“Hello, welcome! You can put your shoes by the door. Just throw your coat anywhere.”

A gray cat walks quickly past you towards the office, as if hurrying to an important meeting.

“This is Laika. She’ll probably join us later.”

“Do you want some wine? We also have millennial water.”

It smells like fried mushrooms and soy sauce in the kitchen. The room is lit in red, orange, and pink hues from a pair of lights hanging over the wooden table, an IKEA orb on top of the refrigerator and a warm gradient strip that runs the length of the top cabinets. It’s a little hot, so you take off your sweater as you settle onto one of the tall stools. The Jai Paul cover of Crush is playing. You accept a glass of Pinot Grigio.

You introduce yourself to the others at the table, they congratulate you for having made it in just before the rain. You look towards the window where you can hear it driving against the glass, past an enormous slightly unstable looking plant with thin leaves the size of your palm.

“Oh yeah, that’s our avocado! It’s like, what, five years old at this point?”

“It’s been raining so much this spring, I’m tired of it.”

“This is normal though, it only ever gets nice at the end of May.”

There’s a dark blue plate on the table, arranged with egg halves filled with a pale yellow yolk mixture and a red oily sauce that you recognize to be Lao Gan Ma. You reach to pick one up and immediately the oil spills over your fingers. Someone hands you a paper towel which you take gratefully, wiping your fingers a little and using it to hold the messy egg. When you bite into it, the umami hits you first, along with a whiff of that very specific Lao Gan Ma smell, then your teeth sink through the creamy layer and into the slippery white part of the egg. You eat two halves, quickly, and then try to restrain yourself from taking another.

The conversation is about whatever Elon Musk was up to recently. You saw some tweets but didn’t know what they were referencing.

You pour yourself another glass of wine from the bottle near you and then dinner is ready. The table is crowded with blue Chinese rice bowls filled with different condiments: chopped scallions, crushed peanuts, a thick brownish-orange sauce, cooked bok choy and crumbled pieces of something that looks like meat but you figure probably isn’t. There are three jars of different types of chili oil as well. Non-matching bowls are being passed around filled halfway with steaming noodles floating in a little water. You’re encouraged to serve yourself, so you add some of the sauce first, swirling it around so that your noodles sit in a creamy orange broth. Then you add some of the meat-like mixture (now you recognize it to be bits of mushrooms), a few of the green stalks, some scallions and peanuts. You decide to taste it that point, mixing everything together with your chopsticks, which is good because it’s pretty spicy for you. You add only the smallest spoonful of Fly by Jing.

“Cheers!”, people are saying and you raise your glass. “To getting everyone together.” “To the summer!” “To chili oil!”

You notice that the cat has appeared suddenly, sitting like a statue at the center of another stool like yours, watching the meal silently but with great attention.

Everyone eats, dressing their bowls further between bites, passing the condiments around. The sauce is a little tangy and slightly bitter, but mostly spicy in a mouth-numbing way and rich with sesame paste. Your lips tingle so you gulp down water, which doesn’t seem to help. You eat a piece of plain bok choy. You decide to enjoy the tingling. You tip the bowl toward you to sip the rest of the broth and the bits of peanut and mushroom that have collected at the bottom.

“This is really good.” “Thank you!” “Yeah, this is great.” “I feel very spicy inside.” “Can you pass the scallions?” “Would you mind grabbing me a La Croix? Thanks.”

The cat has managed to squeeze herself between two people on the bench closest to her food bowl and now periodically reaches a paw up with claws half-extended, pulling on their clothes.

“Laika, stop it! Be nice to guests!” “Has she had dry?” “Yeah, but not wet.”

The cat’s eyes go wide as the refrigerator door is open. She jumps off the bench and stands on her back legs leaning against the counter, reaching one arm as high as possible toward the countertop and meowing dramatically. When the food is placed in her bowl, she makes audible licking and smacking noises as she devours it.

“Should we go to the softer area?”

People begin to move out of the kitchen, some take their half-finished glasses with them. You stack a couple of plates on top of each other and put them into the sink.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, we’ll do it later.” “Close the door though or Laika will do them all for us.”

In the living room, the couches are mostly full, so you sit on a sheepskin on the floor, leaning against a couple firm meditation cushions. The lights are low and Planet Earth is being projected onto the wall. You start to watch but you’re pretty tired and at some point notice that you’ve been lightly nodding off. What time is it? You stand up and stretch as you find your things.

“Thanks for coming!” “Of course, everything was so good, I had a really nice time.” “Get home safe.”

Outside, the rain has stopped. You head home.

What I’m cooking

Dandan noodles with mushrooms

Dandan noodles are at once very specific — “authentic” dandan can be a fraught subject — and such a simple combination of tasty things that even if you don’t do anything the “right” way you’ll probably make something good. I first ate them the right way, from a street cart in Chengdu with no prior knowledge of what they were, only the obvious signal of a long line of people who wanted it. I asked them to hold the meat, so it was basically just noodles and sauce, and it was perfect.

We can give up trying to be perfect at home since we probably don’t have fresh noodles anyway. I like to make a mushroom and tempeh mixture to replace the meat, but you can use dried mushrooms, fresh mushrooms, just tempeh, or any combination. Chinese sesame paste is ideal — it’s made of toasted whole sesame seeds as opposed to tahini which uses raw, hulled sesame seeds — but if all you have is tahini then go with it. (If all you have is peanut butter or almond butter, you can definitely still forge ahead; I haven’t tried it with just a nut butter, but I do mix them with tahini.) Sui mi ya cai is preserved mustard greens that you’ll miss if you know it, but since you may not be able to find it, don’t stress. The only thing you need is Sichuan peppercorn, and the better it is, the better your sauce will be.

Note on chili oil: I have a jar of Blank Slate chili oil, which is much more Sichuan peppercorn-heavy than chili pepper-heavy. You can use another chili oil if you have it, or you can make it yourself, but if your chili oil has less of a numbing flavor then maybe use a little less of it and a little more ground peppercorns.

Serves 4

Ingredients
Mushroom mixture

• 1/3 cup dried sliced shiitake mushrooms
• 2 large shiitake mushrooms
• 4 oz tempeh
• 25 grams (about a fourth of a packet) sui mi ya cai
• 1 tablespoon shaoxing wine or sherry vinegar
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 2 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorn chili oil (see Note)
• 2 teaspoon hoisin or sweet bean sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon five spice powder

Sauce

• 1 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorn
• 2 tablespoons tahini
• 1 tablespoon peanut or almond butter
• 1 tablespoon Sichuan peppercorn chili oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon black vinegar (rice vinegar if you don’t have black)
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar

To serve

• 4 servings wheat noodles
• ~ 8 baby bok choy or equivalent amount of other greens
• 1/2 cup peanuts, crushed
• 1/3 cup scallions, chopped

Method
If using dried mushrooms, put them into a bowl covered with hot water to soak until soft, about 20 minutes depending on the mushrooms.

Roast the Sichuan peppercorns on a dry wok (I do this step now instead of later because my wok is clean). Heat the wok to medium-low and pour the peppercorns onto it, shaking frequently, until you can smell them. Don’t over-roast because they’ll be bitter and because the fumes will probably make you cough for the next 20 hours. Put them in a mortar bowl.

Chop up the tempeh and mushrooms into small pieces (I use both the stems and caps of the mushrooms, but make sure to chop the stems extra small). Chop up the soaked mushrooms as well, reserving the soaking liquid.

Heat the wok again over medium and add some neutral oil. Fry the tempeh first, breaking it up even smaller with your spatula, and then all the mushrooms until they’re browned, about 10 minutes.

Add the sui mi ya cai to fry it for about 30 seconds. Then add the shaoxing wine, soy sauce, chili oil, hoisin, and five spice powder and stir to combine. Put the mixture into a serving bowl.

To make the sauce, grind up the toasted peppercorns with a mortar and pestle. Combine them with the tahini/nut butter, chili oil, soy sauce, sesame oil, black vinegar, and sugar. (Sugar helps to balance the bitterness of the Sichuan pepper. If you’re using Chinese sesame paste, you don’t need additional sugar because it’s already sweet.) Loosen the sauce with a little of the mushroom water, if you have it, and some more warm water, to make it easier to stir.

Heat a pot of water for the noodles and cook according to package directions. When they’re just cooked, use a spider or slotted spoon to move them into a strainer, but keep the water boiling. Add a little sesame oil to the noodles and mix them around to keep them from sticking.

Wash and prepare your greens. If using baby bok choy, I break them into leaves as I’m washing them; if using another green you could chop it into slightly smaller pieces. Blanch them in the boiling water for about a minute, depending on how tough they are. Remove to a strainer, still keeping the water in the pot.

To serve, use small bowls (you can keep refilling, but using a smaller bowl keeps everything hot and keeps the noodles from soaking up too much of the sauce). Put a handful of noodles into the bowl followed by half a ladleful of the cooking water. Add a couple spoonfuls of the sesame sauce and swirl it all around, then the mushroom mixture, bok choy, scallions, and peanuts.

