Here in Ireland, I don’t have a car, so groceries are gathered by dutifully wandering down the hill to the market, wheeled cart in tow. Or wandering further, into city center, to go to the Really Good Market (the English Market) for niche vegetables, fluffy bread, and very nice seafood.
On one recent grocery excursion to the closer shopping center, I gathered an especially lumbering cart full of groceries. And as I started to wheel them home, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.
A foot. By itself. On the ground.
I kept walking, but curiosity got the best of me, and I turned around to investigate.
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On the flyleaf of MFK Fisher’s annotated edition of Catherine Plagemann I wrote “I’m really excited about annotating this copy: Like being in conversation across space and time with both authors.”
I jumped into the book, then, with some high expectations. I find few things as thrilling as a robust conversation in the margin notes (part of the reason I like buying used textbooks is so I can write responses and revelations connected to the previous owner’s notes), so a chance to have a marginalia-based interaction with one of my favorite food writers, about a new-to-me food preserving book? That is a peak life experience right there.
I adored this book. I adored the conversation the authors had in its pages (even though Plagemann of course wrote the book without realizing it would become this annotated volume decades later). I’ve talked before about the interaction between text and reader, and how a book is not just a static object but a site for meaning-making between both author and reader (who both might have very different interpretations of the same thing).
A cookbook presents a different version of this, because we’re not working with philosophical texts or other works that we traditionally consider being more open to interpretation. Cookbooks are considered by some, in some contexts to be didactic instruction manuals more than interpretation-heavy texts (sorry, I love nuance too much to make a broad and inaccurate sweeping statement here). And so the interaction between text and reader is in some cases fundamentally different than a reader’s experience of purely narrative text.
Leaving the many nuanced and context-driven rabbit holes we could go down exploring examples of and exceptions to the above, what I loved about this particular book was that we got to see those interactions made explicit, and in this case, they aren’t just about the instructions themselves: They meander across memory, local food systems, and a range of other subjects (I talked a bit more about this last week).
MFK Fisher’s writing is in my experience both conversational and authoritative, and I found I initially approached her margin notes the same way. With deference, almost, to this much more known and experienced writer of food.
However, as I went through, I asked myself to challenge that tendency, instead approaching the marginalia as a conversation, rather than taking the margin notes as the be all and end all of how one might experience these recipes.
What if I added my own thoughts, and gave them the same weight as the marginalia already on the page?
And so, thrusting myself into the book as a conversation partner rather than a passive absorber of information, I added my own rather substantial layer of notes.
Sometimes, these focused on specific recipes. Sometimes, my experience with similar types of foods.
I played around with whose words I read first: I found it didn’t make a huge difference to my understanding or experience of the book if I read Fisher’s notes or Plagemann’s original text first, but it felt more like a conversation building on itself when I started with the original text and went forward from there.
I was surprised which recipes Fisher annotated and which she didn’t, since only about half the recipes in the book have margin notes from her. Some, like her favorite recipes, or ones she was skeptical of (like banana jam), have notes saying such. But others that I assumed she would have something to say about (like the cucumber ketchup I mentioned last week) have no margin notes at all. It was interesting, then, for me to add in notes on pages where the conversation became just between myself and Plagemann’s original text, a return to how I often annotate books, without an additional voice between myself and the original author to consider. Both also cite some additional books, briefly, like voices dropped into the conversation then just as quickly disappearing again, which adds another layer of exploration for me to dig around with.
Here are a few favorite recipes/annotations from the book: What annotations would you add to continue our conversation in the margins?
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It’s your last chance to preorder Essential Food Preserving before it starts shipping out TOMORROW. So exciting!
I have been busy in book promotion mode, including media interviews and handling incoming emails for preorder bonus gifts.
There’s a certain flavor of controlled chaos that comes with a book launch, and it’s one of the aspects of being an author that I didn’t really anticipate when I started out (there’s so much more promotion and administration than I realized!) But it’s a particular kind of high that I’ve grown to love.
It’s been really thrilling for me, as it always is, to see the response this book is already getting, and to hear from readers who eagerly anticipate its arrival in their mailboxes and at their local bookshops.
I’ve also got some book tour dates in the works, which I’ll share soon (remember to join me for my FREE online book launch event on Wednesday, more details below).
Today is the last day you can get your free class, so if you’ve been wanting to preorder and get the bonus class as well, you have until midnight EST tonight to do it.
