Good evening and good riddance to winter.
It’s supposed to be 2 degrees on Sunday, and that is incomprehensible to me. The only way I know how to cope is to keep buying ingredients for soup.
We’ve got firewood and a full fridge, so I’m going to accept my new life as an Oklahoman homesteader. If only Ree Drummond had not already capitalized on this as a whole personality, I bet I could have struck up a deal with Food Network.
The real order of business today is to share a few great things I’ve read this week and to eventually write up a recipe for Chinese eggplant in garlic sauce that I think you need to try.
So let’s get to it then, shall we?
If I haven’t met you In The Flesh, I’m Allison. I live outside Oklahoma City with my husband Mitchell East and our two precious children. I am an editor and book designer and a home chef, among other things. I run a small bookish agency called North Parade Press. My work here on Substack often explores the intersection of food and faith and literature.
Friday Kitchen Sink is the segment of my newsletter where I round up a little bit of everything I read this week. Grab a book and a fork!
This Week’s Bookish Reads:
This piece by
and was my favorite thing I’ve read this week. They offer great insight to the state so many of us live in these days: consuming empty digital calories that leave us feeling hollow and diminished. Peco and Ruth call for reintroducing risk, adventure, and scrape-your-knee, dirt-in-your-nails ways of being to children and young people with hopes of providing rich interior lives grounded in the real world. I’m thinking about these kinds of things often as Mitch and I cultivate life at home for our children.This is a great interview from
and ! I loved her thoughts on reading, learning, and travel as a family. I want to pack up and travel the world again. Perhaps I need to get the one-year-old a passport . . .I loved this line from Tsh:
I think of the quote attributed to St. Augustine: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page,” and how I believe the converse is true as well: the book is a world, and those who do not widely read do not leave their home.
I know I’ve mentioned my reading goals this year, but really truly, so many of the people I read on Substack like Joel and Tsh have inspired me to be intentional with my book choices, to take books with me everywhere, to pretty much stop watching TV, and try to put my phone down most of the day. It’s difficult to try and shift my habits some days, but I am confident as time goes on and I am able to cross more and more books off my list, I’ll be glad of these efforts.
Currently Reading
I’m back again with another ridiculously long George Eliot novel to start the year off with a bang. I was reading this afternoon and this segment of the book on childhood stopped me in my tracks.
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
I mean. Come on, George.
I’ve also got going Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers.
In food news
Inside Alison Roman’s Upstate Shoppy Shop — from Eater
First of all, “Shoppy Shop” is my favorite vocabulary word. There is no better way to describe these boutiquey/foodie/cool-kid-at-the-lunch-table-opened-a-lil-store-with-tinned-fish destinations. This piece read a little funny to me, like they wanted to be critical of Alison Roman for this endeavor, but in the end, the writer seems to land on a small town hero note. I’d stop in if I were going through Bloomville, NY.
Deb Perelman and J. Kenji López-Alt are starting a podcast! The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. I am the worst of podcast listeners, mainly because my daughter yells at me if we are not listening to the soundtrack from Frozen. But I will find the time to hear what Deb and Kenji have to say about anything.
The Menu
Alright, quickly before I have to think about what we are having for dinner, a recap of my visit to Super Cao Nguyen and my subsequent cooking of Chinese Eggplant with Garlic Sauce.
On Tuesday while my children were at school, I headed to one of OKC’s Asian supermarkets and spent a while browsing the aisles. It was loads of fun to have a grocery experience different from the ever-depressing curbside Walmart pickup. I mainly stocked up on pantry items I was lacking — mirin, soy sauce, labneh, curry pastes, miso, sesame oil, spices like za’atar and sumac and garam masala. I also bought toasted rice powder, which I’m not entirely sure what to do with, but it should lead me to some new recipes and techniques. And tofu! I’ve never cooked it, so we will be trying that soon too.
Don’t mind the roll of dark chocolate digestive biscuits in the photo below; my little anglophile self can’t help it.
I mentioned in The Dinner Edit earlier in the week I was planning to cook a Chinese eggplant dish inspired by our meal at Szechuan Bistro. My friend Diana cooked the Garlic Eggplant Noodle recipe from the Nom Wah Cookbook before I got to it, and she sent me some notes/tweaks. So when I ventured to make the recipe, I amended how I cooked the eggplant, I didn’t blend the sauce, and I swapped the noodles for rice. So like, kind of totally a different thing. But I did use the same sauce ingredients and most of the same steps. I am very pleased with my edited version of the dish, and I’m working on writing up the recipe, which is proving to be more time consuming than I imagined. I want to test out my new method one more time before I share with you all to make sure my measurements are correct and I get the steps in a manageable order. (This has made me think a lot about recipe writing, and gives me greater appreciation for the recipes I love that work well and make sense!)
Please make no comments on the shrimp, they were an afterthought.
Tonight I made a vegan massaman curry, mediocre at best if I’m quite honest. I followed no recipe and also kind of burned it.
Cheers to your weekend. Ignore my New Year’s resolution about going outside.
XOXO
Allison
Thanks for the mention Allison! Glad to hear that you found our essay to be a valuable read :) I will also be starting a George Eliot soon (Middlemarch) and quite enjoyed Gaudy Night. Hope the dish was as delicious as it looked :)