a few good meals: winter edition

I invented a pantry pasta

First of all thanks to everyone who weighed in on last week’s discussion post. You guys are so smart and cool and have reminded me to dip back into books like Meera Sodha’s East (currently on my coffee table) and Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain. You’ve also reminded me that it’s high time I do a deep dive into Nigella’s back catalog. I’m hoping for March to be a month of spending real time with cookbooks, but I say that every month, so we’ll see. Next week, though, I’ll have a fun sort-of-book review for you, so at least we have that.

I’m back in Brooklyn this week after a month spent alone in a lake house in northern Michigan, where I worked on my book and made lots of cabbage (more on that below) and watched lots of movies on Fran’s Criterion account (thank you Fran) and mostly went full hermit mode. My sleep schedule was insane, I slept from like 1 AM to 10 AM every day. And every morning when I grogged out of bed and into the light I got a smack-dab view of a frozen lake through the living room windows, and it never got old. Before you ask, it was actually freakishly warm, but still very beautiful.

lake at sunset

I was in Minnesota for a residency with the Nemeth Art Center, thanks to an invitation from Amy Thielen, whose house was a fifteen minute drive from where I was staying. I mostly said yes to the residency so that I could go to dinner at Amy’s house and it was worth it. But I also said yes so that I could do my sort-of-yearly ritual of locking myself away at a residency for a month and thinking about my weird childhood.

I’m going to get to a bunch of good stuff I’ve cooked and eaten over the last month but before we get to that I feel called to call out some writing I have enjoyed in recent weeks:

Mosab Abu Toha on the current state of feeding yourself in Gaza, where “a fist-size heap of raw beef cost[s] a shocking seventy dollars” and families are staying alive by eating animal feed • Molly Wizenberg’s wonderful interview with Rachel Khong (parts 1 and 2), whose new book revived me from an awful reading rut last fall + whose “circle system” I have adopted • Jaya Saxena on why defining a restaurant as Palestinian matters (+ an interesting follow-up on Google tags) • Max Falkowitz on East African tea • Tatiana Schlossberg on a realistic vision of climate-friendly home cooking • Rebecca May Johnson’s 2020 essay on community gardens (sorry, “allotments”) • Robert Glück’s About Ed (as I told Matt, it’s wildly beautiful but I’m too dumb to explain it) • Edward Carey’s Edith Holler, a novel about a girl who lives in an old theater and can never leave (ha ha), somewhere between Dickens and Angela Carter • Rereading Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House and realizing the only voice that speaks in unattributed quotes is her mother’s, and what an act of love and reverence that is.

Okay, okay, food.

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Carrot and Rosemary Pasta e Ceci

I’ve written before about my love of temporary kitchens. Something I like about them is that when you’re getting close to leaving wherever you are, you must play the game of using everything up, of thinking how little can I buy in this last week, can I simply scavenge the cupboards. This strange exercise in constraint delivered me, last week, to an exciting new pasta dish, which we’ll call a “pantry pasta” assuming you have a single carrot in the fridge.