fall? if you say so
some very good cookies and an extended corn season
I can’t believe it’s Thanksgiving this weekend— it seems to sneak up on me every year, but it feels especially surreal to have it happening while there are still red tomatoes on the vines in my garden, and daytime temperatures are hovering around 20°C (so far the spookiest thing about October is the visible effect of climate change). Should we not be eating tomato-basil panzanella instead of squash soup and brussels sprouts? But, Jeff has been missing his yearly opportunity to cook a turkey and refuses to let a little thing like weather take it away from him, so we’re hosting a small dinner on Sunday.
Thanksgiving has long been “our thing” to host, not only because we’ve done so traditionally for over ten years, but because people associate us with food, so of course a holiday centred around the harvest would be for us. I’m looking forward to spending some time in the kitchen— truly there is no satisfaction quite like that of feeding the ones you love. If you’re getting together with family or friends this weekend, I hope you all have a safe and delicious time.
For a while recently I’ve felt like I was in a bit of a slump, cooking out of necessity and being fine with it once I got started, but not feeling much drive to do it nor to get very creative. Knowing that it’s pretty normal to go through periods of resentment over a task that is endless— as providing food for yourself is— didn’t make me feel less guilty about it, though. But over the weekend, the task of cooking several pounds of overripe tomatoes brought me back to the joy of making something good.
I didn’t get quite as many tomatoes out of my garden this year as I did last year, I assume partially due to the colder, later start to summer, and possibly also due to stinkbugs? One of my heirloom plants was completely spoiled, which was heartbreaking. However, I didn’t get nothing, and at the end of the harvest season there are always plenty of less-than-perfect bags of tomatoes on the dollar rack at the produce store, so a combination of those and everything ripe at the time in the garden gave me about four pounds to make sauce with.
I like the method in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat for making a large batch; it creates a pretty basic sauce that is richly flavoured with onions, garlic, and olive oil (and herbs if you like) with not too much effort, just cutting the tomatoes into halves or quarters and waiting for them to cook down. I sometimes pull the skins out as they start to break down but not always, since I blend it with the hand blender at the end. It’s good on pasta on its own or however you want to add to it, or as a base for pizza or shakshuka or whatever else. I ended up with about a litre of sauce at the end and separated some of it out into containers for the freezer, and cooked some ground pork for a lazy ragù-type pasta sauce that night for dinner.
Last week I made cake because I wanted something sweet and low-effort, and needed to use those poached apples, but what I’d really wanted was cookies. So while the sauce was simmering, I made a double batch of chocolate chunk cookies with peanut butter chips, walnuts, and pecans. They were so, so delicious and satisfying. While I wouldn’t say I favour nuts in cookies in general, I’m not opposed to it either— I do love a soft cookie that has a little crunch to it.
I didn’t use Alicia Kennedy’s lovely-looking recipe because I didn’t feel like using butter or the stand mixer, but I was inspired by it! Instead I just used my favourite vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe and adjusted the add-ins: a cup of mixed chocolate chunks and peanut butter chips and half a cup of chopped nuts, with the always-necessary salt flakes on top. The double batch was because I dumped in too much starch— an accident, but a happy one. Now I have half the dough in the freezer for another time, and I’ll be able to make cookies without having to wash a bunch of dishes (truly, that is the dream).
On Monday, when I’d gotten home from work late and then got sidetracked with other things, I made a hybrid out of two standby meals, both originally from Isa Does It but which have melded over time into my own versions. I pan-fried cubes of tofu and charred some broccoli in the wok, something I usually make for a curried peanut sauce bowl with brown rice. Instead, I made the more basic spicy peanut dressing which I usually use for a rice noodle salad with fresh greens, since cooking rice noodles is a lot faster than making brown rice.
This combo was absolutely delicious; I love a really tangy peanut sauce, which this is. The recipe uses sriracha but I often like to put in gochujang as well. I also sliced some red cabbage paper-thin on the mandoline to put on the top. I think it would be good with thinner ramen-style noodles too, if that’s what you have. My regret is that I didn’t make twice as much of the dressing; there might have been enough for another meal left over if I hadn’t been eating it off my finger constantly while cooking the rest of the dinner.
If summer is going to continue not taking the hint even after the house lights have come up and the music’s stopped playing, then I’m going to continue grilling ears of corn about it. I used some of it in refried pinto bean tacos with chopped tomato, a little feta cheese, and red cabbage seasoned with lime. It would have been nice if I’d had some cilantro, too, but a few healthy pours of hot sauce on top brightened it up nicely.
With the rest of the corn, I made chile corn chowder again. I used coconut milk this time (last time I used oat milk) and it was even better, and I also had some carrot to add to give it a bit more variety and colour. I’d made a fresh loaf of sourdough that morning and the thought of a grilled cheese was too appealing to resist, but I think a quesadilla would be more appropriate, not to mention easier to dip into a chunky soup.
Media:
This article (content warning for talk of eating disorders) from Glamour really does a good job of summing up the reasons for my trepidation about the resurgence in popularity of certain early 2000s fashion trends: they come from an era in which so much of clothing existed solely in order to showcase the wearer’s thin body, not as an actual celebration of fashion design. (This is why so many of them are, in my own opinion, ugly as sin— the clothes themselves hardly mattered.)
It’s also disheartening that we’ve see a lot of these sorts of toxic ideas around weight re-emerge as a form of “wellness lifestyle”, because it’s the exact same mentality: thinness isn’t just about a way you should look, but about leading a disciplined life which affects how you look. The idea being that if you are not thin, you are somehow a failure.
“We were told from every angle that weight was somehow correlated with morality and value, and that is what screwed us up in a way that is entirely distinct from other generations.”
I’m sure most of us now find the blatant fatphobia in shows and movies from the 90s and 00s to be as jarring as the blatant homophobia, but at the time, it was so internalized as to be practically invisible to anyone who wasn’t on the receiving end of it. Obviously we have made significant progress, but as the article says, the mentality has done lasting damage, and while you may no longer need to be a size 0 in order to be considered beautiful, it’s not as though society is now automatically kind towards people who don’t fit into the narrow range of sizes they sell at Aritzia. We have a long way to go.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please smash that like button below, or share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. Anyway, twitter’s new feature of letting us upload combinations of still images, gifs, and videos in the same post is good, actually.