A lazy(ish) salmon-lentil salad for tonight and tomorrow

you've heard of WFH lunch but do you know about WFH dinner????

I recently ran into a friend on the street (we were waiting for breakfast burritos) and asked her if she’d been going back into the office of late. Not really, she said, then added something like, and anyways, now my writing practice involves getting up every thirty minutes to chop something. Yes! I knew exactly what she meant. This is how I think about my workdays, the push-pull between focus and fussing, typing and slicing.

This month—these years!—I have been at war with my attention span. My life ebbs and flows between periods of good mental hygiene (morning pages, meditation, an hour or two of writing in the morning, reading a book a week) and awful mental hygiene (screen time, nyt games app [evil], social media, checking my email every three minutes). It’s gotten so bad that I’ve started unplugging my wifi for a few hours at a time. This is one of the only ways I can currently focus on “writing my book”. I work in 30 minute chunks, then get up for a five or fifteen minute break to chop something, to toast something, to make another cup of tea, to do a few dishes. Some will think of this as the pomodoro method; I have recently been using Rachel Khong’s circle method, which I find more conceptually playful.

There is a specific type of cooking that lends itself to this sort of schedule. This is not a schedule that befits puttering-type foods—your soups, your stews—but meals that mostly require chopping and checking and waiting.

Last week I found myself writing in the afternoon, and getting up every half our or so to stumble my way towards dinner. First I cooked some lentils: setting them to simmer on one break, checking them the next. (I usually cook my lentils willy-nilly, and they usually turn out just fine.) Then I boiled some water and dropped in a few handfuls of pearl couscous. At some point I peeled and chopped and roasted some parsnips from the CSA. If I’d done all of this work in one go it would have felt more laborious, but stretched out along a few hours, broken up into distraction-style tasks that got me on my feet and thinking with my body rather than staring at a screen, it felt like pulling something off. Like sneaking behind the back of my work to cook myself a cute little dinner. I had spent maybe 30 minutes, total, in the kitchen.

first come the neutrals