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Having fun is fucking difficult. Peaceful, calm, tender, reflective — that’s more within my range these days. I wouldn’t say I was great at it in the best of times. But now in this space that is always the same, where nothing ever happens except of my own volition, it feels almost out of place.

I’ve been thinking about how to have more fun and initially thought I’d write a list of creative ideas, a sort of How to Have Fun in Quarantine guide. Almost immediately, it struck me as contrived and kind of bleak. Forced fun is the worst activity, as anyone who’s worked at a well-funded company can attest. And when it’s an attempt to stave off some darker feeling, it can be downright scary. I can’t spark your imagination for you or come up with activities that make sense in your life. I think we might try to make a fun zine about how Laika looks like Putin, but that’s hardly a universal recommendation.

So, don’t force it. I do think it’s worth reflecting on, but you’ll have to do it yourself. Maybe just see where you can invite creativity or a little bit of absurdity into your apartment or routine.

Meanwhile, I’m going to use the rest of this newsletter to write about pancakes, which are unequivocally the most fun food.

What I’m Cooking

Millions of Savory Pancakes

I’m not sure if pancakes are the most fun food (could be dumplings), but I was looking through my Instagram and realized that since quarantine I’ve been making some kind of pancake every other day. Pancakes are versatile, difficult-to-mess-up, often keep well, and have the best toppings. Everyone at the table can customize their plates, which has always been my favorite type of dinner party. They’re inherently creative, and I think that’s usually what I mean by fun.

Almost all pancakes are, well, okonomiyaki which means, “cooked how you like.” Treat these recipes more like guidelines and adapt them to your tastes and what you have in the house. Basically anything goes as long as your pancakes hold together in the pan, and if they’re falling apart you can usually fix the batter with more flour and/or egg. (An exception being doughs that require rolling out, like moo shu pancakes or tortillas. Does that mean they’re not pancakes? We can fight.)

Za’atar sourdough pancakes

Starter discard is probably the main thing that causes me anxiety about sourdough, because I refuse to dump it and can only make so many sheet-pans of Wheat Thins. I didn’t feel comfortable enough with it to deviate from Internet recipes until my friend suggested just turning it into a pancake, as is, no extra flour. I’ve embellished on his suggestion a little, so here it is as a recipe:

Let your starter come to room temperature. Heat up a cast-iron pan to medium heat, coat the bottom with olive oil and then pour the starter in. Spread it around to get it about a centimeter thick. Cook for a few minutes on one side then flip and cook on the other. When you think it’s browned on both sides, spread a little more oil on the top and sprinkle za’atar liberally over the whole side. (Here you can get creative again! What other seasonings would go well with a bit of sourness?) Flip it again so that the spiced side cooks, around 30 seconds, but doesn’t get too burnt. Remove it from the pan and slice into pieces using a pizza wheel. We’ve been eating it with yogurt, hot sauce or zhug, and sometimes pickled things if they’re around. An egg would also be nice.

Scallion pancakes
These were one of the foods my mom requested from my grandmother on her birthday, and they became one of my favorites as well. Like croissants, they’re basically thin layers of dough with fat in between (a process called “lamination”) and I guess kids are little butter-hungry lamination-detectors so it makes sense that we grew up loving them.

The process involves a lot of folding and rolling, but it’s something you get better at after just a couple tries. Like the pancakes above, this recipe uses a boiling-water dough which makes it pretty soft and easy to roll out. I like Kenji’s recipe, with some call-outs:

• I added a few pinches of salt to the initial flour-water mix
• Make sure to cut the scallions quite small, so they don’t break the dough later on (this will still happen but you want to minimize it)
• Brush only a very thin layer of sesame oil on the disks so that you can roll them up more easily
• Kenji’s big innovation is to have two steps of snailing/rolling out the dough; I think you could drop to one and everyone will live; your pancakes might even come out softer
• If you want to eat your pancakes later on, freeze them after they’re shaped. Place them on oiled wax paper on a baking sheet, uncovered, in your freezer for about an hour until they’re rock-solid. Then you can put them into a plastic bag (with the wax paper separating them) and when you want to eat them, put them on your skillet directly from the freezer and add a minute of cooking to each side (3–4 minutes).

Moo shu pancakes
I’ve seen these called “Mandarin pancakes” on the internet, in my grandmother’s cookbook they’re simply “Chinese pancakes,” but I think of them as the pancakes that come with moo shu pork/vegetables. They’re excellent in that format: soft and thin wrappers with a sweet slather of hoisin or plum sauce and the crunchy texture of barely-cooked vegetables. I’d also like to try them with soft-scrambled eggs and maybe some kimchi as well.

These pancakes follow a more particular set of rules than the others here, and this recipe does a good job of describing them. There are a couple interesting techniques. One is that you add boiling water to flour which gelatinizes the starch (I wrote more about that previously) and makes the dough soft and pliable. Another is that you roll out and cook the pancakes by stacking two on top of each other — well-oiled so that you can pull them apart later — which lets you roll them thinner and causes each one to have a brown-spotted cooked side and a steamed side, which creates a nice texture.

Okonomiyaki
Okonomiyaki might be my ideal drunk-food. It’s a fried pancake that’s basically a platform for mayonnaise, sweet-savory okonomi sauce, and bonito flakes. There are two distinct styles: Osaka, which is made from a thick batter with all the ingredients chopped up in it, and Hiroshima, which has distinct layers of cabbage, yakisoba, fried egg and everything else, held together by a much thinner batter. There’s something I like about the way the cabbage gets crispy in Hiroshima okonomiyaki, so I’ve made that kind but without the noodles.

It’s not that hard and you don’t really need special ingredients despite what the recipes impress upon you. These are a good start: Hiroshima and Osaka. I didn’t have tenkasu, Japanese yam, aonori seaweed or bonito (but sprinkled furikake over everything). I do have okonomi sauce (though it sounds like you can approximate it) and Kewpie mayonnaise, which I vastly prefer to Heinz in any situation.

Vegetable fritters and latkes

You should probably make fritters soon, because you probably have random bits of vegetables to use up, and this way they will be crispy and trick you into thinking you’re eating something totally new. You can use pretty much any vegetables, chopped small (probably half-inch pieces or so), and then mixed with flour, an egg, salt and pepper or other seasonings. If you’re vegan, a little baking powder and cornstarch can help replace the binding and leavening role of the egg.

Take a look at this broccoli-parmesan recipe or this zucchini one to get started, based on what ingredients you have. One thing to watch out for is the water content of your vegetables. For example, for potatoes or zucchini, shred them first with your food processor or grater, scoop them out into a colander or piece of cheesecloth and then wring out as much water as you can. For tough veggies like broccoli, a little pre-cooking will help ensure they’re not raw when the rest of the pancake is done. Then go wild with the sauce. You can take yogurt in different directions, with the additions of lemon, garlic, dill, feta, za’atar, tahini, cayenne, turmeric, etc. Or make a salsa or pesto or your own aioli.

Kimchi and pickle pancakes
Kimchi pancakes follow almost the exact same formula as other vegetable fritters, but you don’t have to worry about pre-cooking or much seasoning. In fact, they’re so easy that I started thinking about what other jars of vegetables I have, found some dill pickles, and remembered eating fried pickles from a boxcar diner in Montana when I was staying out there.

For either of these directions, chop up the veggies and mix them with flour and an egg or cornstarch. For the pickle pancakes, I also added some Italian breadcrumbs. I made my kimchi pancake the size of my pan and cut it up like pizza, and the pickle pancakes into smaller pies (the only constraint is whether you’re able to flip a larger pancake). For dipping sauces, go Asian for the kimchi (maybe something with gochujang, or scallion pancake-style toasted sesame seeds, soy sauce and black vinegar) and Southern American for the pickles (a remoulade or fast food-style mayo + honey mustard + bbq sauce).

Crepes
Every time it snows, Anthony makes a double-batch of crepes. We invite friends over and eat as many as we can, with sour cream, caviar, sometimes rolled up with farmer’s cheese or mushrooms, or with fruit preserves. Then we drink a lot of gin and go out into the snow. Much later in the night, there are usually some crepes left for a second round.

This recipe is a good start, but make sure not to add too much flour (or add more milk) to make a very thin batter. The tricky parts have to do with getting your pan (nonstick!) to just the right temperature so that the crepes are cooking but the butter isn’t burning, and pouring the batter in a smooth motion to make a round crepe. We’ve also experimented with sourdough crepes (recipe but with just 2 eggs, some flour, oil instead of butter) and substituting in buckwheat flour, which makes them gluten-free and an awesome purple color. As you’re cooking them, stack the finished crepes on a plate, buttering each one as you place it on the top.

Tortillas
Tortillas probably deserve their own list, because there are so many varieties with very different ingredients and preparation methods. This is just to say that it’s worth making some fresh tortillas, sometime. You need masa harina for corn tortillas (the corn is soaked in lime which softens it and makes it more digestible). For flour tortillas, it’s better to use a fat that’s solid at room temperature. You can use lard or shortening, but I really enjoyed the taste of coconut oil, which came through very lightly. Recently I made these fermented whole-wheat tortillas (using water not milk), which weren’t particularly traditional, but were tangy and substantial and great with mild cheese and sautéed onions and jalapeño.