I’m giving everyone who preorders free access to my self-paced, online class, What Cans and Doesn’t Can (a $20 value). It’s still in production, but you’ll get access to it before it’s even listed for sale on my website.
The catch is you have to order the book before the US release date (which is tomorrow), though the free class is available to readers anywhere in the world (it’s ok if you send the email after today, but you’ll only get your free class if you order by today at the latest).
If you’re a paid newsletter subscriber or Patreon patron, I’ll also give you access to a second class on Preserving Recipes + Cookbooks for free (normally $25).
To claim your free class:
-Email me at hello@ root-kitchens.com with the subject line “Essential Food Preserving”
-Include a copy of your receipt (a photo, or just forward me the confirmation email if you ordered it online)
-If you’re a paid subscriber or Patreon patron, tell me if you want your free second class, too.
-I’ll send you your access instructions once the class launches later this Spring.
The free class is open to readers anywhere in the world, but only if you order your book before the US release date (May 19th).
And remember to join me to celebrate my book launch! I’d love to see you!
To celebrate my book’s launch, I’m teaming up with fermentation expert Dr. Johnny Drain and my friends at Charis Books and MOFAD to bring you a super special conversation. Johnny and I both have wide-ranging interests, so expect a conversation that wanders through the world of fermentation, food preserving, and beyond.
I love when serendipity brings a new book into my life. While digging around online for home repair stuff, I somehow, completely by chance, came across a copy of MFK Fisher’s reprint of Catherine Plagemann’s Fine Preserving.
Published in 1986 by Aris Books (Berkeley, CA), this particular volume is interesting because it comes to you, the reader, as a glossed text. That is, the original text is presented alongside margin notes that were added in by a different reader (MFK Fisher), giving you a couple layers of text to experience and explore.
Next week I’ll talk about the experience of becoming part of that larger decades-long conversation through the margin notes of the book.
But this week I want to talk about the book itself, and the recipes inside (scroll down for a couple of my favorite recipes from this text, if you’re curious).
There are several layers of conversation happening in this text: There is the original text itself: Plagemann’s original 1967 Fine Preserving, a copy of which Fisher owned, and which sparked the publication of this annotated volume.
Fisher was, according to the preface, in conversation with friends about lost masterpieces, and said without hesitation that if she could revive any book it would be Plagemann’s. The book’s publisher happened to also be at the table and the rest, as they say, is history.
It was decided not just to reprint Plagemann’s book as-is, but to include the annotations Fisher made in her personal copy to produce a new version of the text.
The annotations go beyond “this is good” or “I don’t like this”, though those are present too: What struck me was that Fisher’s conversational tone also pops up in her annotations, particularly when writing out a specific food memory in the margins. It leads me to wonder if her original annotations were taken as-is or edited a bit for the published text (one assumes the latter), but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn Fisher’s margin notes read exactly as they do here in the original version.
Sometimes, this is accompanied by a recipe: And in the case of orange marmalade, she notes that she prefers her mother’s recipe, then offers it, as an extra treat of sorts, on the adjoining page. The annotations, then, are not just Fisher’s experiences, but an opportunity for us as readers to recreate those experiences in some limited way. To try Plagemann’s recipes, and some of Fisher’s family recipes, and bring the authors into our own kitchens.
There’s a temporal and geographic element to it as well: Fisher and Plagemann both note what ingredients they have in abundance where they live (e.g. Fisher, in California, talks about working with grapes and citrus in abundance). But the kinds of foods they serve the preserves with also speak to a way of eating that is very meat-heavy: The recipe notes for just about every fruit preserve say that it’s good alongside meat (a tendency that asked me to think more broadly about how I use fruit preserves, as someone who rarely eats meat, with fruit or otherwise). It feels, to me, like the cooking of a generation or two before my time, which it is, though Plagemann may also have been heavily influenced by German cooking, where in my experience this is more common.
And Fisher clearly tells us her favorites from this book: pickled seedless grapes and chermoula (scroll down to see).
Most of the recipes are for sweet preserves and pickles, with a few surprises, like cucumber ketchup (though readers familiar with Our Fermented Lives will probably remember that this has historical precedent: people make ketchups out of just about anything).
From a food preserving standpoint, many of the recipes hold up to my experience of what makes a good-tasting preserve, though I will say there are a lot more jellies in this book than I typically make (MFK Fisher, I learned, shares my lack of interest in making jellies, and we both find them overly finicky and prefer to make other preserves instead).
