Gratitudes

I couldn’t remember if I’d written about recipe-sharing in a gratitude yet… or had just thought about it. A quick search reminded me that words were indeed committed to page in late January, when I mentioned wanting to figure out how to share some of my family favorites with others. No progress there but I don’t think I’m going to have any success with sharing from my Evernote-based recipe book… unless the recipient also has Evernote. Thinking about a means of recipe sharing has made me realize and appreciate how uniquely personal recipe keeping is for those most serious about cooking. This is nothing a software or app is likely to solve for, nor should it try to, imo.

While I love my template-based Evernote recipe library, many of the most prolific home chefs I know have similarly proprietary, oddly personal, and arguably efficient ways of keeping their recipes. For example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine, I was part of a recipe challenge. Here are how the recipes came to me:

• A link to a blog, which featured a recipe from a cookbook
• An image of a page from a cookbook
• An image of a photocopy of the hand-written recipe of a grandma
• A recipe presumably copy/pasted from somewhere (origin unknown) into an email in paragraph-form. No bullets, no numbers.

There’s a method to all our madness and should embrace/accept one another’s method as a feature, not a bug.

Every night immediately after dinner, my wife and I divvy up two relentless tasks of hygiene: bathing the kids and doing the dinner dishes. We do a good job of switching it up, but on Sunday nights, I always opt to be at the sink, closer to the radio, where I enjoy the weekend wind-down ritual of listening to the country’s longest-running radio quiz show, Minds over Matter on KALWfm. The hour-long show is hosted and moderated by smartypants moderator Dana Rodriguez who is joined by a rotating panel of cohosts. They challenge each other and the listeners with questions, then live calls are taken where listeners both ask and answer questions. It seems like the type of thing Howard Stern’s Wack Pack would love to know about but despite the show airing live every week with relatively little call screening, its ripeness for prank call abuse seems to go unnoticed. Maybe the many oddball callers are amusing enough. Last night, the same fella called twice and the second time wasn’t even a question or answer–it was a dumb joke that Rodriguez politely obliged. The most intriguing question last night asked How often in years do calendars repeat with the same day-date combinations? (answer at Quora, fyi)

I made a mostly unconscious decision about a month ago to avoid specific people in these gratitudes, unless they’re outside my personal orbit (like musicians, YouTubers, or the inspirational heroes of lost-at-sea stories). Most of the time, the gratitude I feel for a person–or the reasons for which I’m grateful for that person–is something just a little more personal than I’d want to share. While I will now consciously keep to this, I have considered lately that my appreciate for the kindness of friends and neighbors should not go unrecognized, so similar to how I’m putting concerted energy into these gratitudes, I will figure out a way to regularly recognize the beautiful humans in my life, to make them know they’re far more appreciated than a good deal on cheese at the Grocery Outlet.

I can remember discovering the Grocery Outlet when I first arrived to California in 2009. Being as “cash sensitive” as I was, it was always exciting to find a premium product at a deeply reduced price. If one were to really drill down, there’s probably a lot of psychology that could correlate one’s interest in finding Cabot Sharp Cheddar Cheese for a quarter of its retail cost to one’s other interests like mushroom foraging or crate digging for vinyl. For now, I’ll just say that I’m grateful for 1) being able to afford the food we put on the table for our family and 2) enjoying over a decade of discounts from the most underestimated groceries in the west.

There’s no reason to believe that winter’s over, especially when we see what’s going on with the extreme weather in Texas. Soon enough, Northern Californians will be back in our layers and condensation will be back on the windows. For these few days, though, there’s been a touch of spring–and even summer–to remind us of how nice and invigorating it is to welcome a new season. The days are getting longer and we’re trending towards warmth, gardens, and a few lest things to worry about.