To all the pancakes I haven’t made before:
Dosas! Egg hoppers! Injera! We’ll get there. If you’ve made any of these and want to send me tips, please do!

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Through the alchemy of friendship and a car, bagels became cured salmon, a bottle of whiskey, a box of matzoh, a batch of warm cookies. It felt like a treasure hunt to drive to our friends’ houses, wave to them from windows or across the sidewalk, see their smiles and their clothes (or bathrobes), and through our snaking path, trace the connections that make up Brooklyn to us. I’ve begun to harbor dreams of setting up a more-official unofficial food exchange. I picture us all in the future, free of COVID-19 but also free of consumerist needs, drinking each other’s moonshine with homemade kimchi and cheese, growing mushrooms in our bathrooms and tomatoes on our fire escapes, dropping out, opting out of the disastrous economy.

And then my vision resharpens on reality. Trading food might let us eat decadently, but it doesn’t pay our rent or health insurance or utility bills, it won’t help us fly to visit family, or afford childcare, or take care of us when we’re old. It doesn’t really change anything.

***

The news about Bernie leaving the race came as a terrible blow. It hit me like the Trump election — less of a surprise than a sudden clarity about what country we’re living in. It reignited the deep sense of dread that I have on my worst days, that people are fundamentally bad, scared, selfish, and that we have that latent monster inside all of us. I want so badly to find the good in all this, to believe that in this disaster is the chrysalis of political change. I haven’t been able to see it though. The crisis is not affecting demographic classes evenly. When it came for NYC — a city that has been pushing the poor out of it ceaselessly for decades — the rich simply left. Across the country, people are shutting themselves in their homes, for the public good of course, and shutting themselves out of the news, for their personal good. Can anything change if we don’t know what’s happening to each other?

I had a RAINN shift immediately after hearing the Bernie news. RAINN has been difficult during the crisis because — isolated in their homes without the safety net of schools and neighborhood friends — some people enact their freedom terribly. That day, I told a visitor what I tell nearly everybody, “I believe things will get better for you.” The visitor answered, “But what if it doesn’t?”

***

Fermentation is a neat craft because it maintains the appearance of control, with all the dehydrators and temperature controllers and pH meters that you can buy, but truly has less to do with you. You’re not so much cooking for yourself as for microorganisms, who — like proud street cats — might show up and settle in if you set up a very comfortable environment for them. I’m only at the beginning of understanding the range of possibilities and it will be a long time until I can taste some of my ferments, but it’s already fun. It’s more like having plants or a Tamagotchi than what I think of as making food. And the quick things I’ve made, like kimchi and kvass, are wonderful to eat and drink and make me feel powerful.

Fermentation is great for making shareable foods. They package and keep well, and each one is unique to the terroir of your kitchen. I attended an online gathering of the NYC Ferments Meetup, and I was gratified by the (haha) culture of the group. They were mostly older people, obsessive but not at all stuck-up, and very welcoming to me. I can’t wait to meet them in real life, and taste the things they’re working on.

***

I don’t have any particular insight into how to survive, aside from having done it for almost 33 years. I know that we’ve never had more than the appearance of control over our lives, and none at all over each other. I can’t make anybody vote or volunteer or live the way I want them to. At most, I can aid in creating environments conducive to care and connection. I can’t know if things will get better or who exactly they will get better for, but I’m pretty sure it’s necessary to keep imagining something better.

At 7pm, I’m usually in the middle of cooking, but I put everything down to to open the window and clap next to it. What does it mean, who is it for? I don’t know if any healthcare workers can hear us. But there are tinges of joy in the shouts of my neighbors. Every day it feels like a celebration, despite not having anything to celebrate. Maybe what we’re learning from this is that we can do something together: if we can clap together, then we can builder bigger movements together. Maybe all we’re learning is that we can survive this, and it will not make us monsters.

What I’m reading

Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz

Social change is another form of fermentation. Ideas ferment, as they spread and mutate and inspire movements for change…In the realm of social change, fire is the revolutionary moment of upheaval; romantic and longed for, or dreaded and guarded against, depending upon your perspective. Fire spreads, destroying whatever lies in its path, and its path is unpredictable. Fermentation is not so dramatic. It bubbles rather than burns, and its transformative mode is gentle and slow. Steady, too. Fermentation is a force that cannot be stopped. It recycles life, renews hope, and goes on and on.

I have to admit that while I’ve been paging through the comprehensive, gorgeously-photographed Noma Guide to Fermentation, which is teaching me useful stuff, I’ve found myself resonating more strongly with this used green-and-pink paperback that I picked up randomly last year at a store in Chinatown. Sandor Katz lived through 1990s NYC with HIV/AIDS, which was an epidemic of greater destruction than COVID-19, but among a more limited and overlooked population. He did manage to drop out of mainstream society, going to live in an off-the-grid community in rural Tennessee but also became something of a fermentation-activist icon (I am not the first to resonate with his work).

While teaching you how to ferment everything from miso to wine in short unvarnished recipes, Wild Fermentation is equally about living with precarity and death, and activism in the face of it. To Katz, fermenting at home is a way of taking food back from the commodity chain and a practice of self-empowerment. It’s also a ritual of observing decay and imagining death, which helps him to embrace life. Thankfully he’s still around, and if you want, you can watch him speak at 12pm EST today as part of the Florida Ferment Fest.

What I’m cooking

Kvass

This is a recipe only in that it’s the steps Anthony and I took to make a nice, bubbly drink that we normally only have in Ukraine. It’s different from the recipe that appeared in Wild Fermentation and from this other one we found on the Internet, but hopefully if you make it, it will be different from ours. Katz’s recipe uses lemon juice, but the only citrus in our fruit bowl was two clementines and then we ate half of one, which is why our recipe calls for one-and-a-half clementines. I bet oranges or grapefruit would be cool, if not traditional, or you can leave out the citrus altogether.

Normally kvass is a little bubbly, less than soda and even a little less than kombucha. The stuff you can buy in Brooklyn is too sweet according to Anthony (who says the best kind he’s bought in the US is this one). It’s drunk cold, preferably when it’s hot outside.

Note on bread: If you can get it, use borodinsky bread, a rich dark-colored rye with additional flavors like molasses and coriander that show up in muted ways in the kvass. We couldn’t find it this time, so went with a simpler rye that still worked but ended up producing a slightly flatter flavor, where the sourness was more accentuated.

Ingredients

• 600 grams rye bread (around 8 slices, though that depends on how you slice it)
• 14 cups of water
• 1 1/2 peeled clementines
• 60 grams (1/4 cup) sourdough starter, at whatever hydration (or 1 packet yeast)
• 100 grams (1/2 cup) sugar or honey
• 1/4 teaspoon non-iodized salt
• 40 grams (1/4 cup) raisins

Method
Begin toasting the slices of bread until they are quite black. Meanwhile, bring a pot with the 14 cups of water to boil.

Once all the bread is toasted, add it to the pot along with the clementines or other citrus. Stir everything and cover it.

Wait for 8 hours or longer (we did this overnight). Keep it in an undisturbed place out of direct sunlight.

Using whatever combination of a strainer and cheesecloth that works for you, strain out the solids, which will be extremely mushy by this point. Put the liquid into a large glass or food-grade plastic container (just not metal).

Add the sugar or honey, salt, starter or yeast, and raisins to the container, mix the contents, and cover it.

Wait for 2 days, stirring it each day. Taste it. Maybe wait another day. When you’re happy with it, strain out as much of the remaining solids as you can and put it into a container with a lid (we decanted it into a growler). Add additional sugar if you want.

Store in the refrigerator for up to a few weeks.

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Sometimes I try to break it down into its component elements. What do I miss? Pole and yoga, restaurants and bars, dinner parties, concerts. So I take a YouTube yoga class, recreate dishes from restaurants, eat dinner in front of the computer with a bunch of friends on Zoom. But what do I miss? Putting nuts into pretty bowls before dinner guests arrive. Biking through an unfamiliar part of Queens where I’m drawn into a bakery that smells good. Running into a friend I didn’t know was going to be at the show. The feeling of coming back home. It’s the whole thing. It’s the way the moment exists in relation to the ones before and after it. Food, drink, music, movement become meaningful in the context of their environment. The broken elements don’t add up to the whole.

I’m learning about bread this week. Flour, water, and salt. Utterly unbelievable how those few elements, combined in various ways with various temperatures and times, transform into the myriad of forms they do. I made thin, chewy Mandarin pancakes for moo shu vegetables by dropping boiling water into a small pile of flour and salt. I picked up the tiniest bit of sourdough starter from a bakery I love in Bushwick, and through regular feedings it’s grown into a fragrant bubbling behemoth over in its corner of the kitchen.

