fftf: I have to make dinner... AGAIN?! 🍝

plus a GOOD recipe for frozen salmon, amazing vinegar, green veg pozole

Hello and happy Friday,

Thanks for all your lovely comments and replies to my reflections from two weeks ago. I always appreciate your responses, but especially from last week since that was a more vulnerable one to write. So - thank you ♥️.

As a follow up, today, I’d like to share the current reality of my cooking life (which I have also been slow to adjust to)…

For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that it wasn’t THAT long ago (2020) that I was publishing long, detailed recipes and intuitive cooking guides in my newsletter, making and selling cooking courses, and posting cooking videos / talking & teaching on my Instagram feed weekly. I was single, and I had a cooking “system” I had mastered for myself, that I felt super confident about, and wanted to teach to others. I had so much energy and passion around it!

Lately, I have found myself lamenting why I do not have that same energy or any desire to make cooking videos (which I used to love doing). Welp, here to tell you another realization I’ve had of late: WOW - cooking for family is SO HARD! (And my family is only three people total right now.) Do we really have to eat dinner EVERY SINGLE NIGHT? It never ends!

This family cooking is an ENTIRELY different beast to me, and I feel like I have not even CLOSE to mastered it. I’m just barely surviving and figuring out how to make it work. I mean, of course I’m still cooking almost every night because I’m me (also, Pittsburgh takeout options are dismal at best) but, DAMN, cooking is SO much more of a chore now. It is NOT the relaxing (lol) task that it used to be to me, except when I very rarely get to cook alone in the house for more than one hour, though when I do that I’m also thinking about the 15 other things I wish I could be doing and am not doing because I’m cooking.

{Oh, and did I mention Jazzy now barely eats what I make? She is currently subsisting on an alternating rotation of fruit (entire pomegranates for dinner), yogurt, almond butter, granola, oatmeal, steak, occasional toast or just the butter eaten off of it, and maybe every other day she will take 1-15 bites of the real food I’ve made. If she eats a vegetable lately I have to be sure not to freak out with excitement, in fear that she’ll suddenly stop eating it. Sometimes, out of the blue, she’ll eat greens off my plate or a big heap of cabbage, but those times are a surprise these days. Luckily I was obsessed with & worked on the topic of kids and food way before I had kids, so I know that this is very normal and hopefully a phase. I am generally able to let it go, although it still sucks to have my lovingly-made food rejected on the regular.}

Up until December, I’d still been cooking mostly “intuitively” like I always have, where I basically shop for what looks good at the farmers market/grocery store, and then decide what I’m cooking not long before I make it. I’d have an idea or two/a few cravings each week for a specific recipe I’d plan to make, but usually there hadn’t been THAT much planning involved.

I could tell in the fall that this was really NOT working for me in the new family setting, so finally, since January, I’ve started “meal planning.” Ideally, on Friday, I make a plan for the next week’s dinners and maybe a few other items, make a grocery list accordingly, shop over the weekend and/or on Monday, and then execute M-F of the following week. I’m not fully in the habit of doing this yet - because it’s definitely extra work - but so far, when I do plan, it has been making the weeks & evenings feel so much better. I’m also learning a lot about how much we really eat… turns out we don’t need a full new recipe every night.

what Jazzy does while I attempt to make dinner: toddles around bringing me items from around the house, or stands next to me in her “helping tower” and demands snacks

But still - to get dinner on the table around 6pm, I really have to start it by around 4pm latest, depending what I’m making. (Of course, I am doing this with Jazzy still toddling around in my care, so everything takes 2-3 times as long.) So… I really don’t know how working/commuting parents do it, let alone if you have evening activities. It is a grind! Especially the “coming up with ideas” part, which brings me to two projects I am planning to work on over the next couple months, when my 2-days-a-week babysitter starts next week:

(These are actually completely selfish projects that I want to do for myself anyways, but I also think many of you would probably be excited about them :).

Project 1: I want to actually catalog every recipe I’ve ever written/published and organize them by category. I need this just as my own starting point for my weekly meal planning 🤣. If they’re old recipes, I hope to test them and see if they’re still good, and/or re-evaluate them to see if they still work for family-cooking. Depending how the categories map out, I may create some kind of e-cookbook or think about how I could put them out all together. It’s sort of silly that I don’t have this already, and I want it for myself as much as to share with anyone else!

Project 2: I want to look back at what I fed/cooked for Jazzy when she was just starting solids, to see if I can put together a little guide or plan for my own baby #2, and/or to share! My philosophy around this is to make the same meal/foods for the whole fam, including new baby just starting to eat. Gonna try to remember what I made that worked well last time, and/or put together some new ideas for this time. Also may put some seasonality notes in there, as that’s how I prefer to eat, and the timing really matters in this case.

