cooking while stressed

having fun when your plans get wrecked

Originally, today’s newsletter was going to be my ode to traditions, to the anticipation of knowing that every year around the same time I’m going to knead a pound of butter into dough, bake it into brioche loaves, soak it in custard for pudding, and finally deep fry it and drizzle with a raspberry sauce. I was going to write about the ritual of making the same ambitious thing year on year and the feeling of peace that comes with it.

(A recurrent theme for me: Here’s last week’s newsletter on egg nog, and last year’s on gingerbread.)

But nothing would land, because the reality of cooking in the last couple of days has been a harried and frazzled one. One where I’m splattered with butter and oil and end up falling asleep with sticky bits of garlic and soy sauce on the counter and dirty pots caking up on the stove.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about how cooking doesn’t have to be a production or a tradition or anything at all to be fun.

My boyfriend and I had a little plan for New Year’s Eve. We’d take the train back to the city in the morning, make a grocery run, and then while away the night cooking an elaborate dinner. We even had a schmancy menu: stuffed pork tenderloin, potatoes au gratin (cheesy potato always required for meals like these), goat cheese salad, and raspberry lemon cake. We’d drink some nice cocktails and stay up to an ungodly hour without feeling guilty, which is the real purpose of New Year’s imo. (Yes I know we’re about a decade too young for this kind of thing, leave me alone.)

But Amtrak, usually my friend but currently my enemy, cancelled our morning train and then basically all of the trains in the Northeast Corridor for most of the day. When we finally did make it back to DC, it was so late that I nearly smashed face-first into the locked door at the Giant before someone shouted, “They’re closed, babe.”

I was in a state of hangry where I could think of nothing other than food, and a state of exhaustion where I wanted nothing more than to go to bed, if only I could stop thinking about food.

So we cooked with the remnants of what was left in the fridge for the two weeks we were gone. A package of rice noodles in the closet, half a bag of shrimp from the freezer, very old but somehow salvageable garlic, broccoli, and ginger chopped up, some glugs of sesame oil, fish sauce, soy sauce, and mirin, all thrown into a very hot pan for a few minutes.

Whether it was actually good or whether we were just stupid hungry I’ll never know, since we devoured enough for about four people in the ten minutes around midnight, leaving no leftovers. Ten minutes after that I could barely stand up straight, so we abandoned the wreckage in the kitchen and called it a night.

(I’ve got no pictures at all from the last few days because of the aforementioned general frenzy. They’d usually go here.)

New Year’s Day was going to be our redemption, another shot at the original meal we’d planned. It would be a relaxing day of cooking in the afternoon, a couple of friends over to eat, all very chill.

But then we couldn’t get out of bed, and then we didn’t want to get out of bed, and then the dishes from the night before were really quite crusty, and then the grocery store was packed, and then some family issues hit the fan, and then I was trying not to cry, and then suddenly it was the time we were supposed to be eating and friends of the newsletter were walking up the steps and the pork tenderloin hadn’t even come out of the fridge.

I get kind of tense and anxious if I need to cook a full, elaborate meal from beginning to end while also playing host. I am not a good multitasker, and the older I get, the more I think true multitasking is a myth. I will cut myself or break something or miss a key ingredient if I’m actually having a real conversation and trying to cook something new simultaneously.

Even worse, you might volunteer to help, and I’m sorry but most of you can’t be trusted to thinly slice the onions or appropriately salt the soup. If you’ve been invited over for a meal, you’ll notice that usually I’m at least halfway done before you show up. Until I know that you’re actually comfortable in the kitchen and you cook more than once a month, I’m going to be a bit of a control freak. I’d much rather you drank a nice cocktail and chatted about your life while I go about the kitchen.

But on Monday, control freak was no longer an option. I did in fact nick my finger with a knife, our friends (who can actually really cook, thank goodness) helped stuff the pork and glaze the cake, we overdid the tenderloin when we got too caught up in conversation, and we ate two hours later than planned.

And we all had a really great time. The cooking was fun, the food was delicious, the friendship was warm and lovely and all of those fuzzy things.

Two nights in a row, nothing went according to plan. But we drank lots of Paper Planes (one of my favorite cocktails atm). We stuffed our faces. We stayed up late. We laughed.

I’m sitting here feeling much less culinary ambition than usual, and a lot of love for that feeling of cooking next to someone. I’m sure the energy will come back, as will my failure to delegate, but I’m glad I’ve been reminded just how casual and easy and unplanned cooking can be. I wasn’t having the best day by the time we made it back on Sunday, or by the time we were trying to cook on Monday. But I was by the time we had finished.

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A quick restaurant recommendation

In previous newsletters, I’ve sometimes flagged places in DC that I’ve been loving. I may bring that back occasionally, but today I wanted to briefly mention a restaurant in Philly called Laser Wolf. Anyone very keyed into Philly food will know about this Zahav offshoot from the CookNSolo team, but it brought me so vividly back to my time living and eating in Doha, Qatar that I’d recommend anyone interested in food from the Middle East try to get a reservation if you’re planning to be in Philly. I’ve yet to find hummus that revelatory anywhere else in the US, and I’ve been looking for years.

Until next time, my parents got a puppy, and I think this about sums up my kitchen vibes…