The book I’m reading (Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast — not to be confused with last week’s Book of Four Nouns) says to think of time and temperature as having an inverse relationship, or being on a seesaw, which I’ve found helpful. Warm doughs develop quickly, cooler doughs more slowly. When bread is rising, yeast is replicating and producing those gases which you can see in the bubbles, and it’s done rising when there’s no more oxygen in the dough so the yeast can’t keep replicating. Higher temperatures encourage yeast replication, which is why the dough rises faster. If you’ve made that No-Knead NYT bread that everybody has (me included) you’ll notice that it has very little yeast and a very long rise at room temperature. The small amount of starting yeast and low-ish temperature are what allow it to rise for so long, letting the flavor develop. The flavor mostly comes from fermentation during that time.

There’s actually a whole other thing going on when mixing boiling water with flour, which is a technique that shows up frequently in Chinese cooking, like those pancakes. The hot water blasts apart the starch molecules in a process called starch gelatinization that usually only occurs once the dough is in the oven. The starches absorb all the water and form long polysaccharide networks that are an alternative to gluten networks. This makes the dough very soft, which is why I could easily roll it out paper-thin, but actually not stretchy, in that if you pulled on it it wouldn’t snap back to its earlier shape.

It’s not magic the way breads form. It’s complex as hell, as evidenced by all the vocabulary to digest and the enormous difference between a mediocre and incredible piece of bread. Or, another way to look at it, is that everything is complex when you zoom in closely enough, but we’ve learned a lot about this particular region of complexity and we’re pretty good at manipulating it to get what we want. We’re so attuned to texture that we can tweak slight differences in gluten formation and create totally different experiences of the ingredients.

Returning to comparing my days in quarantine versus before, and I think the difference is one of texture. Similar elements of the day don’t feel the way they used to in our new context. Not really “broken,” though. Sometimes slower and more subtle. Each day is as much a part of our life as the days we had before. Maybe the metaphor here is a layer cake, or the Earth’s strata. Indelibly warped by the forces of the environment, but just a layer, with one beneath and one following.

What I’m reading

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Through alienation, people and things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their life worlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere. This is quite different from merely using others as part of a life world — for example, in eating and being eaten. In that case, multispecies living spaces remain in place. Alienation obviates living-space entanglement.

Tsing is not, in fact, talking about the Internet here — although it would be easy to extend this concept to the way we’re carrying out our social and professional lives online. She’s on the topic of supply chain capitalism, and particularly the way agricultural goods and agricultural workers become commodities. We can eat things that have no relation to each other or to us in space and time, gathered by people who are so replaceable (to the system) that they could be slaves imported from Africa or migrant workers from Mexico, and it wouldn’t much impact the process. This section shows up in the book (more about the book in my earlier post) because matsutake don’t lend themselves to plantation-style farming, and are not as easily commoditized.

I saw one of those almost-too-cute quarantine stories the other day, about a Philadelphia restaurant owner who FaceTimes customers before and after their delivery, to guide them through the menu and then check up on how their food is. It’s a little much (I hope those customers are tipping very well) but raises the question of what you lose when ordering delivery from a favorite restaurant. The decor and music, the smell of the food being cooked, seeing what other people have ordered, the server who brings out your dishes and tells you about them. Even before the virus, we were already seeing the restaurant industry’s daunting turn toward “ghost kitchens,” where food is prepared in kitchens unattached to any customer-space, and subsist on delivery apps. The Japanese or Mexican food you order could come from the exact same place, but you’ll never have to see it. As in industrial agriculture, the food and food workers become completely interchangeable, and thus easy to scale for enterprising entrepreneurs.

I’m glad people are supporting the restaurants they love, but I hope this is an opportunity to notice why you love them. When you gingerly open takeout containers to throw them away and shovel the nachos onto your dinner plates, it becomes very clear that it was never just about the food. As others have alluded, this virus and its devastating effect on restaurants might come as something of a reset for an industry that already had a lot of problems. Will that reset look like retail or journalism, another wave of independent organizations swallowed by the venture capitalists, relying on big money and conglomeration for stability? Or, now that we know what it feels like to lose a sense of place connected to food, can a new set of businesses spring up that are centered on place and community and responsibility toward the people who serve us?

What I’m cooking

Sourdough Wheat Thins

If you’re making sourdough, you probably already know about handling your discard, but to summarize this good explanation of how to use it: At the point of feeding, the discard is probably not powerful enough to leaven bread by itself, so you want recipes that either don’t require leavening, use other leavening agents, or have another step of fermentation built in. This first case is why crackers are such a good candidate for discard.

Due to some misjudgments, I had a lot of starter, so I tried going in a few different directions with crackers. I made some parmesan-black pepper crackers that were quite good (see note below for how to make those). My guilty-pleasure snack, though, has always been Wheat Thins, so that’s where I directed my energies. The sourdough tanginess is mostly hidden by the sugar but still gives these crackers a little complexity that I liked. Black (or white) sesame seeds are another good addition, though they are definitely too fancy for Wheat Thins. If you aspire to the culinary prowess of 9-year-old Kate, you can put together pairs of crackers with cheese and microwave for 5 seconds per sandwich.

Note: If you want to make the cheese crackers instead, leave out the sugar. Then after adding the sourdough starter, add 60 grams (2/3 cup) of finely grated parmesan or pecorino romano and about 10 grinds of fresh black pepper, and pulse together briefly.

Another Note: If you don’t have starter, check out the recipe mine is based on. It should work pretty well, though I think the longer baketime at a lower temperature still leads to crispier crackers.

Ingredients

• 113 grams (1 cup) whole wheat flour
• 40 grams (3 tablespoons) sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt plus additional for sprinkling
• 2 tablespoons wheat bran (optional)
• 85 grams (6 tablespoons) of butter, can be cold
• 250 grams (1 cup) sourdough starter
• Additional mix-ins: finely grated hard cheese, black pepper, chopped herbs, sesame seeds
• 1 tablespoon olive oil or so for topping

Method
Mix the flour, sugar, salt, and wheat bran (if using) in a food processor. Cut the butter into small cubes (especially if it’s cold) and add a couple chunks at a time, pulsing to combine the ingredients with each addition. Then add the sourdough starter and pulse some more until just combined. If adding any additional garnishes, mix those in now by hand or with a couple brief pulses.

Divide the dough into two balls of equal size and wrap them in plastic wrap, then place in the fridge for 20 minutes or longer.

Preheat oven to 325° F.

Take out a ball of dough and lightly flour a piece of parchment paper on a smooth work-surface. Now comes the trickiest part, of rolling out the dough as thin as you are able. I found it helpful to lay a piece of wax paper over the dough for rolling (making sure to lift off every now then and sprinkle flour on the dough, so that it didn’t get stuck). The nice thing about crackers is that, if you are optimizing for taste rather than looks, it doesn’t matter if the dough breaks as long as all the pieces end up on the baking sheet. When mine was fully rolled out, one ball (half the total) took up my whole half-sheet baking pan, 13” x 18”.

Brush the surface with olive oil and sprinkle salt generously over it. Using a pizza cutter or sharp knife, cut the dough into squares (just making the cuts is fine, you don’t need to separate the squares). Prick each square with a fork, which will release steam and help them get crispy.

Transfer the dough on its parchment paper to your baking sheet. You may need to cut off some edge bits and place them in the corners if they don’t fit.

Put it into the oven and bake for 30 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through. After that amount of time, the crackers will be quite well-browned, especially on the edges. If you really don’t want them that way, you can take them out after 25 minutes, but I preferred the extra-baked ones.

Once they’re out of the oven, transfer the parchment paper to a cooling rack or countertop to let the crackers cool completely. It’s okay if you eat a couple but you want to let the rest of them get to room temperature, especially before putting them in a container, to retain their crispiness.

Store in an airtight container for up to a week.

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It took me awhile to believe that this apartment and the many unfilled hours inside it were my whole world now. Like a Trumpian id buried in my psyche, a part of me kept saying, Only two weeks, only two weeks. But it’s been that and then some, and while mental health maintenance is still my main priority, I’m trying to keep going with the rest of my life.

So it’s time to take culinary school to my kitchen! I’m finding ways to self-structure my education. As I see it, what I want to study boils down (haha) to three main areas: Cooking, baking and fermentation. They each operate on generally different timescales and require different forms of attention. Cooking is mostly about tasting along the way. Baking frequently uses different senses, like touch, smell, and sight, that act as clues to the chemistry going on inside. Fermentation — which I know the least about — seems to be a bit of both, where some parts can be tasted along the way but the full result may only emerge glorious or gross after weeks of waiting. Of course, everything interacts and mixes up and builds on each other and that’s what makes the food good.

I’m using a number of different methods to learn all this at home, which I’ll talk about in later posts, but I’ll start with cookbooks. Not all cookbooks will teach you how to cook. They give you recipes but don’t explain why all the ingredients are there or why steps must be done in the order they prescribe. It’s up to you to extrapolate and unearth principles you can apply outside of the recipes. Some cookbooks, though, are more like textbooks. Salt, Acid, Fat, Heat is highly technical. It takes you through what are essentially chemistry lessons in how salt, acid, fat, and heat interact with each other, and then offers recipes as hands-on demos of those lessons. Samin Nosrat’s charm and humor also spill out through the words and illustrations of the book, which make it immensely more enjoyable to learn about the Maillard reaction.

