I'm back :)

happy new year

I’m writing this on January second, which I’m treating like January first: yesterday was for ordering two bagel sandwiches at once, watching The Birdcage, and celebrating Jamie’s birthday before crashing at 10 p.m. Today was for vacuuming, journaling, dropping off dry cleaning (white Kallmeyer shirt pressed against nye club wall no good), re-oiling my cutting board, hand-washing my vintage cashmere ebay haul, changing the sheets, bravely responding to a work email, dropping off compost. I simmered a big pot of porky beans and made chicken soup with those and some freezer collards for a half-assed good luck meal. I figured this day of beginnings and restarts would be an appropriate time to finally say hello again.

some 2024 candle holders + a freshly painted wall :)

I had to take a break from the newsletter last fall: too much school work and school meltdowns, not enough brain space for new ideas. I’d fallen behind and needed a hard reset. I paused paid subscriptions sometime back in October, and will be turning them back on this week. I’ve always wanted Mess Hall to be something I enjoyed, or at least something I felt propelled to pour energy into. I’m awful at forcing myself to do something I don’t want to. I am in awe of my fellow substackers who calmly get a post up once (or twice!) a week. I had to wait for the urge to return, and it has. If you didn’t notice—great! If you did—thank you for your patience :)

The next few months will see some reworking and experimenting here, I hope. I recently received a teaching fellowship through my MFA program at Bennington, and I’ll be assisting an undergrad creative writing class next semester, spending a few days a week up there from February through May. I got the news a month ago and still when I think about it I get a whipping thrill. To spend some time in New England, to get some teaching experience, to ride some strange new momentum. So much happened in 2024 but still I felt inert. I like to think that feeling will be impossible this year.

Being up at Bennington—with a full meal plan, ha!—means I’ll likely be spending a bit less time cooking each week, and with that and teaching and working on my thesis, I think that my cadence here will be more like 3 times a month rather than 4, aiming for quality over quantity. I may change publishing days to Mondays—sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading email on a Friday. I’m hoping to get back to regular cookbook reviews, and maybe even some interviews, two types of blogs that I love but tend to ignore. I’ll also likely write a little bit outside the kitchen—I need, first and foremost, to tell you about painting my apartment, the great epic of my Q4.

I’ll have something for you next week, but in the meantime, in lieu of any sort of 2024 retrospective, I’m offering you an arbitrary list of bests from the year, published in the great annual Fran Magazine anthology. See you soon xx

Fran Magazine: Best of 2024 Extravaganza