From a modern-day food safety standpoint, some of the practices are not ones I would personally share in a book (like sealing jars with paraffin rather than safely canning them). But also, I recognize that these processes were a part of food preserving’s history, and thus the book makes sense for the time in which it was written. The recipes I’ve made from this book so far are ones that work well as preserves kept in the fridge (I may, at some point, can some of them, but have not done so yet).
If you want to make your own, here are a couple to try, including Fisher’s favorites, and that cucumber ketchup:
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Plus, join me for a free virtual book launch event May 20th
A short newsletter with a couple exciting pieces of news from my author world today:
I’m releasing a new class, What Cans and Doesn’t Can, later this spring, and everyone who preorders Essential Food Preserving gets free access.
This class does what it says on the tin: It’s a quick, go to resource for learning what you can process via canning, so you can safely and also avoid canning things that frankly just don’t hold up to the heat.
If you’re a paid newsletter subscriber or Patreon patron, I’ll also give you access to a second class on Preserving Recipes + Cookbooks for free (normally $25).
To claim your free class:
-Email me at hello@ root-kitchens.com with the subject line “Essential Food Preserving”
-Include a copy of your receipt (a photo, or just forward me the confirmation email if you ordered it online)
-If you’re a paid subscriber or Patreon patron, tell me if you want your free second class, too.
-I’ll send you your access instructions once the class launches later this Spring.
The free class is open to readers anywhere in the world, but only if you order your book before the US release date (May 19th).
To celebrate my book’s launch, I’m teaming up with fermentation expert Dr. Johnny Drain and my friends at Charis Books and MOFAD to bring you a super special conversation.
Johnny and I both have wide-ranging interests, so expect a conversation that wanders through the world of fermentation, food preserving, and beyond.
Essential Food Preserving comes out in less than a month (in the US, in about 6 weeks elsewhere), and as part of the lead up to the book’s release Storey publishing, along with some of my favorite preserving folks, are running a contest on Instagram for a bunch of free preserving goodies, along with a copy of the book.
If you’re on Instagram, it’s worth heading over to enter the sweepstakes. There are a lot of really cool preserving-related products in here, and if your kitchen isn’t already chock full of jars and crocks like mine is, this will put you well on your way.
We’re finalizing details on a few in person events related to Essential Food Preserving, so far in Atlanta, Boston, DC, and Cork (Ireland), with others potentially to come.
Stay tuned to this space for more!
In a couple weeks, I’ll be sharing details of an extra preorder gift I’m giving to everyone who preorders, wherever you are in the world. So if you haven’t grabbed your copy of Essential Food Preserving, now is a good time (if you’re a paid newsletter subscriber or Patreon patron, you get an additional gift on top of this).
My book launch event will be on May 20th: A virtual conversation with Dr. Johnny Drain, run by Charis Books in Atlanta, partnered with MOFAD in NYC.
It’s free, but pre-registration is required: Sign up at the link below.
I’m deep in edits for The Little Book of Lemons (Storey, 2027), and preparing to launch Essential Food Preserving (releases next month!), while also running my own businesses.
While my own life is chaotic in a good way, this is such a chaotic moment generally that it feels hard for us to catch our breath, nonetheless figure out what to make for dinner or to enjoy the process of doing so.
I’ve been bouncing between deep, philosophical musings on food systems, political systems, etc., and bouts of whimsy and wonder. I don’t think there’s a right answer for how to navigate a time like this, but that’s been what I’m doing.
This newsletter is less a traditional recipe round up and more a “here are some ideas for getting food on the table and for maybe also enjoying life a bit” round-up based on what I’ve been doing.
It includes a super simple technique for a hazelnut sauce (below) which, if you’re feeling enterprising, can also be made with kimchi or pickle or sauerkraut brine, then drained and pressed to make a vegan cheese (just omit the oil if you do this and plan to let it sit outside the fridge).
It includes some simple ideas I’ve been sharing with people who are concerned about grocery prices and supplies. These aren’t magical solutions that will fix everything (if I had those I would have already implemented them), but they will help you stock up with intention, and fix dinner and leave you a little better prepared to care for you and yours.
You can find more on this by searching for “food waste” in the newsletter archive: I wrote several extensive posts a few years ago offering dozens of ideas for stretching ingredients.
But primarily I want to encourage you to find a bit of whimsy this week. In the kitchen or outside it. Not because I want you to stick your head in the sand (though, logging off sometimes is healthy, you know your limits and what you need). But because the only way we’ll come through the uncertainty of right now is by leaning deep into our love for the world.