Six Seasons is by Joshua McFadden, an NYC restaurant chef who later joined a farm up in Maine. Each section is organized around a season (summer is divided into early-, mid-, and late-, hence the extra two seasons) and then sub-organized by a vegetable from that season. He tells you a bit about how it’s grown, how to store it and prepare it for cooking, then walks you through a few recipes that highlight different cooking methods (including raw). Again, these recipes aren’t meant to be followed to the letter, but demonstrate the breadth of a particular vegetable and give you hints about how it behaves with different kinds of heat or taste pairings. If I’ve got something beautiful and fresh from the farmer’s market and I want to use it well, this is the first cookbook I go to.

I’ve ordered The Noma Guide to Fermentation from Word Bookstore (support your local bookstores!) so I’m hoping that’ll be the next comprehensive tome I get to dig into.

Is there a dish (meatless, please) that you’ve always wanted to make but haven’t figured out? Give me a problem, and I’ll work on it! If you’re in Brooklyn, I may even deliver it to you…

What I’m reading

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat

One of the great alchemical wonders of the kitchen, an emulsion happens when two liquids that normally don’t mix together or dissolve give up and join together. In the kitchen, an emulsion is like a temporary peace treaty between fat and water. The result is tiny droplets of one liquid dispersed in another, resulting in a creamy mixture that’s neither one nor the other. Butter, ice cream, mayonnaise, and even chocolate — if it’s creamy and rich, chances are it’s an emulsion.

Consider a vinaigrette: oil and vinegar. Pour the two liquids together and the oil, being less dense, will float above the vinegar. But whisk the two liquids together — breaking them up into billions of tiny droplets of water and oil — and the vinegar will disperse into the oil, creating a homogenous liquid with a new, thicker consistency. This is an emulsion.

Yet little more than momentary bewilderment will hold together this simple vinaigrette…When an emulsion breaks, the fat and water molecules begin to coalesce back into their own troops. In order to make an emulsion more stable, use an emulsifier to coat the oil and allow it to exist contentedly among the vinegar droplets. An emulsifier is like a third link in the chain, a mediator attracting and uniting two formerly hostile parties. Mustard often plays the role of emulsifier in a vinaigrette, while in a mayonnaise, the egg yolk itself has some emulsifying qualities.

Emulsions have been my enemy for some time. Seeing a creamy nut-dressing turn into a gloppy oily mess half an hour before a dinner party has driven me to near-tears, and once Anthony and I were both so engaged with whisking a mayo that we failed to notice Laika behind us delicately putting her face into a cake until its surface was cratered like the moon.

My rules of thumb for making sauces — throw in everything at the same time, substitute or leave out whatever you don’t have, and if something is too thick just thin it with water — fall apart, literally, with emulsions. I was always in too much of a hurry and too deep of distress to think about why, but reading Samin’s explanation of what’s going on helped me to make them better. Whisking, I imagine striking those molecules to blast them apart, so that they can reform into something new.

What I’m cooking

Vegan caesar salad

The secret ingredient in this dressing is…fermented bean curd! I know it’s not something you’re likely to have in your pantry unless someone in your household makes a lot of Chinese food. If you can get your hands on it at some point though, it plays a crucial role in bringing this vegan Caesar dressing closer to the original. Caesar salads were one of the last, most “grown-up” dishes that I decided I liked by the time I went vegetarian as a teenager (most of my meat-memory is of things like chicken nuggets and meatloaf with ketchup). I’ve had plenty of vegan Caesars before, and while many of them use capers for the briny saltiness that anchovies normally provide, the anchovies also have this funkiness that I just haven’t been able to recreate in their absence. In a similar way to canned fish, fermented bean curd has a pungent and potentially off-putting smell but when used sparingly makes the dressing much richer and deeper. It also acts as an emulsifier in this mayo, in addition to the aquafaba (the liquid in a can of chickpeas), mustard, and flaxseed.

It’s easiest to make this with an immersion blender. Supposedly you can make mayonnaise in a regular blender (like a Magic Bullet type), but that has only ever brought me pain and a hot, separated mess. Using an immersion blender allows you to add the oil extremely slowly which is the key to making this emulsion work. Make sure you’re pouring the oil from something with a good spout, like a liquid measuring cup or squeeze bottle so that you can control the flow. You can also whisk it by hand, but it’s going to be a lot. Working from your wrist is less tiring.

This recipe makes enough dressing for two big Caesar salads. I made the amounts as small as I could (and still have enough liquid for the immersion blender), because it’s best fresh and because if you completely screw up in an unsalvageable way, you won’t be wasting too much of everything. If you’re feeling confident though, you can double the mayo ingredients and reserve half to use for other things (like chickpea salad!) while you go on to make the dressing with the other half.

Ingredients
For the stiff mayo
1/2 teaspoon whole flaxseeds
1/8 cup aquafaba (liquid from a chickpea can)
1 block (mine were about 1 inch wide & quarter of an inch thick) fermented bean curd
1/4 teaspoon mustard (stone ground best, Dijon fine, just not the yellow hotdog stuff)
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/4 cup canola oil (or any neutral oil, but not coconut)
1/4 teaspoon lemon juice

To make it into dressing, add
2 teaspoons capers
1 small garlic clove
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
1 teaspoon nutritional yeast
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 cup aquafaba

For the salad
2 slices of rustic bread for croutons
2 tablespoons olive oil
Chopped fresh herbs (optional)
Mixed greens
Hemp seeds
Any other nuts or seeds you’d like to add

Method
For the mayo
If using a blender, add the flaxseeds and aquafaba to a cup or jar big enough for your immersion blender to get to the bottom. Grind up the flaxseeds in pulses. Add the bean curd, mustard, and sugar and pulse until combined. With the whisk method, grind up the flaxseeds first in a mortar and pestle, add the tofu and break it up a little, and then put it together with the aquafaba, mustard, and sugar in a mixing bowl.

Now, whisking hard or running the blender with one hand, begin to pour the oil in as slowly as you can. You can pause pouring when it seems like oil is collecting in pools, and start again when it’s all incorporated. (If I’m whisking, I tend to take more pouring-breaks so that I can hold the bowl at a 45 degree angle.) After you’ve used about 1/8 of a cup of oil, you should begin to see the mixture thickening. I needed about 1/4 of a cup total, but depending on your other ingredients it may take you slightly less or slightly more. Once it has the consistency of, well, mayo, then stop (if you’re just turning the mayo into dressing, you can also stop before it’s completely solid as long as it’s one smooth consistency). Add the lemon juice, which will further hold everything together.

Now turn it into dressing
If you’ve made extra mayo you can put that away in the fridge in an airtight container. With what’s left in your mixing jar, add capers and garlic first and pulse the blender to break them up (or mince or squeeze the garlic and use the mortar and pestle to break up the capers). Then add the rest of the ingredients and mix them together, by hand should be fine but you can also add a couple blender pulses. The mixture should become much more liquid, but still not separate completely. Taste and adjust seasonings (it probably doesn’t need more salt; mine tasted too salty but once I dipped in a kale leaf to try it, it was just right). This dressing will keep, refrigerated in an airtight container, for about 3–5 days.

For the croutons (can be made up to two weeks ahead, stored in an airtight container):
Preheat oven to 400° F.

Tear the bread slices into bite-size chunks. Toss them with the olive oil, salt and pepper. (If you want to use herbs, mix them up with the oil first, and then toss together with the bread. This will help prevent them from burning.)

Set a timer for 10 minutes and take them out to move them around on the pan. Are they dry and crispy on the outside? If not, put them back and check again every 5 minutes or so. When they’re done, move them to a cooling rack or just a plate to cool completely before using.

Put together the salad
Rinse and dry your salad greens and put them in a big bowl. Pouring in a bit of dressing at a time, dress the salad with your hands. If using kale, scrunch and squeeze it with your hands as well. Add the hemp seeds and any other nuts or seeds, toss a little more, add the croutons and toss some more. Serve immediately.

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On my first day of quarantine I made panic cookies. I’ve made, like, thousands of chocolate chip cookies in my life — they were one of the first things I could throw together without a recipe when I was a teenager. I thought I was doing great that first day, I’d reorganized the entire kitchen and taken an online yoga class and didn’t miss the outside world one bit. But then I was making these cookies and I thought they seemed too buttery so I started adding more flour and then I thought I needed more baking soda to balance the flour, and then just a little more oatmeal because the bin was almost done and I wasn’t measuring anything, I was throwing things in faster and faster, and I knew those cookies would come out terribly long before they sat in tight little balls their whole time in the oven, refusing to spread.

