a non-punitive chia pudding

a recipe + tips for the thing i eat every morning

Thank you to everyone who said nice things about this week’s tea blog! Please keep sending me your tea recommendations, I love getting them. This week we’re talking chia pudding but PLEASE don’t unsubscribe I promise it actually tastes good. Extremely brief ED mention here, and some nutrition stuff if you’re sensitive to that, though I admit the biggest content warning here is just “chia pudding” and “digestion”.

Food, for me, is inextricable from freedom: the freedom of self-sufficiency, the freedom of allowed abundance that came with ED recovery, and freedom of time. As a self-employed person I find great pleasure in the freedom to cook what I want when I want during the day, the freedom from rigorous meal planning, though this freedom can go too far. Making a fancy little breakfast on a Tuesday can mean constraining myself to a sinkful of dishes and a more-pressed work schedule. I am now remembering something an old yoga friend told me a decade ago that has just dislodged from the undercarriage of my memory: that “commitment is freedom.” I am finally aging into an understanding of this, of the great moving around you can do within a set of constraints you’ve created for yourself, the ease and relief that comes with making a choice, with no longer having to make a choice. This is a windbaggy way to introduce the concept of chia pudding, I know!, but it is also a sincere one: I recently realized I didn’t want to burden myself with the daily question of breakfast¹. That absolving myself of choice at the nine o’clock hour would mean more time for reading, writing, thinking, and sending stupid emails. I have long had an obsession with how to start my day—mornings could be huge, as they say on poog—and this is just just the most recent iteration of that obsession. It conceptually commingles with morning pages and meditation and keeping my phone turned off (yes OFF) for at least an hour after waking, but it sets itself apart by tasting good.

basically a bowl of yogurt but texturally more fun & essentially 3 metamucil tablets

An even more embarrassing way to introduce a recipe for CHIA PUDDING is this: A few months ago I watched a video of Emma Chamberlain doing nothing. At one point, sitting on her couch, she held up a large Ball jar of chia pudding, explaining that she tried to eat some every day for let’s call them regularity purposes. I said hmm, okay, yes. The most interesting part of it for me was the huge jar, the idea that I could just BATCH my chia pudding, and then breakfast would mean decanting it into a bowl and garnishing, then washing the bowl and the spoon.

So I have become the sort of person who makes herself a big jar of breakfast sludge once a week, for purposes of ease and, yes, regularity², and let me tell you, baby, I love it!

Happily, this has not become a sensually ascetic practice: I do not consider this a “diet food”, but a tasty and convenient food that, as my mom would say, has “lots of good guys”.³ It is cool and rich with multiple kinds of dairy fat and it is easy to make and it is gentle. It takes me two minutes to mix up and two minutes to dish out and two minutes to clean up. I think some people don’t like the texture of chia pudding—it’s not not slimy, though a friend recently called it “slippery”, which I prefer—but I’ve found that when pumped with yogurt and bolstered by oats, it offers its own strange abundance. And while my version is not vegan, I’ve added some tips below for cutting the dairy without sacrificing richness.

my beloved jar of morning slop <333333

A few lives ago I was deep into an overnight oats habit, I wrote all about it here. Every night before sleep I’d mix up a little jar of oats and every morning in front of a computer at a job I hated I’d shovel it into my mouth dutifully. It was dense and occasionally bland but healthy, which is probably some sort of metaphor for my life at the time. For some reason my new chia era seems more joyful and less weighty, and I’m speaking only of the food, I promise. Plus I don’t have to mix it up every night, I can spend my evenings getting dinner with people I like or watching a quiet and devastating movie about a woman and her dog or reading a book or whatever. Before bed I fill up my tea kettle with water to avoid an additional step in the bleary light of morning and I rest easy knowing my breakfast is waiting for me in a big gloopy-walled jar.

Here are some of the ways I make my chia pudding non-punitive.