More ideas below, but the tl;dr: Slow down while you cook at least once. Leave your phone out of reach as you cook dinner and let your senses guide you. Let yourself be in your body. Find a flower, a critter, or a lovely object in your immediate environment and let yourself really appreciate them. Find whimsy and joy where and how you can.
Where to find me this month:
Books!
I’m in Atlanta AND Ireland this month, so most of my work right now is happening online as I bounce between the two places.
This is the last full month to preorder my book,Essential Food Preserving (please use + share this link, which gets me a small commission. Every bit helps!)
Later this month we’ll be launching a lil’ sweepstakes on Instagram for US folks, and I’ll also be offering access to one of my Culinary Curiosity School classes to folks who preorder.
More details on all of that soon!
Live workshops + book proposal coaching is 50% off
I’m in full book launch mode, so only doing one live, in-person workshop during the next month (in Cork), along with fermenting friend Chlöe Dempsey. More info + ticket link will be announced soon!
I’m still offering private writing + creativity coaching sessions, and book proposal consults (where we outline and/or refine your proposal together in real time) are 50% off this month.
My 9-month intensive program, Symbiosis, has a spot for one more person to join before I close the doors for the rest of the year. Head here to sign up if that’s you. If you’re a paid newsletter subscriber or Patreon patron, please use your dedicated discount code! (email me if you need a reminder).
I’m offering private, Zoom-based corporate workshops and private 1:1 and group lessons on fermentation, reducing food waste, and more. These are more affordable than my live, in person workshops, and a good way to work with me live if we aren’t in the same place!
This is more process than exact recipe, as many of my on-the-fly kitchen experiments are.
I’ve found myself with an abundance of hazelnuts, so yesterday I soaked some overnight in a mixture of kimchi vinegar (that recipe is here), plus a steeped-then-cooled lemongrass infusion.
This morning, I blended it up in my trusty old blender along with some Oliver Farms pecan oil. You could use other oil though, whatever you have to hand. Just add enough to get it moving.
I’ll use it throughout the week to top roasted veg, grains, and maybe to blend with some dairy in pasta sauces too. It’s savory yet a bit sweet, rich and decadent.
Some ideas for stocking up on groceries with intention, and without turning into a prepper
Grocery prices and food supply chains are unpredictable, but with a bit of planning, there are simple ways to reduce stress and ensure you’re able to ride the ups and downs more easily:
*Assess what you have: What shelf-stable staples can you use to infill what’s in your fridge, freezer, and pantry for complete meals?
*What staples do you use the most? Make sure to keep extra around so you don’t run out (I don’t mean prepper-level stocking up, just grabbing an extra container when you’re at the store).
*HOW do you cook, realistically? If you’re scrambling to get dinner on the table in half an hour after work, for example, buying ingredients with a long prep time isn’t realistic unless you’re willing to plan ahead.
*What can you make both for yourself and to barter with others? I’ve traded pickled okra for haircuts, car repairs, yard care, etc. for the last decade. Plus, I get to eat pickled okra, too.
*Use what you have to full effect: The greens on root veg, peels, etc. can all be incorporate into dishes (for more ideas and practical recipes, check out my class Preserving Abundance).
*Buy in bulk used to always be cheaper but, not always now: Be sure to check prices on bulk foods before assuming. Sometimes cheaper prices can be found by using bulk bins at health food stores or at international markets versus larger chain groceries.
The question is less “where am I finding whimsy?” Than it is “where am I not finding whimsy?!” because friends, I have been really leaning all-in on pleasure and whimsy and creativity and joy.
The world may be chaos but no one can pry my joy and love out of my hands. If anything, this moment has made me realize more fully how much those things are central to life, more central to my life, and are also central to how I show up for and serve others. In other words, it isn’t selfish for me or you to center creativity, whimsy, love, or joy: It’s how we come out on the other side.
So what does this look like for me practically right now?
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My grandpaw Julian worked on the shuttle program, and specifically on the guidance systems, as a Honeywell employee who was contracted out to NASA in central Florida.
He, alongside hundreds of others, is a part of the program’s history and one of the people who paved the way to the current Artemis II launch, and I’ve been thinking about him a lot as I’ve logged in throughout the week to watch this mission.
As I’m typing this, I have the livestream on in the background, the last few hours of the mission serving as a backdrop to a day of doing book research for a fellow author, and my own writing.
