not a coincidence that my need to create something tangible and nourishing reared its head after I read the news about the18th school shooting of year. When I feel powerless and devastated, the instinct to do something comes.

There are so many things to do. Call your representatives. Protest. Petition. Lobby for change. Write op-ed pieces. Tweet angrily.

I often struggle with what feels like the most effective thing to do in the moment. What if the thing that feels best and right is to create something? To bake a fucking cake? Does it do anything to create something - a dish, a cake, a pie, a pastry, a poem, a blog post, an essay - and put it out there? What if you create it and put it out into the world with love and revolution in your heart and mind? Is that something?

Soup Disasters & Banana Cream Pie

Friday Bites is my new weekly blogging experiment, where I write and reflect on the food I’ve made during the week. It will be published every…you guessed it…Friday. Let’s see what happens.  
***

Do you ever get that feeling that you’re…full? Not full of joy or gratitude or feelings or whatever. I mean like, you’ve been eating lots of meat and cheese and carbs and you feel like you are just…full. Like kind of bloated, but fuller? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

When I get to feeling full in the way I just attempted to describe, I crave soup. Brothy soup. This week, I wanted to make some soups that were brothy but hearty enough to keep me satisfied.

So I went for Chrissy Teigen’s vegetable tortilla soup from her cookbook Cravings. It looked bright, healthy-ish, and tasty. I skimmed over the part of Chrissy’s recipe blurb that said the soup had “the perfect kick” and went about my business.

Without question, I chopped up an entire jalapeño and threw it into the soup pot (seeds, membrane, and all). A memory flashed through my mind of the time when, barehanded, I chopped up a fresh jalapeño from a friend’s garden, and the ensuing flames of pain that came when I got the jalapeño juice (alright, fine, the capsaicin) all over my hands and just inside the rim of one nostril. My fingers and nose burned for days. I wish I were exaggerating.

But I dismissed the thought because I would never make that mistake again. And anyway, store-bought jalapeños are fairly mild, in my experience.

As I measured two entire tablespoons of chili powder into the soup, the thought crossed my mind that this might be too much for me. I double- and triple-checked the recipe, and thought, “Okay. Two whole tablespoons? Really? Alright, Chrissy. I trust you.”

The soup simmered, and I fried up some tortilla strips with excitement and anticipation. My kitchen smelled amazing, and I was so hungry. When I finally got a chance to taste the soup, my mouth had exactly two seconds to enjoy the flavor before the spicy heat hit me. I felt like the chili powder had gotten into my sinuses, and my nose started running. I started sweating after two bites, and a few minutes later my eyes started watering. I felt like I was on an episode of Hot Ones, trying to make it through one of the hottest hot wings. I kept eating the crumbled cotija cheese because it felt so cool in my mouth. I started laying pieces of cold tortilla on my tongue. M poured me a glass of coconut milk (because the only actual milk in our house is saved for baking). My skin felt hot. I was turning inside out.

Now, what really bums me out? The “perfect kick” for Chrissy Teigen is 30 minutes of sweaty, teary torture for me and additional digestion problems that come by later at an unexpected time.

Thankfully, M can hang with the spice level of this soup, so it’s all his.

And because I’m sad about the soup, I didn’t take any pictures of it. Oops.  

***

I don’t know what it is about barley soups, but I can’t resist them. Beef barley, vegetable barley,  vegetable and beef barley, mushroom and barley. When I was a kid, I loved the Progresso beef barley canned soup and hogged them all for myself when my parents bought them from the store.

So this week, I made a mushroom barley soup using a combination of ingredients and process from The Kitchn and Real Simple recipes. (Look at me! I'm out here, just winging it!) There were no jalapeños in this recipe, no tablespoons of spice. Just some good old-fashioned onions, carrots, celery, mushrooms, and barley.

There’s not much to say about it, other than it was tasty, beautiful, and exactly what I needed on a Wednesday.

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The real piéce de résistance of the week hasn’t been made yet, and it probably will have to wait until the weekend. What is it? It’s banana cream pie, recipe courtesy of Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar cookbook.

Why banana cream pie? Well, there are a few reasons.

  1. Banana cream pie is delicious. Why would I not want to make it?
  2. I’ve been watching the first season of The Mind of a Chef, and saw the episode where Christina Tosi makes a tasty-looking banana cream pie with ripened-to-black bananas. I was intrigued and, also, extremely on board.
  3. Last weekend, M told the story of the best banana cream pie he’s ever had. It was so good that since then, he’s measured all banana cream pies against That One Pie. I’m up for the challenge of making a banana cream pie that will blow that one out of the water.

But when we went grocery shopping, all the bananas — and I mean ALL of the bananas — were green. And not just yellow with a hint of green. They. Were. All. GREEN.

So I’m waiting. The bananas are in a paper bag, ripening extremely slowly. It’s the first time I can think of where the making of the delicious treat is not on my timeline — it’s up to the bananas.

So maybe I’ll get to make banana cream pie this weekend. Maybe I won’t. It’s really just up to the bananas. 

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