when life gives you strawberries

just make the shortcakes already. waiting is for other people

I’m once more writing from my parents’ backyard, where the air smells like honeysuckle and where I’ve spent the last few hours hammering plugs of shitake and chestnut mushroom spawn into oak logs. If this newsletter survives the next year that it will take for the spawn to creep through the wood and flush into actual, harvestable mushrooms, you can be sure I’ll be writing about the magic of fungi when the time comes.

You can also read more about why my family is nuts enough to be spawning their own kitchen mushrooms — and how my family history inspired this newsletter — right here.

meeting family ghosts in the kitchen

Sometimes, life literally hits you in the face. Sometimes, you’re having a massive meal with your family and best friends at the beach and then, ten minutes later, having the worst sleepless night of your life. Sometimes, you’re in the Trader Joe’s checkout line and then you’re crying in the dark and the rain on a city street with twenty pounds of groceries.

The last year of my life has been conspiring to remind me to be present. It’s one of those pieces of life advice that feels like a cliche right until you wake up in the alternative universe where you can physically feel the unkind magic that birthed the cliche in the first place. The feeling eventually fades, if you’re lucky and if you have that incredible human resilience that makes you just keep living. One day you just wake up back in the original universe, remembering but not really knowing that urgency to be present.

The first time I felt that way, it gave me a scary adrenaline. I’d seen mortality, and I overreacted. I spent more time with my parents. I told everyone I knew that I loved them, again and again. I made every plan believing that joy might be scarce and horrors waited, unpredictable yet present, behind a corner I couldn’t envision.

None of those reactions were terribly unreasonable, if we’re honest about the way that life goes. But nobody can go on like that forever. Gravity pulls you to some kind of calmer stasis, perhaps prickled by guilt that you’re no longer as present as you wanted to be but not overwhelmingly so. Not until something happens again.

(A brief aside: If this is too much for you, or you’re just here for the strawberry shortcakes, scroll down. This newsletter is still actually about food, even if it takes a minute to get there.)

…where this newsletter is going, I promise

In Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, an amazing memoir of the food that bound twenty-something Zauner to her mother as she died of cancer, Zauner realizes that with her mother’s illness, she no longer wants to wait to marry her then-boyfriend. They loved each other, they knew they were going to end up together, and if they just stopped waiting, her mom could be present for a moment that mattered to them all. I read that book shortly after the the beginning of my cute little existential spiral, and I was struck by the dark underside to the advice that the world gives us young people. Later, wait, you have all the time in the world.

You don’t, actually.

Shortly after I read Crying in H-Mart, I was laid off from my job and immediately booked a two-week trip to Chile with one of my best friends (see here for the first newsletter on the magic of Chilean food, and here for the second one, on the magic of Chilean wine). I was still disturbed by the sense that there wasn’t enough time in a life. When else would I get to go to Chile? When better to do the living I wanted to do?

the magic of Chile

While there, I read nearly the entire translated canon of the late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who has written some pretty dope poems about sex, women’s bodies, and how wine and food are like sex and also women’s bodies. (A bit weird, but I do recommend.) One poem in particular stuck with me. It acknowledged how I was feeling, it echoed the urgency in Zaumer’s story, and most importantly it reminded me that reacting to fear doesn’t have to be that drastic. You don’t have to get married or fly to Chile, you just have to eat the food you love and be grateful while you do it.

The poem is called October Fullness, and Neruda wrote it near the end of a long, hedonistic, food and love-filled life. I’ve reproduced the text of the first and most important paragraph, the one that stuck.¹

little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried
my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has, 
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
The best thing was to learning not to have too much
either of sorrow or of joy,
to hope for the chance of a last drop,
to ask more from honey and from twilight.

“To hope for the chance of a last drop, to ask more from honey and from twilight.” The words I can’t get out of my head.

These words told me what I’d been feeling but couldn’t have articulated: That evening at the table with the friends and the food and the beach, that’s an evening to be grateful for. That last sip of a Manhattan that you might leave in the glass, that’s a last drop to tip into your mouth and leave it there for a few seconds. Those farmer’s market strawberries sitting in the fridge? It’s finally time to make the shortcakes you’ve been saying you’ll make for years.

You don’t have all the time in the world, but that doesn’t mean rush big decisions. It means that if you’ve always put off making strawberry shortcakes because they feel too fiddly and demanding, just make them.