I wish I knew more about grandpaw’s specific role in the shuttle program. I have some of his old NASA patches and some photos of him in the office, but few paper records, thanks to a culling of his old papers from his house that happened before I was able to intervene. There’s a sense of loss, then, for not having a deeper knowledge of the work he did. But a sense of pride, too, and a renewed desire to try once again to learn more about his work.
What I do know is he worked on the guidance systems, and he worked with NASA for years, on many important missions (but which ones specifically?! Since I don’t have most of his records, or even all of his mission patches, I don’t have an answer to that). I also know he worked cared deeply for the work. My strongest memory of the Columbia disaster isn’t the shuttle breaking apart, it was talking on the phone with my grandpaw and hearing his voice crack as we talked: Probably one of maybe three times in my life I heard him cry. He was a complex character, and a highly inventive one (you should have seen his ham radio collection and cobbled together tools, some of which I still use), but our space memories are some of my most cherished.
I’ve loved watching the collective joy at this mission, which has been a needed balm when so much else about turning on the news or opening my phone is…not joyful.
And it brought to mind my family connection to the space program, and the reason that NASA always makes me think of food.
Decades after he retired, when grandpaw was in a nursing home, I was eager for ways to connect with him as much as possible with the little time he had left. But, I was also hours away in a PhD program, so I turned to one of my favorite solutions and started mailing care packages.
On a whim, I started packing up boxes of Moon Pies in there, in part a nod to his time spent helping with lunar missions. But the Moon Pies ended up being his favorite part of the care packages: To the point that I just sent him a new box every two weeks and stopped sending anything else, because nothing compared.
Grandpaw was hard of hearing, so phone calls were difficult, but he loved email, and so we primarily communicated that way, him sending messages in the stereotypical all caps. His Moon Pies became a daily ritual, and a daily email ritual for both of us: Each afternoon or evening, I’d get an email with one line: MOON PIE AND MILK TIME.
It was a marker of a ritual but also an invitation to conversation.
I’d reply and ask him how his day was, and from there we’d chat for either a few emails or many. I tried to ask as many questions as I could about his youth and about our family (though he wasn’t always terribly forthcoming), and the emails ended up becoming a record of his history that I probably wouldn’t have gotten if I had just rocked up with a recorder and started asking questions.
I ended up publishing an article in a student journal on his emails back in the sands of time, which you can read here.
There isn’t a larger point to this story besides that it’s been beautiful to see a lunar mission happen again. To remember some great times connecting with my grandpaw in part because of those missions. And to think how excited he would be if he were alive today, emailing me about Moon Pies and sending me frequent updates about the shuttle’s status.
My recent article on food waste sparked several on and offline conversations about our social relationship to waste. On Substack (where my newsletter no longer lives but where I cross-post links to it) The Curious Eater (Miranda Brown) responded:
“We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time discussing indulgence and excess this term-and its flip, the valorization of thrift in Eating Right.”
And it got me thinking about my own relationship to “eating right.” And the ways rightness carries moral baggage.
Hippie + evangelical morality and “eating right”
In my case, I was raised in the 80s and 90s in an… intensely religious evangelical church (I’m trying to be diplomatic here), where we went to some church service or meeting or something about 5x/week.
It was also the time when everyone was obsessed with low fat food, including my mom (do you remember those terrible yellow bottles of spray margarine? I do).
I also also was raised in Boulder which, while a beautiful place full of nice things to eat, also carried its own relationship to eating right that was separate and distinct from, say, what “eating right” meant when I moved to Iowa in the early 2000s. I will say though that my childhood diet, heavy in whole grains and vegetables and lean meats, probably did me many favors as an adult.
I was skinny and pretty, so was off the hook in some ways when it came to moral chastisement of my life and appearance, but also weird and not terribly popular, so I was not off the hook completely. I existed in a sort of liminal space, which became less liminal when I left that church (ran screaming in the other direction is more accurate) at 16, and suddenly had not only lots of free time, but the opportunity to craft my identity and listen to my desires with greater intention.
While I maybe didn’t articulate it then, I was beginning to untangle my relationship to “rightness” as an absolute. I remember about a year later, my mom said something about my weight, and I told her she was projecting onto me and to stop telling me what to eat or how she felt about my body. It was an early sign that the threads that severed “rightness”, or food as a moral prop or moral failing, were beginning to unravel.
They unraveled further, of course, as I started to cook for myself and buy my own groceries and navigate the kitchens of a variety of tumbledown rentals. And continue to unravel, while simultaneously reweaving themselves into something new, to this day.
