In typical February fashion, my cooking didn’t go as planned and there was hardly enough time for what did. Earlier this year I decided to work toward a more plant-based, vegan-ish diet, and Yogurt was left in the dust, due to its inherent nature as a dairy product.
I should have more to say, but I don’t. February has always felt like a transitory month. I’ve had a lot of headaches, real and logistical. I read a lot this month, and I cooked a lot this month, and I tried many new foods this month. That’s probably part of it: transition into a version of myself both more and less like who I was years ago. When I was 10, I could finish a book in a day, and I never dreamt of eating rice. I’m not sure what my motivation was. I was afraid of the possible texture, I think. Reading cookbooks has let me grow softer with my fears. When Samin Nosrat described tahdig in her recipe for Persian-ish rice, I thought it sounded like something I’d like, and if I didn’t at least no one would be the wiser. So I made it, and it was delicious, of course.
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In late December, I finally took the plunge and bought a Short Stack Edition. I’ve been intrigued for a while, every time I see them at the Strand — their covers are eye-catching and some of my favorite food people (Molly Yeh, Dorie Greenspan, and Alison Roman, for example) have written for them. On my girlfriend’s suggestion, I picked up Honey, and then it occurred to me that it would be fun to try to cook my way through as much of a book as I could each month of 2019.
Since buying Honey, I’ve become a little obsessed with its author, Rebekah Peppler. I bought her book Apéritif a couple weeks ago, enchanted by the idea of being someone who makes and drinks her own cocktails at home (like my dad — I really feel like I take after him far more than I could ever have expected, but that’s for another post). One of the things I like a lot about Apéritif is that, as Peppler writes at the end, it exists in a world without cishet white men.
This is dreamy at the best of cultural moments, but particularly lately.
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In classic Chloe fashion, I’ve left a passion project to sit for nearly a full month and barely noticed the time go by. It’s been a busy month, but it’s about to get busier, what with Thanksgiving coming up; around this time of year I start really wanting to cocoon, but that’s not a full-time option. Unfortunate. But if I can’t do that, I can spend my days off doing things I like — baking, spending hours with my girlfriend watching TV or hanging pictures on my walls for the first time in the 3 years I’ve lived in this apartment, petting my cats, reading, listening to Ariana Grande…all the usual things that make weekends nice.
But weeknights are important too. I sometimes feel like I’m tripping toward the weekend, stumbling through the days of work before I get to the full days off. On busy days at work that feeling is intensified. With the weather changes and general stress, I keep getting little (and big) headaches. At work I eat the same things over and over, which I can’t really complain about (free!) but am going to anyway. There is a lot to be said for making your own food. Maybe I enjoy it so much because I don’t do it a lot.
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