Kind of an unwieldy title, eh? I compressed the last three months into a single blog post because, as has been the ongoing pattern this year, my project output has swerved downward. My excuses this time: I decided a couple of months ago that I wanted to revise my novel (My Novel™; is there any way to say this that doesn’t feel obnoxious?) so I’ve been focusing on that; I’ve still been cooking and baking, just Other Things; I had a work trip in the middle of October; the list goes on. The charm of this project has worn off a bit, just in time for it to end! I wasn’t planning on continuing it through 2020, and I’m still not; instead I have something else I’ve been dreaming up, so keep an eye out for that in January.
I’m not quite ready to do any sort of reflecting on this project, although as ever I would like to thank it for helping me try a lot of new things. (Or a handful of new things, if you’re just talking about September-November.)
A quick overview: Apples is the one I most regret not making more from, and it’s the one that fell during the aforementioned work trip that sort of jolted my cooking. I will definitely be revisiting over the winter. I really want to try the tartines. I liked Broccoli, which is my girlfriend’s favorite vegetable, which itself means we’ll be back to this one. I liked Chickpeas too, but learned that I either don’t like chickpea flour or I don’t like the brand we bought. I’ll grab another bag from Kalustyan’s someday and we’ll see.
Onward!
Read MoreYou’d be forgiven for wondering if I’ve given up on this Short Stack project; I never wrote the blog post for July and I made one entire recipe in August. These non-events both come with similar reasoning: I started a new job that I genuinely like going to, and it’s taking up more of my energy than my last one in part because I’m more willing to give it. It’s a new area for me, and that’s challenging, but I also seem to be taking well to it, and I’m proud of myself. I’m proud of how I’m doing there. Another piece of reasoning: my girlfriend moved in with me last month, which is thrilling, but August felt like a very flux-y month and I just wasn’t in the mood to cook a lot. (Heat? End-of-summer malaise? I don’t know either.)
I did make one thing, though, so I’m proud of that, in a way. Better to just make one recipe than none, I think.
Read MoreIt feels like a cop-out to start probably the third blog post in a row with “it’s been a tumultuous month”…but it has been! I’m a couple days late on this because Pride was this past weekend (I have odes to write to the Dyke March, my very first, but those may come later) and I was on the go basically non-stop. Plus, I’ve been unemployed for about a week and a half (fear not — barring any sudden developments I will be re-employed as of next week, thankfully) and the stress of the lead-up to that was…a lot. I’m not going to opine on it, but job hunting is hard, and demoralizing.
But then there’s always strawberries.
Read MoreI was very excited to try rhubarb for the above reason. For so much of my life (26 years!) (technically more like 20, I guess) “rhubarb” was a mythical creation: my characters in “Oregon Trail” always bought a ton of it, because it was cheap and traveled well; and every spring, I saw food writers sing the praises of rhubarb [pie/jam/crumble/etc]. But until this month, I’d never gotten around to trying it.
Alas, it was not May 01 that I tried it, and that’s why once again it feels like I’ve made very little from this particular Short Stack. I hit the Union Square farmers’ market on May 1, ready to stock up, only to find that spring had not yet sprung quite enough for rhubarb to start being harvested and sold. It was closer to the middle of the month that I finally managed to get my hands on some, and that delay in tandem with my unusually busy social calendar (ha) meant that I didn’t come close to using as much rhubarb as my Oregon Trail pixel settlers did.
It can be hard for me to try new foods (thank god no one took me on the Oregon Trail, I guess); there’s a lot of sensory anxiety and social anxiety wrapped up in it. One of the things that I’ve loved about this Short Stack project (and that I love, in general, about home cooking) is that I can try things by myself, in the comfort of my own kitchen, where no one has any expectations of me. If I don’t like rhubarb after all, I can give the pie to a friend. If it turns out that I absolutely love whole-grain honey mustard, I can hoard it, buy it, or make it again myself. The stakes are low, and the anxiety is minimal. But I liked rhubarb a lot. I’ll be stocking up and freezing a ton before the season ends, so that I can drink rhubarb lemonade in November and think of spring.
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