Volume 1, Issue 1
A tiny newsletter just for us
Hi there newsletter viewers. Thank you for your readership and your support.
I was inspired to start putting these together as an outlet, a fun thing for me to work on, an extension of the meaningful, conscious conversations so many of us have privately, and practice in spearheading my creative projects. It’s also a big practice in imperfection — I’m not sure if there will be 2 issues or 20, what writing style I’m going to like best, or if I’ll end up wanting to write about totally different topics. Right now, I’m planning to include my the thoughts of the moment, some of my health and lifestyle experiments, recipes I love, and maybe some personal artwork and writing. Regardless, I hope you enjoy having a little something from me pop up in your inbox every once in a while. Please leave me your comments below!
Growth, Love and Reflections of the Moment
Sister Dinners
It’s not so lonely in New York, though many of the friends I had here last year have scattered across the country since quarantine. I have my love Jake by my side; I have the simple comfort of our studio apartment; and just across the bridge and an L and a Q train away, I have my sister Taylor and our Sunday night dinners.
She arrives with a bottle of wine from her favorite wine store. It’s for cooking, not drinking; she has a recipe for pasta with sausage, tomatoes, and peaches that calls for white wine, though I have an open bottle of red we drink instead. I ask her about work and friends, and she asks me about school, but we mostly talk about things that I could spend the rest of my life talking about to perfect contentment: The new Japanese bowls I got and how they’re the perfect size for salads. How she’s started biking in the evenings, not the mornings, and finds it much more stress relieving. A new vegan Caesar dressing I’ve discovered that pairs perfectly with kale. If she should get a bullet blender or a bigger blender once her roommate moves out and takes theirs.
It’s a communion of love for the domestic and the simple that probably leaves Jake scratching his head wondering how the hell we find all this so interesting. But our proclivity for all things related to home, cooking, routine, and daily comforts has its origins in something greater.
I’ve never understood why family seems to vanish as a value in our lives during our 20’s. If it’s important enough to cement our start of life, and to shape our middle age and end of life, why would there suddenly be a decade where we had no need for it in the middle of our journey? I have been able to viscerally feel the hole going without family has left in me while I’ve navigated early adulthood. It simmers under all other things I’ve experienced and done, no matter how freeing, or fun, or good. As my mother has put it, family is the ground from which we do all other things.
I believe we’re an innately tribal people, or at the very least I know this about myself. I have felt most able to be the best, happiest, lightest and most free version of my personality when I am part of a family, be it my biological family or one built out of community or one found in a workplace — I’ve experienced all three. When my sister comes over on Sundays, we cook and share a meal together, and we talk about all the little things. It’s a simple act that is really something scared: we are celebrating and solidifying all the privileges of having family so close.
She says of our lives in New York, “It’s nice to know that if something bad ever happened — we’d be there.” It’s a truth that feeds me during the good times.
Simple Pleasures
Hairstory’s New Wash
My first co-wash, aka shampoo and conditioner in one. Hairstory makes me feel CLEAN. Not just like my hair is clean, but like I have just scrubbed and purified my whole being. Part of this is the delicious scent which makes my whole shower experience smell amazing, and part of it is using the massage brush that comes with the cowash to really work the wash into my scalp. However, so far I cannot agree with the Hairstory reviewer that claims this is key to the frizz-free hair of her dreams...my hair is still my normal hair (pretty frizzy in the summer). But Hairstory does say that it works over time, so I’m still waiting to see greater changes after a few weeks. It’s also supposed to help me need to wash less frequently...still waiting on changes there, too.
Trader Joe’s Chocolate Non-Dairy Frozen Dessert
The day has finally come...a good vegan ice cream has magically appeared at Trader Joe’s. To be fair, I’ve been separated from my darling Avenue A Trader Joe’s for a few months and this product has actually existed for a while, but it’s new to me ever since I sent Jake out on a spaghetti-sauce run and he “surprised” me with a chocolate something too (I was heavily hinting). Aside from all the benefits of not eating too much dairy, I genuinely prefer vegan ice cream to regular. This chocolate one was so unbelievably good and velvety I was literally, and embarrassingly, scraping my bowl when it was gone. Thank you Trader Joe’s! Now they only need to start selling cauliflower tortilla chips (seriously, where are those? The Aldi by my parents’ house has them, how can TJ’s be so far behind?)
I invented…
Buffalo Cauliflower !
So I didn’t *invent* buffalo cauliflower, but this was my first time trying it, and after tweaking a recipe to my preference and having it come out so gloriously cheesy, melty and gooey I kinda feel like I did invent the dish of buffalo cauliflower itself. Our household (by which I mean me, my boyfriend Jake, and Gritty, his stuffed mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers) has high buffalo standards. We do a buffalo chicken dip and a buffalo chicken cauliflower-crust pizza that are regular staples for dinner...but I think I like the buffalo cauliflower the most.
There is a very serious reason I love this recipe so much, and it is because the star of the show is a cruciferous vegetable. I am obsessed with cruciferous vegetables. In fact, if there was a personalized monthly word cloud that showed me my top-used words of the moment, cruciferous would be in big bold type right in the middle.
