Frozen Emotional Support Vegetables, or Second Breakfast #14
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Recently, I wrote a story for the Atlantic about frozen food’s growing popularity. As is often the case with trend stories, the observation started in my own kitchen. Since the pandemic, I’ve been freezer-curious (or at least freezer-neutral). Prepping tons of food before our baby came made me an actual freezer fan.
But if I’m honest, my turn to the freezer isn’t really about finding some brilliant new hack. After all, it’s been there the whole time. Instead, it’s part of my ongoing project to be less of a perfectionist in the kitchen.
Feeding my kid has predictably pushed all my anxious try-hard buttons. He’s two, and deep in the phase of eating only foods he likes. Bean and cheese tacos are at least 70% responsible for his continued existence on this earth.
The advice is to always offer a food he likes, and a couple he probably doesn’t, in the hopes that, 2 years from now, he will stop recoiling from cauliflower.
But it’s a big mental load to remember things F. likes, things J. and I like, and how those things might be combined into a satisfying dinner, while also not wasting food already sitting in the fridge.
The freezer comes in handly a few ways. For one, it’s a great place to stash foods F. always likes — meatballs, sweet potatoes, dal — to be reheated on nights when I want to get crazy and roast a chicken. But I’m also using frozen vegetables more. Not for him, exactly. But when I’m done steaming sweet potatoes or whatever, I can quickly microwave some peas for the adults to eat and ritually sacrifice on the toddler’s plate.
I feel bad about these boring little steamed peas! But J. loves them. So what am I feeling bad about, exactly? They prompt thoughts like, “No real food writer would microwave peas.” Thank god I’m actually just a reporter who eats a lot, I guess.
Speaking of things I’m afraid to admit as a “food writer:” The third role of the freezer is to feed us, the tired adults, like toddlers. The bag of french fries and the other bag of chicken fingers are not for F. He hates chicken fingers, and I’m not ready for him to know that french fries can happen at home. But when he’s asleep, and our ids want fried ghost kitchen delivery, instead we can make chicken fingers and waffle fries in the toaster oven and shift seamlessly into playing video games — bliss.
As I mentioned up top,I wrote about frozen food’s growing popularity with food-savvy Americans for the Atlantic, and why some of our ideas about the freezer are outdated or just plain wrong.
I also got to chat with Marketplace about the story. That was super fun!
For the New York Times, I dug into why the grocery store egg situation is so chaotic. There are less eggs, yes. But also wildly varying prices, unfamiliar brands, and unpredictable shortages. As with other food shortages, the weirdness all comes down to the supply chain.
I’ve got an ocean of tabs saved for a book chapter I actually managed to write (a miracle), and a big feature I’m excited to see out in the world soon (ish?). I’ve mentioned how great OneTab is before, yes? I can’t function without it.
Here’s a few other things I’d like to share.
I’m feeling defeated by Los Angeles’s ever-more-awful real estate situation, and meditating on what it means to buy a home, or not was clarifying
Speaking of the California real estate crisis: “In San Francisco, anti-abortion activists stopped a clinic from being built by arguing that it would violate local standards for noise and traffic—because of the protests they themselves intended to organize. . . A Los Angeles project to convert a polluted aircraft factory into apartments and shops was sued twenty times in twenty years, under the same law.”
I’ve never heard of Solar Communism before now. It sounds like the precursor to the Culture, or, for that matter, Star Trek.
Speaking of mid-aughts political bloggers and their increasingly central place in the political conversation — this article is a real time warp
A breakdown of what it means to shepherd a legendary bit of IP, from someone who knows. I want to be hopeful about James Amazon Bond, but I want a lot of things.
Meanwhile, the real-world version of spying remains much messier, and sillier, than the on-screen version
The cinnamon-roll moment, long heralded, has finally arrived. Are you ready?
“‘We knew we wanted the marshmallows to be special,’ said Ms. Miller, whose team made the thick, rectangular confections from scratch, printing them with images of the Lumon founder Kier Eagan’s face using food-grade ink in a precise shade of Macro Data Refinement blue.” Tejal on Severance!
I thought the headline “Lady Gaga is Soooooo Cool” was sarcastic and I rage-clicked, but it’s actually for a sincere appreciation of how cool Lady Gaga is
“The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.”
A short story working on a similar theme, and which made me cry
Should I buy:
this bulbous phone case?
this Soviet radio?
Play yourself out with “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” by Ella Fitzgerald, the only good version of the song F. is obsessed with
Thank you for reading! If you made it this far, maybe you’d like this Reddit thread on the weird adult shows toddlers like.
Meghan