Anxiety creeps up beneath your notice sometimes, driving you when you think you’re in charge. You do everything a little too fast and too forcefully, and you feel productive but you’re actually just high on ignoring how hard your heart is beating. It used to be easier to keep going and outrun a body that was telling us something was wrong. Now there are a million more reasons for panic and a million fewer ways to hide from it. Why not try giving it attention instead? Not to the thing that’s making you anxious (though it’s good to know what that is) but to your experience of it. What does panic taste like? What is the flavor of boredom? What is it doing to my pulse? To my thoughts?

I take a tip from our resident master of staying at home, our cat Laika. When I notice I’m rushing in the kitchen, and nothing requires my immediate attention, I put my chin on my fist on the windowsill and stare out at the street. It’s a quiet street, especially now, so mostly I’m just tracing the vines on my neighbor’s trellis, but sometimes there’s a bird (!) which is very exciting (Laika, I get it!). I notice the view and I notice my body. I do nothing for a few minutes and then I go back to what I was doing.

I promised cooking tips in the first newsletter, so here’s one: In general, do all your produce washing, peeling and chopping before you do anything else (this is called mise en place). There are exceptions — read through the recipe first! But usually when they list the ingredients like, “1/2 medium onion, diced,” they mean for you to get to step 1 of the recipe with the onion already diced (if the first step is to preheat the oven, you can do that first). Put the chopped ingredients into bowls along the way. Also! Take another bowl and use it for all the organic detritus you create, rather than leaning over trying to peel your carrot into the trash can or compost bin. Or if you want to reach home cook level 1000, put those vegetable ends into a plastic bag in the freezer, and next time you’re making soup or stew, use them for stock.

This prep-time can be quite soothing and help you to not rush. Nothing is burning or boiling over, it’s just you and your pile of vegetables and hopefully some other things that you can set up ahead of time to make yourself comfortable — good music, a clean workspace, appropriate lighting, a glass of water nearby. Make a little ritual out of getting everything ready and notice how nice your table looks with your knife and cutting board and all these fresh vegetables. You can even take a picture of it (send it to me!) if that helps you pause.

Pause and notice and look. This affects your cooking but also has everything to do with getting through this weird and anxious period we’re in. It’s okay to not be okay. Pay attention to the stories you’re telling yourself. Actually you are *extremely* psychologically healthy / you did all those years of therapy / you recently went on a meditation retreat / you just told everyone how well you’re doing / depression is not your social media brand / you’re the one who helps people not the other way around. I believe you! All of this is true. What’s also true is that right now is a different moment from all the ones before. You’re going to have to figure it out all over again. It doesn’t matter how many cookies you’ve made before, these are the cookies you’re making right now.

And sometimes you’ll screw them up. They’re fine. Just tough.

What I’m reading

No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, by Edward Espe Brown

One problem with recipes is that they blind us to the reality that nothing is fixed and that we are creating reality from scratch as we go along…When you stay with the picture in your head, looking for what fits with your recipe, you may miss the quieter ingredients that are right on hand. When you are open and curious, you taste the lettuce, savor the bread, make discoveries, and find out what pleases you deeply. You’re beginning to cook with feeling, to live with feeling. You mean it, putting your heart into it. You have some successes and some fiascoes. You do your best — and now it’s time to do something else.

Edward Espe Brown is a Zen teacher and helped to found the Greens restaurant in San Francisco. He connects a lot of the best advice I’ve read from other chefs (taste along the way!) to Zen practice. The main premise of the book is that the way to become better at cooking is through full attention to what you’re working with and how it tastes to you. It’s arranged in a series of vignettes or mini-teachings, some of which might seem a little inaccessible if spirituality is not your thing, but most of which are simple and straightforward and contain the kind of advice that feels deeply true.

I love the the way he frames cooking as a demonstration of the fact “that we are creating reality from scratch as we go along.” This is a pretty fundamental principle of Zen. You constantly practice coming back to the current moment. Cooking is a nicely practical way to do that because of the tangible dish you end up with. You have to pay attention to the ingredients you’re working with right now, since they can always be a little different from yesterday, and even when baking, variable factors like humidity may subtly affect your process. That doesn’t mean you have to memorize X% humidity means X amount of water in the pie crust. What you memorize is the feel of the dough when it’s a good crust.

When I messed up those chocolate chip cookies, the problem wasn’t precisely that I wasn’t sticking to the recipe. Even though you can never improvise with baking quite the same way as with cooking, you can adjust the amount of sugar, change the ratio of flour to oats, etc, as long as you’ve practiced enough to know how a good dough should behave. (Rising agents aren’t something you can detect in a dough, so you just have to trust the ratios in recipes there.) I knew my cookie dough was too solid, I just wasn’t paying attention.

The most important thing is to not let one bad dish stop you. Figuring out how to taste and what you like is the best part of cooking. We’ve all got this uninvited opportunity to cook a lot for ourselves, so maybe you can find one dish that you make exactly the way you like it better than anyone else in the world.

What I’m cooking

Highly-reassuring cookies

This recipe comes from my friend David, who is one of the least-panicked and most comforting people I know. He’s working in the ER right now, which is scary to me, but I know he’s helping a ton of other people to be less scared.

This makes a lot of cookies. You could halve the recipe if you want, or after you’ve mixed everything together you could wrap up any amount of the dough in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer. Then whenever you want more cookies, just take out some of the dough and bake them. Spending some time in the freezer (or fridge) will actually help improve the flavor sodon’t shy away from it.

Ingredients
3 1/3 cups flour (optional: substitute 1 1/2 cups for rolled oats)
1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks unsalted butter (softened)
1 1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 lb chocolate
Optional: Peanut butter, dried cranberries, peanut butter chips
Sea salt, for sprinkling

Method
Preheat oven to 350° F.

Mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

In a separate bowl (or the bowl of a Kitchen Aid), cream the butter and sugar until they are one smooth consistency. Then add the eggs and vanilla. Mix for longer than you think necessary at this stage, you can’t really overmix.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones in stages, until just combined (this is when you don’t want to overmix!). Then add the chocolate and any additional ingredients.

Cover baking sheets with parchment paper and scoop out golf ball-sized pieces of dough. Sprinkle sea salt on top. Bake for 12–14 minutes, until the tops are just beginning to brown.

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School is postponed due to the pandemic. I’m in a weird blank space, free of the responsibility of work but also of the grounding and normalcy that it could provide. I am face-to-face with myself, with zero distractions from the task of living my life and making every hour worth something to me, since they’re not worthwhile by any economic measure.

Anthony and I were driving across the country as the virus spread. The plan had been to pick up my brother’s old car in San Francisco and then take some time getting back to New York, touring the South and Southwest. When the country began going into lockdown, it didn’t really make sense to change our plans, though we began to skirt the cities and tourist attractions, sticking to hiking and remote cabins in farmland.

It felt safe in our car, in a very American way. Shut off from other people, with total freedom of movement, engaged in an activity that even amidst a pandemic is the most likely thing to kill you. But one danger seemed present and the other so prosaic as to be invisible. I felt mostly very calm as I drove. I had one task, which was to keep going, and it took just enough attention and energy that I couldn’t obsess helplessly the way I did every time we stopped.

The way the emergency expressed itself on the road was indirect. Gas prices fell as we drove. Was it due to the region or the dropping price of oil? The churches we passed had signs like, “Wash your hands cuz Jesus and germs are everywhere,” or “Pray and wash your hands, God’s got this!” We saw trailers with Quebec license plates driving north on I-81 — Canadian “snowbirds” who wintered in Florida going home just a little early.

We went to big-box stores to stock up on supplies but disagreed about how much to get. Seeing empty shelves at Walmart triggered my American cockroach brain, sending me into a tailspin of panic and greed. I found it hard to articulate what I was afraid of. It wasn’t even the unlikely prospect of literally having no toilet paper — I’m fine using water. My fears, I think, were more about scarcity in general. What if I couldn’t buy this thing later? Or what if it were really expensive later, and I regretted not buying it now? There’s a subtle but significant distinction between fear of not having something vs fear of regret for not having bought it. America always blames you for not taking advantage of the opportunities presented you, which in practice often means not getting enough for yourself while the gettings good. We’re seeing senators being publicly skewered for profiting off a global pandemic, which is unambiguously corrupt, but at the same time is exactly the behavior our country preaches, at a smaller scale. (I have no idea if this tweet is a troll, but it’s perfect.) Anyway, we didn’t buy all of the toilet paper.

When we finally got back to New York, it was like coming home to a city you’d known a long time ago. There was our familiar skyline, and there were people on Canal street, as always, but not as many as there should’ve been. And maybe it was our imagination, but it seemed that people shuffled past one another quickly and that it was not loud in the way we were used to. Since coming home, my mind bounces jaggedly from “nothing has changed” to “everything has changed.” But then, minds do that always. Near the end of our trip, when my parents were urging us to get back to New York before the city “closed down,” panic would come in waves occasionally followed by moments of magnificence. Inhale and focus on the blue Shenandoah mountains, Billie Eilish growling over the stereo, Anthony next to me in a warm car surrounded by fog. The only thing that’s changed, for us, is our certainty in the future, but for now we’re okay.