So… that’s the rest of my personal update from my January break. It’s always important to me to be very real about where I am with my cooking, so needed to share this second piece of the puzzle :). As I continue to “figure out” family cooking, I will, of course, be keeping you posted!

And now, here are three standout foodie tidbits of late. Thanks again for reading, and see you in 2 weeks!

love,
Jess

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1. A tasty & unique recipe to use with frozen salmon

Oftentimes, more “sustainably sourced” wild salmon comes frozen - which seems fine at first, but I always find it disappointing when eaten. I usually bake it and it comes out dry and just - meh, which is annoying because it’s usually still fairly pricey. Happy to report that I found an easy-ish, delicious & unique recipe to remedy this! It’s called Salmon Moqueca - apparently a twist on a Brazilian fish stew. I followed this recipe with a few changes / tips below, and it came out delicious!

• Veggies: I did use the sweet potato (diced small to help it cook faster) and peppers, skipped the zucchini (bc, out of season). Next time I’d maybe add or use up a few more veggies, and add some greens at the end too.

• Coconut milk & tomatoes: I used a whole 16oz of coconut milk, but only 14oz canned tomatoes, and that worked well.

• Annoyance #1: my salmon filet was in one big piece and had the skin on, so I had to remove the skin and also cut it up into pieces. This was annoying and time consuming, so if you have pieces of salmon, that would be better. Maybe the skin is fine, but I think that’s a personal preference.

• Pro-tip to avoid annoyance #2: The “work” of this recipe is really in making the “marinade” which is actually the base/sauce of the recipe. The recipe calls for using a food processor or blender, which is always kind of annoying to get out and wash, so I recommend doing the blending with an immersion blender in a large bowl or 8-cup pyrex (see here & scroll down a tad for more deets on this setup), which is what I did. So much easier to clean, and it works well in this recipe since there’s so much liquid, it’s an easy blend.

• Make sure you start by making the “marinade” first and putting the fish in, then chop the veggies after. At first I was worried that I started making the recipe too late for it to actually marinate, but by the time I got the other ingredients ready (with many interruptions from my toddler), 30 minutes had passed. Granted… I bet this would still be just as good even if you didn’t have time to marinate the fish; just a gut instinct.

2. My current vinegar obsession - TART

During the pre-Christmas, everyone-is-promoting-everything email frenzy, I found myself buying a few things for… myself (sorry not sorry). One of them was a splurge on some cult-following, “small batch raw” vinegars from Tart, a one-woman (online) shop based in Brooklyn. They are $28 for a 12oz bottle of vinegar, which is more than double the price of a standard grocery store bottle, but I have to say…. WOW, they are SO delicious! You have to keep them refrigerated once you open, but I’ve tried three of my four so far and must say I am VERY impressed. Having dabbled in fermentation just a little and knowing how wild and unpredictable it is, I have major respect for those who have mastered it. And especially since I am a lazy salad maker these days, having some truly awesome vinegars at the ready has been game changing. Currently loving the “salad & soup” vinegar, “golden” vinegar, and the “true romance” vinegar, oh la la! Very worth it if you are looking for a healthy foodie splurge.

3. Green (vegetarian) pozole to mix things up

I have loved pozole ever since I ate it for the first time during my early days living in California. If you’re not familiar, it’s usually a spicy, smoky, meaty Mexican soup filled with pozole, or hominy (whole dried kernels of field corn), cooked until soft. This soup is ALL about the toppings: raw cabbage, radishes, avocado, cilantro, tortilla chips, etc get piled on top, so you get ALL the textures, freshness and crunch to balance out the hearty, spicy, comforting soup.

In January, I made this green pozole recipe from Heidi Swanson for a friend who just had a baby and is vegetarian. The actual making of it was sort of a nightmare because I had Jazzy in tow and there were a lot of steps/tools, BUT, it came out very delicious and was one of those “this is so different than what we’ve been eating” type meals, it really hit the spot. If you’re used to a meaty pozole, this one is very different - more like a heartier salsa verde version of a soup (I added beans to make it heartier, too, and spinach for an even greener look) - but the toppings still MAKE it - cabbage, radishes, avocado, feta, tortilla chips - highly recommend not skipping any of those.

(The soup itself is vegan, it’s just the recommended feta on top that makes it vegetarian.) For a meaty version, check out Alison Roman’s recently published pozole recipe, which I also almost made.