Cruciferous vegetables are members of the cabbage family, like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and brussel sprouts. You know how you hear so much on the importance of getting in those dark, leafy greens? I think cruciferous vegetables are the next super-star veggie — they contain compounds linked to preventing cancer and may be especially important for women. Cruciferous veggies break down into indoles, which are important in regulating too much estrogen — think lowered risk of estrogen-related cancers AND less hormonal breakouts. Just anecdotally, as a sometimes hormonal acne sufferer, focusing on eating these guys and taking an additional Indole-3-Carbinol supplement resulted in the clearest skin I’ve ever seen.
So making these buffalo cauliflower for you and your loved ones is an act of love — the very best driving force behind any food.
These are so good my dad kept sneaking them off the pan, and my sister made me tell her the recipe while she wrote it down on an old Sudoku puzzle to take back with her to Brooklyn.
Buffalo Cauliflower
(Find the recipe I based mine off of here on Erin Lives Whole)
Small head cauliflower
1 egg
1 cup almond flour
1 tsp. garlic powder
½ tsp. Salt
2/3 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1/2 cup hot sauce
1. Preheat oven to 425.
2. Chop cauliflower into florets of all sizes. Place in large, sealable Ziploc bag.
3. Whisk the raw egg in a small bowl. Add to Ziploc bag. Shake to coat.
4. Add almond flour, garlic powder, and salt to bag; shake again.
5. Place coated cauliflower on a parchment-lined or lightly greased baking sheet and bake for 25-30 minutes, turning cauliflower after 15 minutes in.
6. Meanwhile, mix mayonnaise, nutritional yeast, and hot sauce together in a large bowl to make your buffalo sauce.
7. Once cauliflower is done, add to bowl of buffalo and stir to coat.
8. Place back on baking sheet and bake for another 5 minutes (this is a very important step!)
9. Remove from oven and dig in :) I eat mine with carrot sticks. Serves 2 as a main dinner, or 4-5 as a side.
I did not invent…
Tomato Pie !
I have been waiting for summer ever since I read Ann Hood’s Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food over the holidays, just so I could make this tomato pie. Ann Hood is a fiction writer and memoirist who wrote novels like The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle. Kitchen Yarns is her collection of recipes, all forwarded by essays of why the dish is significant to Ann and how it represents a different stage of her life. Her writing is fantastic. But here’s the thing about Ann: She belongs to a category of people in my head whom I meet and go, Oh — you’re a genuinely successful person. Genuinely successful people radiate a type of contentment that seems earned and informed, impossible to pick apart or to deny. And Ann Hood, ever since she walked into my fiction writing workshop last fall with her thick black-rimmed glasses and her INTENSELY New York energy, radiated genuine success.
Ann calmly and articulately walked us through her life story that first class. Have you ever tried to articulate your life story to someone? Not only am I entirely unpracticed and awkward at doing this, but if I do this tiny voice enters my mind that goes, You self-absorbed ass, shut up, they don’t care about this! Who would care about this?! But Ann cared — she cared in a way that was neither self-conscious nor egocentric — and we cared. She talked about herself with ease and matter-of-factness, like it was important. And to be a woman and to do that — what an accomplishment. I hung onto every word.
Here is my best conclusion as to why Ann Hood embodies genuine success, pieced together from knowing her and what I’ve garnered from her many books and essays: She is a person innately good at setting heartfelt goals, who went out into the world and achieved those goals to her standard. Ann wanted to be a writer, and she is a writer. She wanted to live a writer’s life — book readings, party invitations, New York City — and she lives that life. She loves teaching writing, and she does teach writing.
“Success” is such a tricky word — I should know, I live my life terrorized by it. Conspiring to get it. Grappling with the purity of wanting it. So when I see it show up in front of me in its true form, I pay attention. And Ann has it.
Back to this tomato pie.
“A feast of tomatoes and cheese and basil baked into a double biscuit crust” — UM, yes please. “The smells of that pie on a hot summer day make you feel dizzy, so intoxicating are they,” she writes in Kitchen Yarns (which, incidentally, I think would make a wonderful gift — it’s heartfelt, cozy, and the short-form of the essays along with the recipes make it a very undaunting read).
It was finally August, and the tomatoes in my dad’s garden were coming in heavy, so I got to make the pie. I had to sub my own gluten-free crust and didn’t experience the magic of the double-biscuit (but maybe YOU can!!). I had two fat pieces back-to-back. Jake thought the concept of tomatoes in pie was questionable — but as I put it, “You like tomatoes. You like cheese. You like crust — you’ll like this pie.” (And he did.)
Tomato Pie
(From Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food by Ann Hood, who credits writer Laurie Colwin with the original recipe)
Crust
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 stick butter
4 teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup milk
Filling
2 pounds fresh tomatoes, sliced thin, or, in winter, two 28-ounce cans of good canned tomatoes, drained and sliced thin
3 to 4 tablespoons chopped basil, chives, or scallions
1 ½ cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
⅓ cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. To make the double biscuit crust, blend by hand or in a food processor the flour, butter, baking powder, and milk.
3. Roll half the dough on a floured surface and fit into a 9-inch pie plate.
4. Lay the tomatoes over the crust and scatter basil, chives, or scallions over them.
5. Sprinkle one cup of the shredded cheddar over the tomatoes.
6. Thin the mayonnaise with the lemon juice and drizzle it over the tomatoes and cheese.
7. Cover with the remaining cheddar crust.
8. Roll out the remaining crust and fit it over the top, sealing the edges and cutting steam slits.
9. Bake for 25 minutes.
10. This pie can be made ahead and reheated at 350 degrees F till gooey.