can't wait til it's colder so i can really start cooking
hello! it's been a while. but summer isn't really a time for cooking, it's more about slicing and arranging things. each year, i tell myself that *this* is the summer where i'll go to the farmers market every weekend. i'll be drowning in galettes, and all my friends will be begging me to stop it with the tomato sandwiches. but i've never been that guy, and maybe i never will be. one weekend in september i biked to the market and bought too much produce, and loved it, and heard a woman yell through the crowd "it's the late-summer frenzy!". she was right.
what it is now, though—and don't tell the tomato freaks i said this—is even better than summer, at least in the kitchen. because now it is stove season.
this is the time of year when you get back to turning on your stove and your oven, and you remember how nice it is to stir things in a pot. i think the last time i wrote you we talked about puttering. this is when it begins.
i'm an enormous homebody but it's rare—once every two weeks, maybe—that i really cook myself a full dinner. every time i do it i think i've discovered cooking. i am the neil armstrong of roast chicken, the wright brothers of stewed beans. then i forget again for two weeks.
last week was my personal kickoff to stove season, which is also, i should mention, leftovers season. i made this melissa clark curry, a little coconut-chickpea number where you're supposed to use a can of pumpkin, but it's NOT pumpkin season yet, so we used some regular degular squash, cut into little cubes so it'd cook nice and fast.
it was just the most satisfying thing to make, because every couple minutes i had a new task: cut up this vegetable. now cut up this vegetable! now stir stuff. now take a little sip of vermouth. now taste for seasoning. now watch everything turn into a soft warm sea of orange. now implant yourself onto the couch. now tell yourself that if you do the dishes before bed you can eat as many oreo thins as you want. as my friend jasper says, "never go to sleep with a sink full of dishes" is the single person's "never go to sleep angry".
hallie has a big piece of art on her wall that includes a quote from, if i am remembering it correctly, ray bradbury. "WORK. RELAX. DON'T THINK!" it says. I've been trying to integrate this mantra into my life this year. It's the reason I started taking bubble baths in march, when I was staring down a 500-piece plate order that basically took over my life for a few months, and needed a way to force myself to relax when I got home from a 10-hour day of throwing plates. (I should say that plates are, objectively, the worst.)
Because my brain is broken and I am a little sloth with attention deficit disorder who has been programmed to lay on the couch and stare at her phone during her off hours, finding ways to actually relax while I'm home has become a pet project of mine. I'm not that good at it, but I try. There are the baths, of course. There are the morning hours when I'm not allowed to look at a screen until I've done my reading and journaling. And then, during stove season and puttering season, there is cooking, the kind that takes a medium amount of labor but isn't in any way difficult.
This is the joy of cooking, for me: work that doesn't count as work, a way to occupy my mind that ends in, ideally, something delicious. Sometimes the only other option is laying on the floor staring at the ceiling for extended periods of time, but that won't give me olive oil-braised chicken thighs or tomorrow's studio lunch. Living in a world/city that overvalues productivity sucks, but I feel lucky that I get to channel my manic, gotta do stuff energy into making things out of wet dirt and turning ingredients into foods. This weekend I'm going to finally make something from Anna Hezel's Lasagna cookbook—the rare single-topic cookbook that feels necessary—and I'm so excited to eat melted cheese with my friends. All the bad news has made me want to gobble up small amounts of pleasure whenever i can, like a mouse scavenging for crumbs.
What else can i tell you? I finally started a mailing list-slash-newsletter for my ceramics business. I'd love it if you signed up. It will mostly be a place where I tell you when the shop is gonna be updated, and then sometimes it will be a place where I give you special little discount codes, because I have a business degree and I know people need incentives :) It's also a way for me to untether my success and self-worth from the instagram algorithm, which is evil and rotting our brains! I may also, from time to time, "write" things, but I've never had much desire to write about ceramics. I don't think I have much to say about it—I just want to do it all the time.
More things: I'm dying to make these beurre blanc beans that tejal wrote about. And I have all the breads—cornbread and yeasted rolls—from Jubilee, Toni Tipton-Martin's new book, bookmarked. I'm gonna be making the big genius fish for thanksgiving, because the bulls have a very exciting pescatarian guest joining us, but i still think you should swap out your turkey for a couple of these feta-brined chickens. And I really loved talking to Josef Centeno about his new book, and the real meaning of Tex Mex.
See you soon. And send me all your favorite stews.