somehow I have been doing this for eight years

reconsidering an anniversary, always puttering

How strange, sitting down to write an admittedly perfunctory anniversary edition of my email newsletter about cooking, and scrolling all the way back to the end of the archive—to the writing that happened before Substack was even a twinkle in a venture capitalist’s eye, when the internet still offered copious venues for fun writing and we were all “getting into tinyletter”—and realizing that while, yes, this week is the two year anniversary of this newsletter’s relaunch, it’s also the eight year anniversary¹ of the first-ever Mess Hall post. An eighth anniversary calls for pottery and bronze, far better than cotton (for two years), so we’re going with that. Happy eight year anniversary to Mess Hall.

I spend fifteen minutes sitting here trying to make sense of that.

I cannot tell you why I began writing this thing, except that so many other people were starting newsletters in that era and I am nothing if not a joiner; and also that there was nowhere where else I could prattle on about cooking the way I wanted to. There was a looseness² to those early posts that I miss—we lose something when we hold ourselves to the standard of marketability and the elusive paid subscription. But thanks to our increasingly precarious industry—layoffs continue to decimate newsrooms and career trajectories alike—opting out of monetizing creative work is a nonstarter. So we hold ourselves to weekly and monthly and yearly goals, and try to hold onto some of the fun that got us here. I’d say I succeed at that at least 50% of the time. But I have kept myself writing, and I have something that is completely my own, which was the original goal. Any mess or error here is mine, thank God.

In February 2016 I was still putting kale stems in my vegetable broth, which I now refuse to do; ick. I was still mostly a vegetarian though I would soon begin ordering meat at restaurants, tipped over the edge after testing so many frankly delicious steak recipes for the Estela cookbook. I was about to take my first pottery class (in anticipation of the eighth anniversary, surely). But reading that first dispatch, I am humbled by how little has changed. I still use cooking as an excuse to putter, to leave my desk and make myself useful. I am still always making a weird stock. I am still indebted to all things that bubble in a pot, for their generosity. Just the other day I made myself an ad hoc chickpea-tofu curry, based very roughly on this Melissa Clark recipe. I wasn’t in my home kitchen, didn’t have my usual battery of spices, so I threw a dash of cayenne in there, and threw off the whole huge pot’s balance. Sometimes a dash surprises you by being more than a dash. Just a little too spicy, the curry now threw off my balance too. So I entered into the delicate dance of doctoring a pot of something. Self flagellation, opening another can of coconut milk, adding a splash of chicken stock (random…), more tofu, more lime, more self flagellation, more tasting. Recipes never include self flagellation³ but is is often a crucial step of the process. A teacher recently described writing as amnesic—we learn very obvious lessons about the process, and then we forget them and must learn them anew. Cooking is like this too, for me at least. It is a humbling process, and rarely a boring one. We make a mistake, we feel bad, we learn to correct it, we tweak and taste, and if we are lucky we end up with something slightly off our original mark but still delicious. A few extra gloops of coconut cream never hurt anybody. I spent three happy days eating through that enormous pot of curry and somehow never got tired of it. All that tinkering made me grateful for something so pleasurable.

In the last two years of regular Mess Hall posting I have gone through ruts and peaks and valleys and dark nights of the soul in both my writing and my cooking. Both have been feeling iffy recently—I have felt feverish in my need for inspiration. But I am grateful to have this place to thrash around in, grateful for every person who has read about me cooking like five thousand pots of beans. I am happy to be looking out towards towards another year here, eager to follow a few new ideas that have popped up, hopeful you’ll stick around.

Here are some of my favorite newsletters from the past year, listed as links so you can actually read this in your email. xoxoxoxoxo and p.s. Free Palestine <3

• Cookbook on a Budget: Ruby Tandoh’s Cook As You Are

• The Small And Abundant Luxury of Tea

• A Non-Punitive Chia Pudding

• How to Do the Dishes

• A Beachy Mango Smoothie

• Four New Ways to Look at Leftovers

• How to Get Out of a Rut, Part I

• Sesame-Crusted Tofu Teriyaki Bowls

• How Do You Use Cookbooks?

1. time has become so fuzzy and my math skills so weak that I originally wrote six here, and then seven, and then googled “24-16”, to get the correct answer. Let it be known, as I like to tell anyone who will listen and even those who refuse, I scored a 4 on the BC AP calc exam and would have scored a 5 but my calculator died halfway through. I should also add that Clio got a 5, but her calculator worked the whole time.

2. Remember when I fell in love with that guy in Mexico and wrote about putting lime juice on boiled eggs?

3. Don’t ask me why but yesterday I was googling hair shirt, and I feel like someone must be wearing this to Berghain? kind of cunt….