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If you haven’t noticed by now, let me be the first to inform you that 2020 has not been good. I will do my best not to bum you out, but you can’t begin to improve a situation until you face the problem. A pandemic continues to rage across our country, killing over 150,000 fellow Americans with no end in sight. Our federal government has essentially withered away into nothing, and any plan for the future doesn’t appear to move beyond just stopping the rot and into substantive ways that life can get better.
We are inundated with bad news on a daily basis, and things that would previously be cause for national scandal are met with muted numbness. Every day has a crushing, suffocating sameness, and it is taking a deep toll on us. We’re all the star of our own Groundhog Day, but instead of goofy hijinks we get to worry about whether this is the day we get sick. Play your cards right and you get to do it again, and again, and again.
Things are bad, and we have little reason to think they’ll get better anytime soon. But in spite of [gestures vaguely] all this, if you pick through the trash that this year has devolved into, you can still find hope. The great forest ecosystems of the West depend on forest fires to clear things out and start anew every once in a while, and I like to frame this period as the chutes starting to poke out of the charred forest floor. Sometimes it’s a great evergreen tree sprouting anew, and other times it’s an avocado pit taking root in your woefully untended compost bin.
We started composting a few years ago. Maybe “composting” is being a little generous, but we try. Our leftover fruit and vegetable scraps get dumped behind our garbage in a little pen I built using wooden pallets, and there it just kind of sits. We don’t have a tumbler, I never remember to turn it, and I’m not sure we’ve ever actually used the compost in our gardening. But despite getting basically no use out of it, it makes me feel good on some basic level. Like somehow this is a better outcome than just throwing the same stuff in the garbage.
If I’m lucky, this avocado tree would produce fruit in maybe three or four years. Considering the harsh climate and logistical challenges of trying to keep a small tree alive indoors during the winter, this little guy isn’t going to be productive. But we’ve been throwing avocado pits in this compost bin for years. If I had to guess, we’ve put at least 100 of them in there. I don’t know why these two germinated, but I’m choosing to see this as a sign. Yes, things are bad. Yes, we’re metaphorically struggling in a huge heap of decaying matter and garbage. But sometimes through struggle we can begin life anew, and hopefully be better off for it.
One of the things I do to try to break up the sameness is cooking. With so much out of my control, exploring new techniques and trying new recipes is one of the few things I can do to make the days feel new. But so much of what I love about cooking is sharing food with friends and family, and that has happened far less often this year than it used to.
Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I like to think that I’m doing practice runs of the food that I’ll serve to others once life has returned to normal, whenever that may be. It's like on every episode of House Hunters where they talk about how much they love to entertain, except by God, I'm actually going to do it. I can already picture friends gathered in our home, enjoying fine food and drink and sparkling conversation like we’re living in a prosecco commercial. Look at all these beautiful people, having an intellectually stimulating time together and definitely not trying to explain to their wives why they keep tweeting about athletes hitting them in the face with a frying pan or suplexing them through a skylight.
These are the things that bring me back when I let my mind wander into darker territory. No, I didn’t use the past few months as an opportunity to better myself or pick up a satisfying new hobby, but it has given me a lot of time to think about how I will treasure time with friends and family in the future. We may still be swimming in garbage for a while longer, but I’m looking forward to seeing the things that have grown in spite of our circumstances.
On the actual food front, I dusted off the chorizo mac and cheese recipe on Sunday. It’s by far my most popular recipe, and if you haven’t had the chance to make it yet, carve out some time. Your waistline may not thank you, but the rest of you will.
I also went back to the well on Buffalo chicken pizza using buttermilk fried chicken pieces (recipe down at the bottom), but this time used the Detroit pan to create the greasiest and most satisfying pizza I’ve had in a long time. I cannot recommend this pan enough.
I have some new recipes working in the lab as we speak, so hopefully I’ll get those out to you soon. Until then, let me know what you’ve been making in an attempt to give your life a little variety in These Uncertain Times.
What gets you through
Your chorizo mac n cheese recipe looks amazing! We haven't been cooking much, but we're excited about our "get us through" project: we recently adopted six day-old baby chicks. They are one week old now and damn, they are cute! Their cuteness will fade soon as they enter the awkward "adolescent" bird phase, but on the other side, sometime hopefully sometime in the first half of 2021, they will start giving us "farm fresh" eggs. We hope that by then, the country will be in a better place too. In the meantime, we're daydreaming about beautiful egg breakfasts while we build a sturdy chicken coop that will shelter the hens through the winter and protect them from predators.