There were many ways in which I was spared from the more intense ways “right eating” is policed: My mom’s body comment was an aberration, not a habit, for example, and while the church had plenty to say about my shameful, shameful female form, they had less to say specifically about the food I put into it (though I imagine were I not skinny and pretty, they would have).
Replacing morality with the pleasure of good food
Miranda’s comment also got me thinking about how reconnecting to the pleasure of food, and to abundance and creativity with food, run a lot deeper than just “less waste” (that’s nice too).
It’s an opportunity, potentially at least, to consider how we’ve been taught to look at food and waste, the narratives we’ve been given and those we’ve developed throughout our lives, and to intentionally consider which ones we want to continue using, and which ones we are ready to replace with something else.
Our supply chains, our relationships to labor and land and the abuse of or care for both, and all other aspects of our food systems are rooted in varying extents to the larger cultural contexts in which they exist.
And in the US, there is a certain puritanical and evangelical way of viewing the world that pervades so much of the culture, and is evident in everything from our policies to our architecture to our relationships to food and our bodies and each other (this isn’t true elsewhere, at least not to the same degree: More on that below).
What if we peeled that back, separated it somehow, from our food systems? What would that look like? What do those connections even look like now?
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Every year around this time, I reconnect with a not-so-secret favorite hobby. What started as a lockdown boredom-induced play on words has since spiraled into its own thing: the Pepys Peeps diorama.
One of my best friends and I have been making Peeps dioramas for about 20 years (she once turned a coworkers entire office into a Peeps diorama), but I hadn’t made one in ages until Covid hit.
When it did, I like most folks grasped at every craft I could think of. So the dioramas came back into frame.
I had been working on Our Fermented Lives, and recently researching Samuel Pepys as part of it. So the homonym was fresh in my mind, and a new yearly tradition was born.
So far, Peeps Pepys has largely stuck to the historical canon: writing a diary, burying wine, giving tasting notes on tea.
But this year, I decided to double down on the wordplay, and the diorama has taken a decidedly ahistorical twist (or at least, not documented history. Who knows, maybe Pepys also had hidden talents…)
The Peeps Pepys Peep Show is my favorite diorama yet. I love dancer Peeps Pepys (the selection of strawberry Pop Tart-flavored Peeps* gave him a decidedly festive air), and I love the stage I constructed.
I also love how it speaks to the pleasure I take in the work I do and the surprising ways it shows up in my life.
*Strawberry Pop Tart Peeps are absolutely vile to eat, IMHO, but the multicolor splatter effect made them worth the purchase.
Currently reading/doing/making
I’m getting ready to do the edits on my next-next book, The Little Book of Lemons, which comes out in 2027. Meanwhile, we’re ramping up plans for book tour stops and events for Essential Food Preserving, which comes out in May.
I’m really emphasizing virtual events this year, as well as in person, so if you want to host one (or know of someone I should reach out to) please let me know!
Currently I’m planning stops in Atlanta, Boston, DC, and hopefully NYC (if you’re at an NYC bookshop or museum who wants a talk or demo, I’m looking for a spot to host! My email is julia@root-kitchens.com)
In Europe, I am planning Ireland events (focusing on Dublin + Cork but I am very open to other places too), and I hope to jump over to the UK at some point too.
I also have a virtual book launch event lined up with Charis Books at Dr. Johnny Drain in May. Details coming soon!
I just opened my 9 month holistic creativity mentorship space, Symbiosis. It’s 9 months of hands on work on each of our bodies of work, plus expansive and interconnected practices to bring richness and depth to the creative process.
If you’re feeling called to join, I’m welcoming folks in through early April.
I’ve been slowly reading through Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree over the last year, interwoven with other reading, and have deeply enjoyed it. I appreciate work that interweaves memoir with larger contexts, placing the life within the world in which it’s lived. I also learned lots of useful info about trees and fungal networks, which is always a blessing.
I just finished it last week, and my bedtime reading has moved on to Pollan’s A World Appears, as recommended by Sophie Strand. I am hit or miss with his work, so I’m looking forward to seeing how I respond to this not-food-specific book.
For audiobooks, I’ve been slow on audiobook reading since my Atlanta library card expired and I’ve just renewed it, so I lost access to my long and lumbering TBR pile on Libby.
However, one benefit to living in two places is a second library card, and through Cork city libraries I’ve been listening to Atomic Habits (not strictly a pleasure read, but good in short bursts while walking and running errands), and The Library of Heartbeats, which I’m really enjoying and am juuuuust about done with.
