the cruelest month

handmade ravioli, and ignoring other people's resolutions

It seems pretty fitting that a lot of us had our first work day of the year this week begin with Slack, many workplaces’ primary communication system, being down. And that at least one of us damaged our car’s quarter panel backing into the driveway we’ve previously backed into hundreds of times upon returning home… Just gotta keep those realities about what 2021 has in store for us in check. January is forever duking it out with November in terms of being the worst month possible, but I think January might have the edge: it seemingly takes 15 years to end, the only stat holiday is right at the very beginning, and while you’re just trying to gather the energy to make it out of bed in the morning and occasionally shower and feed yourself, you have to see everyone’s nightmarish self-improvement resolutions all over social media.

I’m not here to knock anyone’s attempts at Veganuary, Dry January, Couch to 5K, or whatever. If these things work for you, do them! Get that serotonin! But seeing people talk about the winter holiday foods and drinks— things that should bring us joy and comfort— as something to “undo” come January is not helpful. Viewing food as a spectrum with ‘good’ on one end and ‘bad’ on the other is not helpful. Using exercise as a punishment for eating is not helpful. And seeing these things pop up all over the place at this time of year can be painful for people who are fat, disabled, suffer from eating disorders or other mental illnesses, and even just those of us who choose not to opt in to the ‘new year, new me’ mentality can still experience a lot of guilt.

It’s difficult to internalize that your worth as a person is not tied to what you look like or how much and what kinds of things you consume. Salt and fat make food taste good because we literally need them to live— you’re meant to like them! Food is a necessity, and we are lucky that there are plenty of ways we can appreciate it: whether it’s making a dish look beautiful, using local ingredients, cooking a recipe for the first time and discovering that you love it, eating fresh vegetables when you’ve been struggling to do so before they rot in your fridge, making a birthday cake for a friend, cooking an enormous pot of soup and putting some in the freezer for days you’re too tired to make dinner, adding butter to your pasta sauce just because you can.

If you’re making changes in your life at this time, please do your best to talk about them thoughtfully, in a way that doesn’t demonize foods, your body, or the choices of others— all of us are just trying to keep ourselves alive and relatively healthy during one of the most stressful times in our existence. If you’re doing that, you’re doing great. And remember, no one ever wants to hear about your zero-waste journey.

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With the apocalyptic levels of rain we’ve been getting over the last week, it’s no surprise that a thick, hearty soup felt like the perfect dinner. I chose green lentil with coriander seed and dry-cured chorizo, from the Fresh cookbook by the eponymous chef of Vancouver’s recently shuttered Bishop’s restaurant. It’s divided according to what you might want to eat on the west coast from season to season, which is a format I like, and although a lot of the recipes are too fancy for every day, I keep it around because it has a handful I come back to (like my perfect all-butter pie crust— the book now springs open right to the page). This is a straightforward soup with a lot of flavour, made creamy by the simple addition of a peeled potato, and smoky and spicy from the chorizo. It’s a little like what split pea with ham might be if that soup were actually interesting (sorry if you like it, but it’s a bad soup). Unfortunately I didn’t realise that I’d accidentally bought mild chorizo, which is a waste of my and everyone’s time, so I added some chili flakes and hot sauce. It was still good but it wasn’t quite the same.

As I promised myself I would, I made Samin Nosrat’s buttermilk biscuits to eat with the soup. I’ve made these once before and they were delicious, even just with all-purpose flour, despite the fact that our good friends in the American South will say such a thing is impossible. (Fun fact, I actually did find and purchase soft pastry flour earlier this year, but completely forgot to use it here.) I misread the recipe this time and rolled my dough out too thin, but although they weren’t as tall as my prior batch, the fluffy, buttery texture didn’t suffer. I just kept a closer eye on them in the oven, which is a good idea anyway since you’re baking at a high temperature. Eating these fresh out of the oven with butter melting on them, dipping them into warm, spicy soup was immensely comforting, which is necessary on a day when it feels like the sun hasn’t risen.

Last year after making fettuccine from scratch, I remembered that it’s not actually too difficult to make pasta if you have a couple hours, and made a note to myself to try to do it more often. Well, I got a ravioli maker for Christmas, so on Sunday we busted that out for the first time. I’d made ravioli by hand before for a cookoff and it was incredibly tedious and time-consuming. The little press made it approximately 500 times easier and faster: place a pasta sheet on the bottom, press into it with the shaper to form pockets, scoop filling into the pockets, and then place a second sheet on top and use a rolling pin to seal and cut. You have to press pretty hard to get it to cut all the way through, but it was so easy and satisfying that I was a little disappointed we only made enough filling for 24 ravioli (we made the rest of the dough into fettuccine and put it in the freezer).

