fftf: hot tip friday #17 💁♀️🍲🌅
kitchen organization inspo, baked eggs & pozole, cooking in the morning
Hello and happy Friday!
First, a few housekeeping notes:
After much internal deliberation, for 2025, I have decided to commit to publishing this newsletter every 3 weeks. Just enough time for you to forget about me, and then see me pop up in your inbox again, HA!1
A special hello to some new subscribers who have made your way here via my great friend & mentor, Jess Skylar (now writing on Substack! woohoo! Go Jess!). Welcome to Food for Thought Friday, where I write about what I’m cooking, eating, and other (mostly) food-related stuff. When I started this newsletter in 2019, I was single, but I am now cooking for my little family of 4: a meat-loving, Desi husband and our two small daughters: a 2.5 year old (Jazzy) who insists on eating most meals while sitting on my lap, and an almost-8-month-old (Amal) who tries to eat everything in sight. I would describe my cooking style as: someone who buys as much as possible at the farmers market and then comes home and makes a bunch of tasty, veggie-forward dishes, mostly intuitively!
For the newbies, my Friday newsletter usually takes one of three forms:
1) an in-depth recipe by me (ex: this simple(ish) Indian-inspired breakfast)
2) a deep dive on a certain food topic (ex: guide to improve your spice life)
3) a “hot tip friday” - like today - which has three shorter, mostly food-related tips or items I’m thinking about lately. (see archive here for more hot tip fridays)
4) something else - sometimes a personal essay or just whatever I feel like writing!
5) *new* in 2025… I am planning to add some “local digests” where I write about Pittsburgh-specific food stuff, as that is now the food scene I am a part of! (Read my first round of Pittsburgh food-recs here.)
Today is a hot tip Friday - I hope you enjoy!
#1 - Kitchen Re-Org Inspiration!
I don’t watch much TV2, but I had flagged this show “Kitchen Glow-Up” as one to watch (because I enjoy being inspired by Ellen Marie Bennett of Hedley & Bennett). I binged it in a weekend while doing chores and it was perfect because: easy, 20-min episodes, not too many, and I ended it feeling VERY inspired to re-organize my pantry and drawers! Highly recommend! (I was able to watch it for free online by signing up for a free Roku account.)
#2 - Egg Custard Bake & Pozole
I recently made two notable recipes. One stands out for make-ahead convenience, the other for winter/cold-season deliciousness…
A) I’ve now made these baked eggs (custard eggs? / steamed-egg-thing-that-goes-on-a-breakfast-sandwich?) twice and I think they will be added to my regular rotation. It’s pretty simple and was nice to have on hand to quickly warm up with toast in the mornings! The cream makes them tender - and they stay that way even through the warming-up throughout the week! My quick recipe tips:
Don’t add more cream than recommended, I did once and it made it too rich.
I’m trying out adding some spices, but nothing has made a huge difference yet.
Eat with avocado and a spicy sauce; maybe some greens if you’ve got em!
Make it straight in this container3 and then just let it cool and put the lid on!
PS. I was actually inspired to make these because I thought my 8-month-old could pick them up and eat it in strips… she totally can but OMG they were RIDICULOUSLY messy, like- one of the worst baby messes ever! Tiny bits of creamy egg everywhere - very hard/annoying to cleanup! If giving to a baby, for ease/less mess, I would recommend mashing with a fork into small chunks and mixing with something else to help it stick to a spoon (avocado, yogurt, sweet potato, etc).
B) Pozole is a soup that holds a special place in my heart. You know those comfort foods that just make you feel hugged from the inside out? Or the handful of foods you discovered as an adult that, upon that magical moment of first tasting it, you couldn’t believe you had been living your whole life without knowing about this wonder?
Pozole is both of those things for me. I didn’t know about it until I moved to California4 , and when I ate it for the first time, it was a revelation, instantly becoming one of my ultimate favorite comfort foods. I’ve mostly eaten it at restaurants (because you can in California), but since moving to Pittsburgh, I’ve taken to making it myself - just a few times. Last year5,I made a veggie version, and this month, I finally made Alison Roman’s version, although I used beef pot roast for the meat because that was what I had. It turned out AMAZING!!! (Although, per photo above, not the pretty red color of Alison’s).
I thoroughly enjoyed drinking mugs full of the smoky chili + tomatillo broth while it was simmering away. The spicy fire on my slightly-sore throat felt SO GOOD, and the taste combo of hearty, spicy, smoky, and acidic from the tomatillos was just scrumptious. Made me want to work on a simpler way to recreate just this broth without needing to do all the soup steps… I am actually headed to Mexico next week for my brother’s wedding(!!) so maybe I will be even MORE inspired to work on this recipe when I get back! Stay tuned! But in the meantime if you need a cozy, fire-y winter weekend project that is totally worth it, try making pozole!
#3 - Cooking in the Morning…
Most of my days at home with my children involve me attempting to cook with my children around, which is… varying degrees of successful. I have recently realized that the MORNING is actually my best time to cook. When the baby goes down for her morning nap and I am alone with my 2.5 year old, who is recently fed and *usually* in a good mood, I have learned I can often get more, or at least something, done. Even if it’s just a head start on chopping things for dinner, or making a breakfast or two ahead for the week, I’ve realized that cooking in the morning is much less stressful for me than trying to cook at the end of the day, right before dinner, when everyone (including myself) is hangry, needy, and tired. I’ve even been trying this on the weekends sometimes, and it seems to be helping, as I feel like I’ve been on a better cooking-roll in 2025. It might be as simple as printing out a recipe or just peeling the onions, but I’ve been finding that a little “cooking in the morning” is making my days/weeks a tad easier and ultimately, more delicious. If I’ve already done even just one of the steps I needed to do towards making dinner, it’s been making it feel easier to “keep going” later in the day, because I’ve already given myself a little leg-up.
I feel like you don’t need to have kids to employ this strategy, so mentioning in case it inspires you!
What won’t inspire you (but sharing it to be real!) is my messy pantry, below… took these “before” pics so that maybe I can share some “after” pics once I’ve cleaned it up, per the organization inspiration I gleaned from Kitchen Glow Up!
And finally, just because: the snowman we made two weeks ago!
That’s all for now. See you in three weeks!
love,
Jess
An unconventional publishing schedule, to be sure… every other week feels like a bit too much right now, but once a month doesn’t feel like enough! So choosing the in-between option. That is, until I can post more often. Getting back to every week is my ultimate goal, but I’m sad to admit to myself that it’s just not realistic for me at the moment as I am mostly full-time mom-ing, with currently two days of childcare most weeks, and another personal project that currently needs more of my attention.
We actually do not have cable or a TV in the house currently, though we do sometimes watch TV on our computers/work screens. Hoping to keep this going for as long as we can?!
The plastic lids on my (otherwise glass) tupperware are getting SO gross; I had been wanting to replace them with containers with no plastic parts, and was excited to see these (and these) linked in my new favorite newsletter that helps me find plastic-free stuff, Silky Crunch (great name) - check it out!
I can’t fully remember, but I think that Jess Skylar (mentioned above) may have introduced me to pozole, for which I am forever grateful.