What I’m reading

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious — even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined. In contrast to the mid-twentieth century, when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end…

We hear about precarity in the news every day. People lose their jobs or get angry because they never had them. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific islands. But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what “drops out” from the system. What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time — or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?

Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive…Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.

The Mushroom at the End of the World is a fantastic book, a weird mix of social criticism and anthropology as told through the story of a mushroom. Her idea of building a framework for looking at the world through precarity, rather than progress, was mindblowing to me and couldn’t be more relevant to our present moment.

I have plenty of friends whose response to climate anxiety is a kind of aloof nihilism, calmly accepting futility in the face of societal collapse in a way they think is edgy and radical. But what Tsing argues, I think, is more radical. Capitalism tells us that our lives are only worthwhile to the extent that they are accumulative, progressive, constantly improving. Most of us would claim not to fully buy into that, but then where do we get this deeply-held belief that life stops if our civilization begins to recede instead of grow? We can all agree that the future is apt to be a shitshow. But instead of giving up, maybe we need to change our understanding of how the world works. And one way to start, Tsing suggests, is to begin noticing what functions at the edges of capitalism today.

She brings it all back to the matsutake, an extremely valuable (in Japan) mushroom that flourishes in human-disturbed forests, specifically eroded or cleared land that advantages pine trees. The matsutake cannot be cultivated, only foraged, and so the economic systems around it preclude the industrial-style farming that has messed up so much of our land and food. The matsutake is both a symbol of what Tsing calls “pericapitalism” and its commercialization is an enactment of it.

I’ve never tried a matsutake; supposedly the taste is strange and even “disturbing” to people who aren’t used to it. I’ve loved every mushroom I’ve eaten, so that makes me even more curious about it. But having only our regular, industrially-grown mushrooms right at this moment, here’s a recipe for portobellos.

What I’m cooking

Slow-roasted mushroom fajitas with spicy cashew cream

This is a pretty good quarantine dish because so many of the ingredients can be swapped out based on what you have. I used poblanos, but bell peppers or any other mild chili peppers would be great. You could throw in squash or fennel as well. Mushrooms are fairly essential, however, because of their umami and meatiness, which especially comes out through the slow-roasting.

The cashew cream stores well (about a week, refrigerated) and is great with everything — slathered on bread, over buddha bowls of grains and tofu, in quesadillas to make them extra creamy and a little spicy. You can start soaking the cashews right before you cook everything else, which would give them about an hour and a half soak time, but the sauce will be creamier if you start them around 10 hours before your meal.

The dish only takes about 30 minutes of prep time, though cooking is over an hour and the soak time can be all day. But that also makes it a great work-from-home dish!

Serves 2, probably with leftovers

Ingredients

Mushrooms

• 4 portobello mushroom caps (or around 15–20 cremini or button mushrooms)
• 1 medium-sized onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 poblano peppers (or bell peppers, or other vegetables)
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon red chili flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin (optional)
• 5 tablespoons olive oil

Cashew cream

• 3/4 cup raw unsalted cashews
• 1/2 cup water plus additional for soaking
• Sriracha (or another hot sauce)
• pinch of salt
• pinch of MSG (optional)
• 1/2 teaspoon white wine vinegar (optional — if you use a more vinegary hot sauce like Cholula, this won’t be necessary)

Tortillas, to serve (hearty grains like brown rice or barley would probably be good too)

Method

Put the cashews into a bowl and cover completely with water. As noted above, you can do this at the start of cooking or 10 hours before.

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Gently clean any dirt off the mushrooms with a damp paper towel or mushroom brush, and remove the stems. (If you’re trying not to waste anything, you can just discard the tough part of the stem, but add back the rest of it to the dish). Peel and halve the onion, then cut lengthwise into into half-inch wide chunks. Peel the garlic cloves, but leave whole. Peppers can be added whole, fennel should be chopped like the onion. (If you’re roasting squash, you can peel and cube it, toss it with oil, salt and pepper, then roast it on a separate baking dish for about 30 minutes.)

Place the mushrooms, onion, garlic, peppers (or other vegetables) into a heavy-bottomed dutch oven or casserole dish that has a lid. Sprinkle the spices and blobs of tomato paste evenly over the ingredients, and drizzle olive oil over it all. Tuck some parchment paper snugly around the whole thing and then put the lid on the dish.

Bake for an hour. If you’re using portobellos, remove the pan and use tongs to flip them over before returning them to the oven for an additional 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the cashew cream. Drain the cashews from their soaking liquid. Add them to a blender (a food processor will not work as well) with the 1/2 cup of water, salt, and MSG and vinegar if using. The spicy level is up to you, but you can start with a teaspoon of sriracha and then increase to taste. Blend for about 3 minutes, scraping down the sides of the blender a couple times throughout. Taste and add additional hot sauce or salt.

Once you’ve removed the portobellos from the oven, cut them into long strips (smaller mushrooms can be cut in half). Heat up the tortillas in a dry skillet, and serve with the vegetables and cashew cream.

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I just quit my job as a software engineer to become a chef. I’m starting a plant-based culinary program in 2 weeks.

I got into tech over a decade ago, when I was finishing college and the NYC scene was small — the era of Gawker parties, Foursquare hackathons, and the New York Tech Meetup. I learned Ruby-on-Rails and started a company with a college friend. Startups felt more like art projects then. It was before there was so much money in the industry that all the founders and VCs who should’ve been bankers were still actually bankers. The power dynamics and economics of the rest of the world hadn’t yet matured on the web, and it felt like a different place. It felt like anything was possible and everything was important. It felt like a turning point that a lot hinged on, and who knows, maybe it was. If so, then we fucked up.

Anyway, plenty of people have written about that. The thing is that it’s hard to separate the arc of an industry from the arc of your twenties when they happened at the same time. I was idealistic in a way that made sense at the time. Then at some point every tech company around me was a monolith that either couldn’t get anything done or actively made the world worse in the name of poorly-conceived aphorisms. I tried opting for non-tech organizations whose usage of technology was boring but not harmful. Outside of work (or during work) I was still reading Twitter for some reason but had become allergic to hustleporn which made it very painful. I muted the word “startup” and blocked people with bios like, “Making the world suck a little less” (because that’s how you know they are for sure making the world suck more). I got better at corporate garbage language and tried to get excited about the professional goal of being an engineering manager at a not-shitty organization.

Throughout it all, I’d been cooking and throwing dinner parties. In the early years these were sort of networking events for tech and media acquaintances, a cheap way to have people over and talk breathlessly about the future over bottles of two-buck chuck. As I got older and the world I thought I lived in simultaneously dissolved and exploded around me, cooking became a refuge from the Internet and my jittery mind, the only thing that could focus and calm me.

I first started to think about cooking as a job while working at the ill-fated Pilotworks, a startup that operated shared kitchens for small food-makers. For the first time in many years I was around people who called themselves entrepreneurs and I didn’t roll my eyes. At least they were making real things. And there was an energy among them that reverberated with me. They were talking about issues I cared about, like sustainable food systems, and it sounded like the market was paying attention. Anecdotally, it seems like more people are attempting to reduce their meat consumption and are more aware of where their food comes from and what it’s made of. And then on a larger scale, Burger King, White Castle, and Dunkin Donuts don’t just decide to offer meatless burgers out of environmental responsibility. It feels like the way we eat is finally, slowly, beginning to change.

I’ve been vegetarian for most of my life and have quietly pursued the goal of convincing the people around me that they didn’t need meat by cooking really good plant-based food. But I didn’t think it was reasonable to consider a career in food if I didn’t want to become a meat expert and I didn’t even know there was a plant-based culinary school until one day I decided to google it (duh). The Natural Gourmet Institute was founded in 1977 by Annemarie Colbin, who focused her curriculum on food that is primarily whole, local, seasonal, organic, and that makes sense for a particular geography. After she passed away five years ago, the school became incorporated into the Institute for Culinary Education. When I made the decision to enroll, it scared the shit out of me but also filled me with relief.

I couldn’t be more excited to start, but is it because I’m pursuing a lifelong passion or is it the intoxicating vertigo of table-flipping a career? Who doesn’t dream — in a conference room, walking through the fiscal year’s KPIs — of opening a bakery, arising in the darkness to put your hands in dough, the smell of egg-washed buns as the morning light filters through the windows? Those are nice fantasies, but not a basis for life-decisions. I know I love to cook but will I love to do it all day every day? In a kitchen run by other people, who may be incompetent, narcissistic, misogynistic? How will I feel losing the title of “programmer” and whatever social importance that conveys? Not to mention the salary and benefits. I’m lucky to even be able to consider this. But am I making a terrible mistake?

I’ve been struggling with those questions, and this newsletter will partly be a place for figuring them out. I’ll also try to share what I’m learning in school, some cooking tips, a recipe every week, and some of my favorite passages from the books I’m reading about food systems, agriculture, and the environment (please send me recommendations!). I imagine most entries will not be as long.

