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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
