What I'm Consuming, April: A Break

From this, at least

Apparently, I’ve been doing this newsletter monthly for a little bit over six years. I started it at a time when I was between jobs, and when I thought maybe I would get into food media, so the combination seemed like a good time to try getting some structure in my life on this front. Since then, I’ve worked at a few different places, and moved into design media, not food media. I switched on the option for paid subscriptions during the pandemic and started donating the proceeds to charity, which has given me more motivation to keep doing it in the many moments where I think to myself “who gives a shit?” I suppose the ultimate drive, however, is my own obsession with finishing projects and meeting deadlines, two things that plague me. Apparently this plaguing makes me good at my full-time job. Above all else, it has been a good reminder of my dad in a ritualistic way even though there was once a time I would have done anything to briefly forget him.

But I’m about to take the most extended break from work as I’ve known it because I am having a baby, something I haven’t written about here because, as I’ve said before, this project has always walked a delicate line for me in terms of how much I reveal about my personal life. Even though what I eat has absolutely been impacted by being pregnant, I felt a revulsion to writing about this experience publicly that comes from a a place too complex for me to fully parse. My sister asked me the other day if I would be one of those parents who did or did not post their child on social media and I realized I didn’t really have an answer, my thoughts waffling between man, I guess it is unfair to put them out there when they didn’t consent to it and well, all of our data has already been stolen and put places we didn’t realize so what would I really be protecting them from? If that response isn’t clear, I haven’t made a lot of decisions about any of this.

Not writing about all this has been helped by the fact I have had, so far, a relatively easy experience being pregnant, which makes me feel exceptionally lucky. Even morning sickness, which I was convinced would plague me, given my mom had it bad and I get motion sickness super easily, didn’t even cause me to throw up once. It has been funny to me how one of the top three questions I get asked is whether I’ve had any cravings. I assume I’m disappointing people when I reveal it’s just the usual stuff most people want all the time that you’re not supposed to eat too much of—bagels, donuts—which doesn’t feel particular to this time in my life. There’s of course all the stuff you’re not supposed to eat, which I generally find pretty dull as well; there’s nothing like knowing you should be avoiding mercury to make you really want tuna salad. I’ve found not drinking less and less of a thought as time has gone on, which, as someone with a family history of alcoholism, has been a welcome relief.

So much of pregnancy has been not hard or amazing but just interesting to me; it’s interesting to have a whole new experience where everything you’re feeling is like something you’ve felt before, but different. Given that this is what I’m hoping for in parenting, it’s been a nice validation, which I’ll take when I can get it. But the thing that has helped even in the hard moments is reminding myself how little I can control and how much I don’t know what will happen next, which, as I guess every therapist I’ve ever had has been telling my my whole life, actually makes you feel better than the opposite technique.

By my count I still have about 60 recipes left from the cookbook to tackle, which would take roughly another six years going at my current pace. That feels like a long time, and a different version of myself to come, so it’s hard for me to imagine that I’m going to complete this project, except for the voice in my head screaming that I have to. Of course, there could be lots of different ways to do it, and part of me loves the idea of being able to connect this to a generation that won’t ever know my father (plus, there’s so many good recipes left I want to dig into). But given that the one thing everyone seems to agree on about having children is that you have less time than you had before, I am trying to give myself the grace to accept that it might not happen, or at least not in a timely manner. This is all a long preamble to say that I’m taking a bit of a break for at least while I go on parental leave for the summer. For April, it felt particularly hard to avoid the elephant in the room (me), given that we literally moved and had a baby shower thrown for us, so if you are a paid subscriber, you’ll—at last!—see that reflected in my usual missive below.

This is the last newsletter I’ll send until, well, TBD. If you have a paid subscription, your subscription has been paused, so you won’t be charged further until I come back (and if that ends up being never, I will return with news of where the remaining funds will be donated). It feels strange to do all this—write about this, not know if or how I’ll do it in the future—but that I suppose this is the deadline I signed up for.

Eating

• You know how recipe blogs are always like “just buy the pizza dough, it’s so easy?” I never do that. Jackson did, made some pizza, and then added a greek salad

• He also made veggie burger leftovers and we used a bunch of the Easter leftovers (green beans, potatoes, etc) to make a new kind of salad

• Noodles with tofu; I think I’ve mentioned this but the frozen udon packs we’ve been buying just at the local grocery are really good

• Frozen ramp pesto pasta with mozzarella and kale stems

• Ham and cheese sandwich on Dayna’s bread

• Hot dogs at Lindsey’s plunge, brownies, and her parents sent her an Edible Arrangement which I just loved

• We’d been talking a lot about waffles so I whipped out the long-unused waffle maker and made some, and yes they really hit

• I’d forgotten to try the party cake-flavored Peeps I’d bought at the drugstore (the man checking me out there was also impressed/surprised by the new flavor) so popped a couple and they were good!

• Jackson made that Times pork chops with feta and snap peas recipe that has been lingering in my saved folder for years but also added some more leftover potatoes and cooked up some asparagus. The pan sauce on top of everything rocked

• Used some leftover tomato sauce and broccoli to do the feta bacon pasta I like

• New kind of veggie burger “recipe” dropped. I of course forget what was different about this one; it sort of like a patty melt, as good as all the others. He needs to do a cookbook of these.

• I added some of Jackson’s muffaletta spread to a sandwich of mine as I was trying to use up things in the fridge, plus some pickled ramps, and wondered why I don’t do this combo more often

• Move out day meant trying Regina’s for lunch

• And then we got pizza for dinner

• Incredible chicken salad and very good egg salad at our baby shower; they were on little croissants, which I loved. Don’t ask how many we ate. Then we took some home and ate them for several days after as well.

• Went to Pete’s Grille, ate two large pancakes, eggs, bacon, hash browns

• Thai takeout we brought back, all mixed together

• Fried rice with sunchokes and ramps

• Mixed leftover endive salad into my tuna; felt like a genius

• Ramp and sunchoke latkes with Greek yogurt cucumber kimchi sauce. I described this recipe as “quick fire is whatever weird stuff is in this bag” and that I “would not have won” with this dish.

• Orzo salad

• Black Seed, where a man tried to charge me over $100 for a baker’s dozen of bagels. Constant vigilance!

• Moonburger and Rossi’s did a collab and I regret to inform you it was Fine if not As Good as either of their Normal offerings. Jackson described it as “Subway sandwich” which, given that I can’t handle how everything there smells the same, explains why I wasn’t impressed

• Roasted kale and sausage with pesto pasta

• Jackson made insanely good pork tacos, we were scarfing them down

• Then I turned them into a bowl the next day, because I’m an innovator

• Ted’s birthday dinner was salmon, steak, rice pilaf, salad, cheesecake

• Used some of the leftover beans from the tacos in a quesadilla, which made it feel fancy

• Leftover kale bean soup from freezer, which was decidedly not fancy

• Mediocre lentil salad that was better the next day

Reader Mail

+1, Cuties are dank this year — Josh

do let them marry together. i am obsessed w u. do other people respond to your every newsletter? — Abby [Editor’s Note: Some do!]

Def want that crab Rangoon recipe!! — Megan [Noted!]