Food Notes from the Hangriest Child of the Universe

The recent joys of appetite

Nobody wants to read about what I eat, I thought to myself. And then I remembered how enthusiastically I devour writing about what other people eat - most recently through Alicia Kennedy, Julia Skinner, and Carrot Quinn’s newsletters. I want to know what everyone is eating! Nobody will tell me as much as I want to know! When my friends travel I want them to tell me everything they ate while they were away (ideally with pictures) so that I can live vicariously, please let’s normalize this.

I think what we eat is complicated and fascinating and also often (perhaps not often enough) joyful. It speaks volumes about our lives and our values - and of the values of the culture we belong to, like it or not.

I love food and I love to eat. I have often joked that I don’t feel alive unless I’m thinking about my next meal. I also cannot, absolutely cannot, have a single intelligent thought if I’m hungry. I become possessed by hunger. So I try to set up my life so that it’s easy to put together food that’s delicious and filling without making me feel like garbage after I eat it, or costing a bajillion dollars. This is something I feel like I should have figured out and systematized by now but dear reader I am here to tell you that I have not. Meal prep has never been a thing I’ve attempted more than once every couple years, it never sticks, I have given up the fantasy of being the kind of person who meal preps.

I also do everything I can to waste as little as possible, it’s one of my closest-held values, so a lot of what I’m eating gets centered around what’s left over. Read on for some easy, scrappy jawns I’ve been putting in my tummy recently.

In the summer, as you well know if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a minute, I eat around what’s growing in the garden. In the winter, when the garden is sleeping under its piles of leaves and compost, I still want to eat deliciously and freshly. However, there are, understandably and obviously here in the Midwest, fewer kinds of fresh foods available. So what does that mean, practically? Here are some recent favorites from my kitchen.¹

Sheet Pan Roasted Veggies: Depending on what’s available, this is the go-to. Chopping, tossing in oil, and putting in the oven some combination of beets, parsnips, sweet potatoes, cabbage, fennel, winter squash, brussels sprouts, onions, garlic etc, etc. These go in everything - quick lunch salads, tossed with a base like polenta or farro, wrapped in a tortilla with mayo and greens, sprinkled with nutritional yeast or parm. Save those chopped scraps for:

Veggie Scrap Stock: The basis of almost all of the cooking in my house is veggie scrap stock. I learned this method many years ago from my pal Ally and have adopted it so that now it is just something I do every week, like laundry or taking out the garbage. All you do is put your veggie scraps in a ziploc bag as you accumulate them throughout the week: onion and garlic ends and skins, the ugly parts of carrots or beets or celery, kale stems, etc. You don’t want to use the remains of eggplant or peppers - they make the stock pretty bitter. At the end of the week you dump the scraps in the crock pot - throw in some bay leaves if you want, why not? - and let them cook into a flavorful and super-easy homemade stock. This is what we use for cooking just about anything that requires a cooking liquid - beans, quinoa, rice, soup, you name it.

Soooooouuuuuuuuup: As soon as it starts getting below 40 degrees at night, soup season is on. There are a few go-to soups that I return to over and over again, like the root vegetable and peanut stew in Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan cookbook. The easiest go-to, though, is just a bunch of veggies roasted and then immersion blended all together with homemade veggie scrap stock.

Sprouts: I think sprouting became pretty popular amongst the hippies in the US in the 60s and 70s but it’s a very ancient practice. I learned how to do it from the first farm I ever WOOFed on, which I wrote about in an earlier newsletter. All you need are these mesh jar lids (very inexpensive), a wide mouth mason jar, a little bowl for the water to drain into, and a dark cabinet. I sprout mung beans most often (I do not agree with Creed that they smell like death) but broccoli and radish seeds are great too. It is very satisfying to check my sprouts a couple times a day, rinse and shake, and watch them grow. I put them on sandwiches, in wraps, a little crunchy, nutrient-filled deliciousness to add to everything.

Pickled Radishes & Brine: I have been quick-fridge-pickling radishes like a fiend, my partner and I just can’t get enough. For one pint jar of pickles I boil a brine of equal parts water and apple cider vinegar with a tablespoon or so of salt. Sometimes I add red pepper flakes, pink peppercorns, and/or crushed garlic cloves to the jar before I chop in the radishes, if I’m feeling fancy. The funkiness might be a lot for some folks, but it is exactly what I love. After we finish a jar I mix the brine with club soda for a beverage I call my sober martini. It’s hot pink! It’s deeply funky! It’s not for everyone and neither am I!

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No-Waste Chimichurri: I recently bought some gorgeous local radishes that had their giant droopy greens and stems still attached. Radishes are a little spicier than what I normally would use in the veggie scrap stock and I find that carries over into their greens as well. Starting with inspiration for a stem chimichurri from Scraps, Wild & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food into Plenty, a book I love and use often, I made an otherwise-pretty standard chimichurri by pouring red wine vinegar, olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, and some herbs and spices over the chunky chopped radish stems and leaves. Y’all: it was SO. GOOD. SO GOOD! I put it on everything until it was gone. 10/10 will be making again. It would also work for something like chard stems or pretty much any leafy green stem that you wouldn’t otherwise use.

The Magic of Marinating: We eat a lot of tofu in our house - so much so that I get the big, 4-pound SoyBoy at the grocery store every week. My favorite way to eat tofu is to marinate it overnight in soy sauce and then bake it (directly inspired by Alicia Kennedy’s process - y’all I cannot overstate how worthwhile a paid subscription to her newsletter has been, it is everywhere in my cooking). I used to just throw some sauce on the tofu before popping it into the oven, but the difference between that and letting it absorb overnight is staggering, I will never go back. Once baked it can be chopped up and thrown into salad, a quick noodle soup, or between slices of foccaccia. I’ve been inspired by Carrot Quinn’s sardine-kimchi-rice meals and have been subbing the baked tofu for sardines.

Tahini Salad Bowl: Lately for lunch I’ve been making a salad inspired by this Minimalist Baker recipe, but instead of caesar I do a tahini dressing, which is easy to whip up from memory and I always have the ingredients stocked. It’s just about a tablespoon each of tahini (a heaping tablespoon), chili garlic sauce, lemon juice, and maple syrup, plus a bit of water to thin it out to your preferred thickness, immersion blended in a wide-mouth mason jar.

Toast Yr Gnocchis: Maybe everyone already knew this was a thing but I did not. Lately one of the favorite dinners around these parts is gnocchi that’s been pan-crisped instead of boiled. The texture is toothsome on the inside and crispy on the outside, and it’s the perfect vehicle for the tomatoes I grew and canned this summer which now have evolved into their final form: tomato sauce.

Thanks for reading! This holiday season I am available for receiving gifts in the form of y’all telling me what you’ve been eating in the comments - the more detail the merrier. Ho ho ho!

1. Lest you be bamboozled into thinking that I am a health-obsessed gourmand, it feels important to say that this is just a highlight reel and not at all a record of everything I’ve been eating! Not pictured is a lot of toast, egg sandwiches, Fritos and Frito nachos (Fritos, black beans, cheese & hot sauce, popped in microwave until melty), so many Lara Bars, so much pasta, and the Kringle my mom sent us for Thanksgiving - to name a few.