The filling and sauce idea came from a page torn out of an old issue of Edible Vancouver I’d picked up at a winery, which I’d been meaning to try for some time—obviously, seeing as it was from a time when road tripping to wineries was a thing— pesto ricotta filling, and lemon butter sauce with shallots. With a lactose intolerant partner, soft cheeses like ricotta are generally a no go. But we had some leftover vegan herb & garlic cheeze (if you like Boursin, this is remarkably similar) from our Christmas Eve charcuterie, and blended that with more herbs, lemon zest, toasted pine nuts, and parmesan. It was delightfully tangy and buttery… my one disappointment with this dish is that it was over too soon, because we only made enough ravioli for two servings.

Over time I’ve become kind of a master of figuring out what to make in order to use things up before they go bad, but I can’t say it always means food I’m super excited about eating (see: every time we have too many sad-looking vegetables and have to make minestrone again). So this is how I found myself making a goddamned salad for dinner on one of the stormiest days of the season. I’d bought celeriac to make a delicious pasta last week, and since every celery root is the size of a child’s head, I needed something to do with the rest of it. I’d had this salad— celery, celeriac, apple, and blue cheese in a lemon-mustard vinaigrette— saved since I saw the recipe around American Thanksgiving, and I bet it would be a delicious accompaniment to something rich and savoury.

We were again using vegan cheeze: this one was from The Frauxmagerie in Ontario, and while it’s obviously not an exact replica, it was nicely creamy, crumbly and salty. It did have less of the sourness you tend to get from blue cheese though, so I added a little white wine vinegar to the salad dressing to help out. I really liked the tangy flavour and crunchiness of this salad, but it felt a bit incomplete with only a boiled egg as its plate companion. But this is the price I must sometimes pay in order to experience the accomplishment of not having to throw brown, rotting produce into the compost bin. I hope I’m not implying it wasn’t a good salad. It was an excellent salad and you should try it! It just wasn’t what I wanted to eat that day. You know that tweet that’s like, “I have never stopped eating a salad because I was full, only because I became too weary to continue”? That is the vibe when eating an entrée salad in the winter.

Speaking of using things up, I made a cake similar to the one I made last January this week because I still had a little buttermilk left: blackout chocolate cake with salted chocolate icing. This one also comes from Teighen Gerard, in the book Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple, and while the cake bases I believe are the same, I slightly preferred the chocolate sheet cake because of the milk chocolate icing. This was still really good and quick to make: I halved the recipe but then baked it in too small a pan so it came out extra tall, and let’s pretend I did that part on purpose. I haven’t decided yet if it’s nice enough to be my cake of the month or if I’ll make another one… I guess we’ll see what horrors the rest of the month holds.

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Media:
I haven’t got anything hard-hitting to report on this week because my attention span is still out to lunch and all I’ve been doing in my spare time is knitting while watching Star Trek, but I did stumble upon this short piece from Wine Folly a few years ago on the rise and fall of wine coolers. It talks about the immense popularity of the humble white wine cooler in the late 80s, and what contributed to its sudden and seemingly complete disappearance, and is worth a read if just for the cool art. I find food and drink trends fascinating, and the way we tend to cycle through different varieties of ready-to-drink booze concoctions is as mysterious to me as any other edible item’s level of popularity. Remember Smirnoff Ice in the early 2000s, and its ironic resurgence in the early ‘10s, even as Palm Bay reigned supreme? (My sister once got Iced by her boyfriend on Christmas morning after she found one in her stocking.) Or Mike’s Hard Lemonade in the late 90s? Or, if you’re in BC, the brief but powerful craze for Hey Y’alls a couple summers ago? (I love Hey Y’all and you can buy me one anytime).

We’re now in the heyday of the flavoured alcoholic seltzer, which is fitting considering we also seem to be at peak supply of, and demand for, seltzer in general. Wine coolers have been seen on the shelves again over the past few years, but with so many people opting for something more neutral, it seems unlikely they’ll get back to the level of popularity they enjoyed with their first go around… especially now that single-serve bottles and cans of wine are abundant and inexpensive. Personally, my days of drinking Arbor Mist in the parking lot of the bowling alley are over.

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Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please pass it along to someone new! I leave you with some excellent news for ‘21, if you’re a fan of frozen desserts from the ‘90s.