I’ve unintentionally fallen down a Japanese fiction rabbit hole in the last handful of months, and Library of Heartbeats is part of it (other reads include Butter and We’ll Prescribe You a Cat), and it’s been an unexpected delight.
As always, I continue to write articles (and newsletters of course), and I’m working on some great newsletter issues in the coming weeks and months to share with you.
In the meantime, I’ve opened up my calendar for April for one hour to full day sessions for crafting your nonfiction book proposal or receiving writing coaching support (or other creative support), getting energy work or intuitive guidance.
Or, you can use that time to learn preserving and fermenting with me 1:1 (please email me before you book the latter so I can point you in the right direction).
If you’re a paid subscriber, scroll down for a one time use link for a 2 hour $50 coaching session (which is over 50% off), to use whenever you need it.
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I love building lifelong connections with plants, in part because they offer me a pathway to experience joy and connection in unexpected places.
Mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) is used in Asia and Europe for both practical and magical purposes, and one thing that brings me a lot of joy about it is that I’m always learning new things about them. It’s like spending time with a friend you’ve had since childhood, and them suddenly revealing that they have a whole skill set or identity you knew nothing about. It offers you a chance to learn about, and fall in love with, them all over again.
Recently, I watched the documentary The Last of the Sea Women, about Haenyeo, women divers off Jeju Island in South Korea. The documentary itself is a compelling watch, and taught me about one aspect of the world I knew nothing about. But as I watched I also caught a few glimpses of an old friend: Mugwort.
The divers put sprigs of fresh Mugwort in their masks before going into the water, though the documentary doesn’t touch on why, and mugwort’s appearance is fleeting at best. I was curious and, knowing mugwort’s long history as a protective charm, wondered if that might be part of it, but the reason is much more pragmatic: Divers rub Ssuk (Mugwort) on the insides of their masks before going in the water, which coats the mask and prevents it from fogging.
Popping up in small places, between the cracks of the sidewalk just in one part of my garden, almost as a protective barrier between my home and the rest of the world. In my garden itself, Mugwort lives in one small area, without me even trying to contain or control their spread. Save for one single plant, which lives under my bedroom window. Like a protective sentinel there to guard my dreams (Mugwort, for those who’ve worked with the plant before, is often worked with for dreaming).
Mugwort is often in the corners of my awareness when moving through my days in this way. Both practical and magical, Mugwort flavors my food and drinks and the tincture supports my moon cycles and my dreams. In Ireland, I often wear a necklace my mom gave me with a piece of dried Mugwort from my Atlanta garden tucked inside.
The latter leads me to my most recent Mugwort encounter, via the Moxa sticks used by my acupuncturist, on a day recently when I needed a lot of support and care. When I stepped into her studio in Cork, she burned the bundle of dried mugwort I made and brought to her the first time we met, a full circle moment of collective and individual care.
I work with Mugwort often and, no surprise, Mugwort ends up as a regular player in some of my newsletter writing + recipes. If you want to dive down into this particular rabbit hole, here are the newsletter issues that talk about Mugwort:
Occasionally, there’s discourse on social media about Mugwort being dangerous. Yesterday, another round of mugwort fear mongering reared its head online, and is a reminder that our relationships to plants is and should be nuanced and personal.
Mugwort is safe for many people but not everyone (e.g. folks who are pregnant and nursing). While Mugwort contains thujone, it would need to be ingested in pretty high levels to have an effect. As always, trust your own senses and body, ask your medical care team questions, and use common sense. But there’s no need to be afraid of Mugwort, who’s been safely worked with, particularly in Asia and in some parts of Europe, for millennia. If you’re worried, just work with Mugwort externally (e.g. in salves or smoke cleansing sticks).
One thing I loved about yesterday’s rounds of discussion were how many people jumped to Mugwort’s defense, and how many people shared their own nuanced relationships to the plant. One that stuck out to me was a Japanese woman who learned to eat Mugwort in Spring and make external preparations in Fall, when the thujone levels in the leaves are higher (I can’t seem to find her post now, if you do, please let me know so I can add it in here). There’s a beauty and intuitive connection evident across many people’s relationships with Mugwort. It’s a reminder to me that our relationships to plants are deeply personal, but many people often develop similar affinities with specific plants.
In my article in the most recent issue of Eaten, on feasts, I talk about repurposing food waste in Early Modern English households. Repurposing waste was something done as a matter of course (and in many households and many places still is), utilizing simple techniques like making stock out of scraps.