That is how I’ve always felt about shortcakes. You have to eat them as soon as they’re assembled. They have three different elements, each made separately. They’re annoying.

the fiddly assembly

They’re also a fabulous celebration: tart, sweet, decadent, and creamy all at the same time, each sensation made more intense by the fleeting few perfect bites threatening to melt into a lukewarm mush. Shortcake biscuits should be puffy and high-rising. Shortcake strawberries should be so ripe they’re about to start rotting, macerated in sugar and dripping gooey syrup. Shortcake cream should be whipped just so it barely holds its shape, drooping elegantly over the biscuit.

They’re an irritation of a dessert to make alone. They’re a delight of a dessert to make if you’re surrounded by people having a great time, maybe with some booze on hand and some music in the background.

me, having a completely delightful time with the assembly. photo courtesy of fellow assembler Paige and her Dazz Cam vibes

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Strawberry Shortcakes (makes about 5)

Ingredients

for the shortcakes

• 4 cups of all-purpose flour (500 grams)

• 3 tablespoons of sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt

• 5 teaspoons of baking powder (this looks like a lot, but trust me)

• 3/4 cups of cold butter (1.5 standard sticks, usually)

• 1 and 1/4 cups of heavy cream

• 1/4 cup of melted butter (for the baking step. don’t mix this into the dough)

for the fruit

• 3 cups of very ripe strawberries, washed, hulled, and halved

• 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar, depending on strawberry sweetness

• A pinch of kosher salt

for the whipped cream

• 2 and 1/2 cups of whipping cream (but really whatever you’ve got)

• A few dashes of vanilla

• A handful of powdered or regular sugar

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 450. Butter a baking sheet.

2. Strawberry filling:

   1. Smash a handful of the strawberries with a fork.

   2. Then mix together the strawberries, smashed strawberries, sugar, and salt and leave to sit in a bowl while you bake. This is called macerating. It is how you make fruit heavenly.

3. Shortcakes

   1. Whisk together the dry ingredients.

   2. Cut the cold butter into cubes, drop it into the bowl, and rub the cubes into the flour with your hands until it’s evenly distributed but not mealy or melty. (If you don’t know how to do this, see my newsletter on pie crust for more details. It’s the same vibe.)

   3. Pour in the cream. Mix it all together with your hands, pressing it together to form a dough. Lightly knead and manipulate in the bowl for a minute until it’s all even and holding together, but don’t let it get warm and don’t work it for more than a minute or two.

   4. Flour your countertop or a surface. Flatten the shortcake dough out until it’s about half an inch thick, or use a rolling pin. (In my experience, easier to just press it out with your hands gently). Using a drinking glass, cut out shortcake biscuits. It’s important to have an even number here (you’ll see why in a second). Mush any leftover dough together and keep cutting it into the biscuits until you really don’t have any dough left.

   5. Take half of the biscuits and put them on the baking sheet. Take your melted butter and brush the tops of the shortcakes on the baking sheet with the butter. Now gently place the other half of the shortcakes on top, sandwich-style. They will bake together but be easy to pull apart, which is important for assembly.

   6. Put them in the oven for about 15 minutes, though this really depends on the size of your drinking glass cutter and your oven. They should puff up and get nice golden brown on the top. When you think they are done, you can check by pulling them out of the oven and pulling one apart, making sure you don’t see any cream or raw dough in the middle. If you do, just put it back together again and pop in the oven for a few more minutes.

   7. Take out of the oven and pull each one apart. This is the bottom and top half of your shortcake.

4. The whipped cream

   1. Whip the cream, vanilla, and sugar together until it holds its shape, either by hand or in a stand mixer. Adjust sugar and vanilla for your preference.

5. The assembly

   1. Take the bottom half of a shortcake and put it on a plate. Spoon some strawberries and some strawberry juice on. Spoon on some whipped cream. Top with the second half of the shortcake. Spoon some strawberries and juice. Spoon some whipped cream.

   2. Repeat with all of the shortcakes.

6. Eat immediately. Like seriously, eat immediately. Ideally assemble this with everyone who will be eating, so you can eat them right away.

Some quick housekeeping! I’d love to know if you’re actually using these recipes, planning to use them, or finding them useful. If you do happen to make any of the recipes you find in this newsletter, or you’re planning to, feel free to let me know in the comments section.

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Restaurant notes this week

great beer with a view: Solace Brewing, Navy Yard. The outdoor seating has a fabulous view of the Anacostia River and a luscious river breeze.

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That’s all for this week. Here’s a picture of what logs look like after they’ve been plugged with mushroom spawn, in case you were curious.

1. The poem comes from “The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems,” edited by Mark Eisner. This poem was translated by Alastair Reid.