FEED YOURSELF LIKE YOU LOVE YOURSELF

Because it's important.

One thing I have continued to cling to as grocery prices have started to soar is making myself really nice meals. They aren’t made with any fancy ingredients, in fact most of the time they’re cheaper than whatever the rest of my family is eating. But I prepare them the way you would prepare a meal for someone who is coming over to your place for the first time and you’re really hoping they’re going to be at least a little impressed.

To clarify - I live with two autistic carnivores. They would happily eat the same meal two weeks in a row. My husband’s main focus is a frictionless meal - anything faffy and he is out. He has a very formulaic approach to food. A protein, a starch, and a green. 

Around two and a half decades ago, when he was supposed to serve in the Serbian military but had to be released from duty because of his spinal surgery, he got posted to the National Library instead. He would pack his lunch each day - a bologna sandwich. The sandwich would be the same bologna, on the same bread, with the same butter and the same cheese, and the same two tomato slices. Every goddamned day. After around eight months of this perpetual sandwich, one day he turned to his fellow library soldier colleague and said ‘you know, I think I’m a little tired of this sandwich.’

The colleague couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the shift. 

When we first met, both just shy of 18, neither of us knew a thing about cooking. His mother was the sort who ruled her kitchen with an iron fist, constantly complaining about having to cook while producing outstanding dishes consistently - savory pancakes with salmon and blue cheese, beer-braised duck, cod chowder, seared steak. My mother had neither the means nor the inclination to produce any such fanfare, but she still kept us functionally fed, and outside of breakfast foods, I cooked nothing while I lived with her and dad. 

Once Dj and I had started living together, however, somehow a silent but inevitable agreement was reached that I would take it upon myself to figure out how cooking worked. He was always ready to lend a hand as instructed - he got into knives and chopping, practiced cutting speed, bought sharpening tools even, but you always had to specify which vegetables, to what shape, what size, in what order, etc. etc. He was willing First Mate to my very haphazard Kitchen Captain. 

A funny thing happens to women where, whether we want to or not, we often get roped into cooking as if it were our preordained destiny. You don’t even see it happening - one day you’re a happy-go-lucky young lady building your career and pursuing your hobbies and the next moment you blink and it has somehow become your job to figure out what two other people are going to eat for every meal of their lives, into perpetuity. It’s very disconcerting. 

My basil

Anyone who has fallen into this insidious trap knows the mental energy of figuring out what the heck to make again and again is equivalent to what it would take to power a small nuclear reactor. It is very easy for this process to leave you so depleted that your own lunch ends up being a chunk of cheese, half a pepper, and a bar of chocolate. 

When I was little we would often visit grandma - my mom’s mom - for Sunday lunch. She was a genuine kitchen witch, concocting an incredible variety of wonderful dishes with seemingly no effort at all. She had a powerful whisking arm for batters and fillings, because mixers and blenders weren’t really a thing yet. But the thing I remember most clearly about these lunches is that she never seemed to eat.

‘Sit down with us!’, everyone would call out as she bustled around, bringing out more different salads and sides. ‘Come eat!’ But it would never happen. On the rare occasion when she would sit down at the table, once the rest of the family had nearly finished, she’d eat like a bird. One time I asked her ‘hey, grandma, what’s your favorite part of roast chicken?’ And without hesitation or shame she fired off ‘The ass.’ 

Now chicken ass was not really a cut I had ever previously considered. Being one of those bizarre people who do not find chicken breast too dry, I always gravitated to that, as the cleanest cut with the lowest risk of cartilage or tendon ruining my day. The other half of the breast would go to my cousin, while grandpa, mom and my aunts would share the wings, thighs and drumsticks between them. What would be left is something I could only term as ‘chicken carcass’ - a pile of bones picked nearly clean, with scraps of meat and skin still accidentally attached. This, apparently, was grandma’s favorite cut.

I called bullshit on this claim many times, trying to get grandma to confess that there is an actual cut of edible meat she would prefer to get over the Ghost of Chicken Past, but she never folded. She took her secret to the grave. 

