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.

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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.

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!).

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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. :)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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.


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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

***
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.)

***
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.

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.

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.

***
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!

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.

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.

***

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. 

Gratitude: the food edition.

These days, I'm trying to remember gratitude. Life is hard enough on its own. Partly because shit happens, and mostly because the systems that we live and participate in are racist and patriarchal and paternalistic and violent and unjust and every kind of phobic. I've been known to say this on a daily basis:      

Some days, I get overwhelmed with how fucked everything seems, how my every day seems so inextricably woven with oppression and injustice, even though I'm fighting every second to dismantle it. 

It is those days, when I feel so backed into a corner and so overwhelmed, that I need to remember gratitude. I need to remember joy in every small thing, wherever I can get it. 

***

I've been home from traveling for almost two weeks now. I'm finally (finally!) over my jetlag and getting back into my meal planning routine. Which sounds riveting, yes, but honestly -- meal planning/cooking are sometimes the only things I do for myself in the course of a week. When I'm choosing recipes, I'm choosing shit that looks delicious and worth working for at the end of a long workday. I'll write more in-depth about meal planning another time (maybe? I'm kind of excited about doing it?), but today, I just want to take account of the good shit, and talk about some of my favorite things, culinary-wise. 

***

1. Getting a goodie bag full of fresh produce from a friend's garden. I thought we were getting hooked up with basil and jalepenos. (Okay, but seriously, how do I get some tilda action up in here?! Help me!) Instead, we got this cornucopia of goodness. 

I've already used a bunch of peppers for breakfast adventures. 

Yes, that's a motherfucking homegrown cantelope you see. Our near-future is full of stuffed peppers, jalapeno pineapple upside-down cakes, boozy cantelope drinks, chowder with roasted peppers. So thankful for these friends of mine who grow food with such care. 

2. Heirloom tomatoes are one of my all-time favorite summer foods. If I see heirloom tomatoes on any menu in any form, you can bet I'm ordering it and I'm loving it. One of my favorite summer snacks is eating heirloom cherry tomatoes raw and being brought to my knees by all the different flavors and all the beautiful colors. 

Heirloom tomatoes snuggled up with jalapenos. 

These heirlooms are no exception. I ate ONE, and almost fell on the floor with their deliciousness. 

3. Roasting chiles is one of the most satisfying activities ever. Even though it gets to be 500 degrees in my kitchen if I'm roasting chiles in the summer, I love broiling and charring them, throwing them into a paper bag for a few minutes, and then peeling that skin off. There's something so satisfying about the whole process. I don't know what it is. It's so easy? It smells so good? ????

Unfortunately, I had too much fun roasting all my peppers and didn't get any pictures of them. So, don't take my word for it. Roast some of your own. 

4. Slicing corn off the cob. It's a pain in the ass, kind of, but it's satisfying to just slice through all those kernels. The result is delicious, fresh corn kernels ready for roasting or throwing into a summer chowder or just throwing into a regular old summer corn salad. (Did you know you can eat raw fresh corn and it's delicious af?! YES.)

Again, I had far too much fun slicing my corn off the cob this week and roasting those suckers, so no pictures for this either. Try it out yourself. 

***

That's what I've got so far. 

Even when it's hard to start my gratitude list, I find that once I start, I keep going. And suddenly, I am filled with all the little things that bring me joy. 

And that's how I'm getting through this week.

***

And because Reading Rainbow kept coming up in my head as I wrote this post, I'll end with this: