let me roll it

wealth disparity, apartment firsts, and some easy faves

I saw the below screencap on twitter the other day, and usually seeing these sorts of things is maybe a little funny, maybe a little defeating— you know, haha, wow this publication is so out of touch with reality— but I keep thinking about it and getting angry all over again. It really feels like my villain origin story. How can anyone look at people spending more money than ever before on the basic necessities of life and then turn it into an article about how young people are choosing to prioritize groceries over beauty products and travel?

The article does mention ‘fancy snacks and drinks’, but the thing is, those little luxuries have always existed for most of us. A bag of potato chips with truffle oil and parmesan, a bottle of lime Jarritos, some peanut butter-filled pretzels from Trader Joe’s (sidenote: if anyone’s going to Bellingham soon, please bring me back some of these). It’s just that these sorts of items used to be exactly that— frivolous treats that make the everyday a little more bearable, things you spend a few extra dollars on without thinking too much about it, because even a bunch of them in a week wouldn’t make or break a gainfully employed person. But when the costs of everything else we eat have risen astronomically, it’s become just one more way the spending habits of Millennials and Gen Z are scrutinized as irresponsible. If only they’d stop drinking La Croix! If only they didn’t consider an $8 bag of chips a reasonable purchase!

These sorts of criticisms conveniently ignore the fact that you can, for instance, accidentally spend $14 on a single head of cauliflower because you just felt like cooking with one, and didn’t look at the price per kilo until you got home and checked the receipt. Granted, it was a big one that I got a couple of meals out of, but when you consider that the same head of cauliflower would have cost half that or less even just a year ago, and that minimum wage in BC is currently below $17 per hour, it’s hard not to wonder how we’re expected to go on like this.

The article finally goes on to admit that goods and services costs in general have increased by $445 per month for the average American household compared to last year (I didn’t find a similar stat for Canada, but overall, inflation here tends to be worse, so maybe for the sake of my sanity it’s better I don’t know). If it were published in a different sort of magazine, maybe an article like this could have been an interesting dive into all the factors that have led us here, and how unsustainable society will continue to become if this sort of price gouging is not stopped. Journalists are asking why consumers in their twenties and thirties are spending their hard-earned cash on a can of nitro cold brew or name-brand chips, instead of asking why Loblaws or Jim Pattison or egg producers are allowed to set prices without regulation and enjoy record profits. Everyone with an ounce of power to do anything about it sits on their hands as we watch wealth disparity grow exponentially in real time. What good is a capitalist system when the people living in it can no longer afford what it costs to literally just stay alive?

Anyway. If, while normal people are struggling to afford food, business types are calculating the productivity loss of people stopping to appreciate the celestial wonder of the solar eclipse… then picking out a nice donut to lift my spirit while I’m at the grocery store feels even more necessary.

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Finally mounted the spice rack, a week and a half after it arrived. A new era is born.

It’s kind of funny, to move to a new place and mark things in various firsts. Maybe not everyone does this, but I do tend to notice these little milestones, often comparing things to how they were in the old place. This is the first movie we watched after hooking up the speakers. This is the first piece of art we hung on the wall. This is the first meal I cooked where the spices weren’t in a shoebox on the counter. Anyway, I saw this new Smitten Kitchen recipe on my instagram feed and it was what finally gave me the drive to make my first cake in our new apartment. When I opened up the recipe, I had to resist the urge to add something to it— the list of ingredients initially struck me as too plain, and I was worried I wouldn’t want to eat it without a cup of coffee or a little glass of amaro, or something. But not everything needs an unexpected or unique ingredient in order to be lovely, and I’m glad I stuck to the recipe, because this cake is amazing.

Ignore the part of your brain that might try to tell you there’s too much of the crumb topping (there isn’t). Ignore the part of your brain that believes you might want to add cinnamon to the cake batter, too (you don’t). The contrast of the crunchy cinnamon crumb topping, equal in height to the soft, vanilla sour cream cake beneath it, is exactly perfect. It was easy to make in two bowls and I didn’t even use the stand mixer, so no worries if you don’t have one. Mine took about five minutes longer to bake through the centre than the recipe called for, and the corners did not come out too crisp!

On the same day I made the cake, for dinner I cooked a quick and tasty soup with shiitake mushrooms and pearl couscous, based on this recipe which I’ve used a couple of times before, though always with brown mushrooms. Shiitakes work pretty well and have a nice chew to them which goes with the texture of the couscous. They don’t release as much water as brown or white mushrooms when you cook them, so a mushroom broth instead of plain vegetable or bone broth might be nice here. This recipe can also handle a lot more seasoning than listed— I generally make a half batch, but still use the full amount of spices. Leftovers will thicken a fair bit in the fridge, so keep a little extra broth to thin it out the next day.

I was looking for something vegetable-forward to make with a head of cauliflower (not the $14 one, this was more reasonably priced), and remembered this roasted cauliflower shawarma recipe. Usually I make my own preferred tahini sauce when a recipe calls for one, but I was feeling kind of low-energy, so I used the one within the recipe, which a few less ingredients and can be whisked together in a bowl rather than blended. Last time I remembered using smoked paprika instead of sweet to great effect, so I did that again here.

We didn’t have pita (and I am not quite back in the saddle enough to consider making them), which would have been the preferred choice, but tortillas worked in a pinch. We pretty much kept to the suggestions in the recipe, adding parsley, cucumber, tomato, kalamata olives, pickled red onion, and extra hot sauce in addition to the tahini sauce. I absolutely devoured this, and my only note for myself was that I should have added more pickles— the sauce and olives made it a little saltier and less acidic than I was craving.

I’d also like to share with you this incredibly helpful review of the recipe someone posted:

Thank you, RP. I hope you’re doing well.

I made carbonara with the last of a packet of bacon, some leftover cauliflower, and some chopped kale. Sure, putting all that other stuff in it kind of makes it not a carbonara anymore, but since no one really knows the precise origins of carbonara or what that word actually even means, authenticity isn’t really a big concern of mine. Adding some vegetables to it makes the meal feel complete without having to make a salad, something I don’t always have the ingredients or drive to do, and both kale and cauliflower go really nicely with the bacon. And I know myself enough to know that I can say with near-absolute certainty that I will never, ever in my life become a protein-smoothie-after-a-workout kind of person— eating a big bowl of pasta will simply have to suffice.

This photo is not good. Sorry, I was hungry.

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Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so any donations, especially while I’m still looking for work, are greatly appreciated. Finally, here is my favourite picture of the totality from Monday’s eclipse.