I, however, am a woman of the feminist age, and have thus refused to play this game. 

I do not hesitate to invest time and love in my own meals. I’ll make the effort to grate the lime zest and add a dash of hot sauce to throw together a spicy lime mayo that will make my grilled sandwich sing. I’ll take the time to painstakingly halve and pit a cup of cherries so I can plop them into a bowl of thick Greek yogurt (yogurt goes on sale a lot, which is good, because the way it’s priced you’d think they spin it from pure gold. Also it’s good wayyyyy after it’s ‘best by’ date, months sometimes). I’ll buy passion fruit on sale in our Asian grocery store to scoop it over that same yogurt and then drizzle with honey. I’ll take the time to whip myself up fresh protein pancakes for breakfast and top them with nut butter and strawberries. I’ll get the good bread for a nice Caprese sandwich with basil from my balcony. 

I’ll invest the three minutes it takes to pickle an onion.

Sometimes it’s literally just how you frame it. Brew a cup of that special tea someone gave you for your birthday and you forgot was languishing unopened in the back of your cupboard. Pull out the nice cup to drink it out of, not the chipped utilitarian one you use all the time.

Aforementioned sandwich. It’s a bit of a cheat because the cheese is Feta and it’s got avocadoes in it. So hardly Caprese. But very good. 10/10 would recommend.

Now the first thing I absolutely understand about this habit of mine is that it speaks of multiple kinds of privilege. As groceries have skyrocketed in price we have been, as everyone, playing horrible math games to figure out what to cut - quality or quantity. I have been getting creative with lentils and beans. I bought my first ever ten pound bag of rice. Speaking to a friend the other day of smoothie ingredients, I mentioned avocados as a great source of fats and it cut me weirdly to hear her say ‘we don’t buy avocados anymore.’ I didn’t need to ask why.

I’ve been fighting the urge to cross the ‘good stuff’ off the grocery list because it feels like a final capitulation somehow. Instead we’ve cut some other bits of discretionary spending that felt less crucial to keep. But be that as it may, I am still in the position to keep certain ingredients on my list, and I absolutely know this is not true for everyone.

The second is of course the privilege of time. As someone who is currently being blessed by the Gods of Unemployment, I can afford to faff around with making my own tempura batter (it’s just flour and water - the key is to use ice water and keep it cold so the gluten doesn’t activate!) or rice paper spring rolls (you’re gonna get stuck to it, there’s no avoiding it, sorry) with garlic chili oil. 

The third is maybe the most precious of all. It’s the privilege of having retained the idea that I am worth the extra effort. 

In my childhood (during the good years, at least) there was a general sense that us kids were always getting the special treatment. We’d be called to eat first, we’d get our favorite things, we’d get the bigger slice of plum cake. We didn’t question it. But as you grow - particularly as you grow into a woman - you’re meant to switch places at some point. You age out of deserving first pick. Men seem to better retain this memory of having had the right to certain privilege. I’ve had multiple conversations with friends over husbands who will just randomly EAT something from the fridge as if it hadn’t been specifically set aside for children - something entirely alien to the female of the species. 

Obviously I am no exception. My kid gets first dibs on all the foods he likes. As I have been blessed, though, with an autistic child, the number of foods he likes is relatively limited. And that’s where maximum cunning and radical self-love come together to form a genius plan. 

You’re not denying anyone if it’s food nobody likes except you. 

It’s almost evil in its elegant simplicity. They both think passion fruit is weird and the local fruit store sells them for a dollar? Bingo! First victory. Neither of them cares for vintage cheddar? They don’t like my multigrain flatbread? They’re iffy on the texture of fried plantains? No appreciation for cantaloupes? Miiiiine. Precioussssss. 