What I’m reading

The Third Plate, by Dan Barber

Farm-to-table allows, even celebrates, a kind of cherry-picking of ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow…Farm-to-table may sound right — it’s direct and connected — but really the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around. It makes good agriculture difficult to sustain.

I have some issues with Dan Barber (maybe I’ll get into them later), but for the most part, The Third Plate is really good. It explores problems with mainstream agriculture that I haven’t thought about much, like the idea that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are addressing symptoms rather than root causes of crop failure, and introduced me to some of the principles of permaculture and organic farming that seek to address those root causes. The book also got me thinking about cuisine as it maps to geography and how becoming a really good cook is related to knowing a place and its annual patterns very well.

Barber goes on to proclaim that he will invent a new cuisine that supports good agriculture. This is an audacious goal for a successful chef/restauranteur, and for an individual like me doesn’t really feel accessible. I don’t have a relationship with any farms outside of buying what’s for sale at the farmer’s market, and can barely grow tomatoes on our fire escape. I also wonder if looking to thousand-year-old cuisines as models makes sense today, because of the various ways our natural resources are changing (and thinning) more rapidly than a cuisine can evolve. But I know I have a lot to learn about crops, particularly those native to New York and the northeast, and that by understanding and using them better, I will probably make food that tastes better and works better for our bodies.

What I’m cooking

Buffalo Nachos

I don’t eat meat and I don’t watch football, but it turns out I love Superbowl food. For a couple years now, I’ve had a Superbowl party for enjoying the food without the distraction of a football game playing. This is a simple recipe that combines the flavor of buffalo wings (which I’m pretty sure is mostly the taste of Frank’s RedHot Sauce) with nachos, i.e. the best delivery mechanism for anything with cheese. You can make it vegan by using Vegenaise (which I prefer to “real” storebought mayonnaise) and something nut-based for the cheese. I think it’s worth the small amount of time to make the tortilla chips by frying cut-up tortillas; they’re usually less salty and provide more structure for the hefty toppings.

Ingredients

Buffalo topping

• 1.5 cups cooked chickpeas (15 oz can, rinsed and drained)
• 2 tablespoons tahini
• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise or Vegenaise
• 1/4 cup Frank’s RedHot, plus more to taste

Ranch

• 3/4 cup mayonnaise or Vegenaise
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh dill
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh chives
• 1 1/2 teaspoons onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

Nachos

• Tortilla chips (storebought or just cut up some tortillas and fry them with a bit of salt)
• Chopped celery
• Chopped red onion
• Chopped olives
• Shredded Monterey Jack (if vegan, I’d recommend Isa Chandra’s cashew queso)
• Additional Frank’s for serving

Method

Preheat oven to 400° F.

Mash together buffalo topping using a fork or potato masher. Combine ranch dressing ingredients in a separate bowl. Place tortilla chips in a single layer across a sheet pan and cover with buffalo mixture, celery, red onion, and olives. Finish with cheese.

Put in the oven until cheese is bubbling, about 8–10 minutes. Remove nachos and dot with ranch dressing. Serve with extra Frank’s and eat immediately.

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I know all cities are emotional maps to the people who’ve lived there, but in NYC especially we let everything hang out in public. Intense personal moments just seem to happen in parks/sidewalks/the subway more than homes/offices/cars. I once broke up with someone over nine stops of a packed Saturday night subway because it started in Manhattan but he wanted to finish it in Brooklyn. Our last hour of standing very close together we were standing just as close to tens of strangers. Recently I was in Tokyo and on the subway there I couldn’t pick out a single couple.

Don’t get me wrong, New York is a mess, America is a mess, and I don’t love that. If I say New York is a well-handled city I mean that it is touched by many hands not managed with efficiency. There’s nothing to be proud of in failing infrastructure and national outpourings of pent-up racism. It’s only that it’s my mess and yours if you want it. If anyone says otherwise, please know that it’s been yours since the first time you pressed your back against its bricks for an ultra-long kiss. Trump may be president but thank god it’s still possible to be in love.

So I haven’t really known what to do with myself for the past year, but I did make this love letter to NYC in the form of a platform called Crying in Public. You can drag an emoji to a place on the map where something important happened and write the story. You can use Google Streetview to set up the exact background. I would like to be able to walk around this city that means so much to me and see a spot that was meaningful to you. It will help me remember that you exist and see your marks on the city as bigger than mayors’ costly train stations or businessmen’s large dicks of skyscrapers. A particular bench might be the most gorgeous Eros monument, in your mind, because you sat there until you were both stiff and frozen but gradually came to the understanding that you would never be alone. Or a coffee shop might be the choice place you were unexpectedly fired, and even if the baristas from that day are no longer there, the walls still remember how hard you stared at them to keep your voice steady.

A wise horse once said, Everything happens so much. There is so much living and trying and feeling going on here all time, and if the stories that make us individuals become prosaic when lumped together in bulk anonymity, that’s okay. Their incalculable sum is what defines this time and place, because it is ours.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I started working on an idea: a tool for women to confidentially submit reports of sexual harassment in the workplace, and be connected to each other if they’ve filed reports about the same person.

The idea was inspired by the shitty men in media list as well as a 2012 paper on Information Escrow (my notes here). The paper makes a game-theoretic case for such a system based on two factors: a) most harassers have multiple targets, and b) for any one of them, being the first to come forward carries the highest risk and retaliation. If a third-party could hold reports in escrow until a small group forms, the risk for each of them is decreased.

It’s an intriguingly simple idea, but as anyone who’s built Internet products knows, the simplicity masks thousands of small decisions that dictate whether it would actually work. It also has the danger of falling into the unfortunately common category of technical tools attempting to solve social problems. This won’t fix a culture that enables sexual harassment — but if it ends up being used, it could put pressure on people and institutions to improve.

I decided I wanted to work on it, but before getting into the mechanics, I started with principles. I wanted the goal to be empowering women, not fixing their problems. They should have as much agency over their data and decisions as possible. That meant taking an essentially anti-authority position — not building this for HR departments or anyone else with power to smother an uncomfortable discovery. The second principle was that it should be inclusive. The design process would need to involve trans people, black women, and other groups for whom sexism interacts with other isms.

The first product discussion we held went well. People expressed excitement about the project, but also plenty of hesitation about trusting an online tool with such sensitive information. The primary fears expressed in the session were about actions being taken without their consent, and their information somehow leaking. A slightly lesser but still substantial fear was the possibility of being put into contact with someone misrepresenting themself as a fellow target of harassment.

We also talked a lot about trust and the graded spectrum from anonymity to verification to identification. Is it possible to verify that a person is not a bad actor without forcing them to reveal their identity?

The initial model for Floodlight came out of that conversation: It would be an anonymous webform for submitting a description of harassment, optional evidence, and the LinkedIn username of the harasser (to help with disambiguation). Verification of the users’ identities would only happen later if there was a match (we weren’t sure what that would look like, but maybe Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn OAuth). Only after verification and explicit consent from all users would they be connected to each other, either in a masked-address email thread or a logless IRC-style chat. One thing I liked about this model is that trolls could submit fake reports without causing much harm, but could be caught later down the line. I find it useful to think of trolls as cats — keeping them out just makes them fixated on getting in, so it’s often better to assume they’ll get in, but make the intrusion unsatisfying.

There were still pieces not figured out though, especially around users’ trust of the system and who would have access to their data. And even restrained trolls could still flood the system, making a ton of extra work. I also spoke to lawyers and began learning about which legal considerations I should take into account. I learned about spoliation — if women are planning to bring a lawsuit and then communicate over logless chat, that could be considered destruction of evidence. Impeachment — making records of an event could get in her way, if she later contradicts anything in them and her credibility is called into question. And I began to be concerned that through discovery or subpoenas, any relevant information in our system could be demanded in court, along with people who saw the data.

As a product-builder, the more I imagined not being able to look at the information in our system, the more uncomfortable I felt. Almost any automated system for verification could be gamed (it’s not hard to set up a fake LinkedIn profile), and standard methods of scanning content for trolls become difficult.

The evolved (and most current) model is more like this: Invite people to join, who can invite others they trust. Therefore, the user-list isn’t a list of women who are victims, just allies, making it much less sensitive data. Because the users can be trusted a little more, we can afford to make the allegation completely private. The description she writes is encrypted with a random key that is emailed to her but not saved anywhere. This makes it less hackable, gives her a sense of security, and means I (or someone else working on the site) could never release it without her consent. She’ll still get connected to others in an email thread if there’s a match, and she may decide to share the key with them but only on the basis of the trust established through their communication.

It’s not perfect, and I have more work to do. Here are some of the questions I am still asking:

What would be your motivations for reporting?

What would make you hesitate?

If you were talking shit about this thing on Twitter, what would you say?

How would you game this system, particularly the second version?

If you’re comfortable speaking to me about your own reporting or non-reporting of harassment, I would love to chat.

I’m also looking for ideas, organizations to reach out to, and collaborators. You can email me at kate@kateray.net.

P.S. By far the best aspect of this project for me has been the conversations I’ve had with other women. You are incredible.