There is something so soothing to lovingly arranging the layers of a sandwich before popping it into the oven to grill. Good bread, some hummus, just a little mayo, bits of yesterday’s rotisserie chicken, thin slice of cheese - some good cheese, not that ungodly ‘cheese product’ weirdness - any Havarti is a good choice, if I must name favorites. When it comes out of the oven all toasty and melted you add some sliced avocado if it was on sale - if not, go with the cheapest greenhouse tomatoes, it will still be great - and top with some basil leaves, which you can grow yourself because honestly paying for herbs is just highway robbery. 

And you have a bunch of pretty common ingredients suddenly transformed into an act of love. 

Cherries are around for such a short time, it makes them feel extra special.

I totally get it if you don’t have the money, or the energy, or the time. But if you do, and all that’s holding you back is the fact that you forgot you’re also a person - consider this your invitation back to the table.

In fact, even if you are severely limited in the money, time, and/or energy department, I challenge you to find something that is still within reach, and would feel like a treat. I’ll tell you my most reliable one, just for inspiration. During the not so great years of my childhood (I’ve had a wild mix of not so great and really quite great years, sometimes switching in rapid succession, so I can draw on memories from either as needed) my one special thing was An Egg.

An egg feels like a relatively humble thing today, but in that one specific period, an egg was not guaranteed when you opened the fridge. The only guaranteed contents of our fridge in those particular years were a) a crusty, mostly empty bottle of mustard that had lived there from time immemorial, b) the leathery skin of long-since-eaten smoked bacon, waiting to be used in a pot of beans, and c) a scrunched-up piece of greasy paper that had at some point contained some sort of deli meat. These were the regulars. But sometimes there would be other things - a plastic pot of sour cream, an opened can of tuna, a bag of milk, or an egg.

An egg was exciting because you could do two really cool things with it. One thing would require you to go hunting for bread. Bread was somehow always on its last legs, stale and crumbly, and occasionally full of ants. None of this made it unappealing for our purpose, in fact stale crumbly anty bread was exactly what you were hoping for. Fresh bread would legitimately not work.

So you would slice the anty bread, shake out as many ants and possible, and then you would take a metal baking sheet and place it on the stovetop. You turn the largest burner on the lowest heat setting - lowest because you are not looking to cook the ants in your bread (that’s a different recipe!), you want to gently invite them to leave - and wait for the ants to vacate your bread. They honestly don’t all have to leave, they taste fine. But I always found it more polite to give them a chance to not become part of my culinary adventure.

Once the ants have been evicted (you can shake them off onto the apricot tree just under the balcony) you whisk your one egg, cut it with as much water as it can take (this is a delicate alchemy, because if you add too much water you have ruined everything, and if you add too little you will not have enough to coat all your de-anted bread) and you dip your bread into the egg-and-water mix briefly on both sides before frying it in your most banged-up, favorite, and only pan.

I swear to you cutting egg with water makes French toast a thousand times better, I don’t know why but it just does. I still make it that way today.

If there is no bread to be had - anty or otherwise - but you still have your egg - the plan changes. Now you’re going for pure decadence! You will break your egg and carefully separate the yolk from the white. This is crucial. If this step fails, you might as well make a tiny, very unsatisfying scramble and be done with it. If you succeed in splitting the egg, though, you add a couple large spoonfuls of sugar to each segment, and you whisk them separately (much better done with a mixer, doable by hand in a pinch but I really would not recommend). The white part should create firm clouds that don’t run when you tilt the bowl. The yolk should form a smooth, pale yellow cream.

You scoop the clouds into a bowl and you pour the yolk sugar cream on top. I have no idea if this has a name, I don’t remember how I first got the idea to make it. I don’t know if it’s safe to consume, technically it’s raw egg and sugar, so don’t take this as a dietary recommendation. But this culinary delight has saved many a dreary day in my childhood, I can tell you that much.

So, yeah. Maybe we don’t have caviar, maybe we don’t have foie gras, maybe we don’t have oysters (never understood the appeal of any of those honestly), but there is something we can rustle up for sure.

Feed yourself like you love yourself. Feed yourself like you are your favorite person. Even if you aren’t. 

Because it’s important.