But there were other more ingenious, creative repurposing efforts happening too: A personal favorite (for its creativity, not necessarily the product itself) is lids made out of hog bladders. Essentially, hog bladders are stretched across containers while still soft, and they dry to become taut like a drum.
I talk about these in the Eaten article, and talk at length in Our Fermented Livesabout my own experiments fermenting food in period-appropriate containers using hog bladders. Tl;dr: The flavor was…memorable.
But while I wrote about the excess being put to use, I also jumped down a rabbit hole wherein the excess itself is the central purpose of the feast. We see that in grand meals across time, where the food becomes a centerpiece for showing off one’s wealth and status via access to expensive ingredients and ability to hire skilled workers to make things like ornate sugar sculptures or towers of meat stacked like nesting dolls.
Sometimes, the waste was the point, as noted by historian Anna Zeide: Who in one interview described the Gilded Age as “a very widespread celebration of overabundance.” Industrial robber barons hosted long tables of guests, with dozens of plates of food (and specialty silverware for each type of food, particularly in the US where social mobility was perceived to be higher and performing wealth was paramount). “For them, like that over consumption of food was a sign of wealth,” notes Zeide, “and of course, most Americans weren’t participating in it, but they were aspiring to it. And in some ways, not needing to use up every piece of food you had was a sign of having made it.”
Our modern sensibilities about food waste are interesting to me because we at once recognize the value of reducing waste not just for individual cost savings and food security, but for urgent and visible ecological reasons as well. And yet how much are we still influenced by food as status? In particular, in wasted elements that can’t be eaten, or are just added to the table for the sake of it.
This called to mind a recent evening where I was watching Downton Abbey in the background while cleaning, and was struck by a scene where two characters are decanting wine for the table, with a different wine for each course. One wonders at how the entire family isn’t falling down drunk by the end of dinner, but another reassures him that “they hardly drink any of it at all.”
These are fine wines, carefully selected by the head butler, decanted at the perfect interval before dinner to breathe properly, and poured with care and precision, to mostly languish in a glass before presumably being tossed down the drain (the show’s writers leave this last element a mystery).
Perhaps few of us engage in this exact kind of decadent waste, but as people in wealthy countries who, to varying extents, can afford a variety of foods, can we say that decadent waste is completely absent from our lives?
It also makes me wonder at the subjectivity of what “decadence” means: The way I live now feels pretty simple and streamlined to me, but would be positively decadent to me 20 years ago. And both might be decadent to someone living in circumstances without, say, indoor plumbing.
In terms of food waste, how can we use excess as a benchmark? I don’t have answers, but I wonder if thinking of “the excess is the point” versus waste as a by-product (and one we try to repurpose to varying extents), is a useful avenue for inquiry in our own lives and world. Not that we should never have big meals or show off our skills, but that those are placed within the context of our larger lives and worlds.
The Great Depression and World Wars by necessity, moderated some of these practices in the 20th century. But the aspiration to giant feasts remains, evidenced by everything from holiday feasts to dozen course menus: A desire to showcase our wealth and to prepare more than we need simply because we can, or because we want to experience luxury. Or want to share that experience with others.
While our relationship to food has shifted and distanced us from our meals’ sources, and shifted the context in which we experience certain low waste foods (like pie) or removed some practices (like using bladders as lids) altogether, perhaps we’ll come up with our own, new, low waste practices, that historians will look at centuries from now, placing us in our lived context through the ways we stored and repurposed the bits and bobs of our daily meals.
I’m fresh off the plane from Ireland, landing back in my other home in Atlanta for 6 weeks. It’s a relief to get to give my cats a big squeeze and to see the sunshine for more than a few hours (I love you Cork, but this winter was extra gloomy even by our drizzly winter weather standards).
The first thing I do to mark the moment when I return home is to hug my pets (and maybe go to sleep). The second thing I do is make sauerkraut.
This morning, I woke up before dawn, and simmered a pot of good smelling spices on the stove to scent the house while I worked away on my fermenting projects.
I made sauerkraut filled with fragrant herbes de Provence, one of my go to blends, particularly in Springtime.
And I made this chili-lemon-garlic sauerkraut (below), studded with flecks of minced garlic and lime zest and cranked up a bit with dried chilies, which I crushed with my hands into the sauerkraut as I massaged the salt into the cabbage.
Along with these, I decided to share a few favorite recipes with you that are front and center in my new book, Essential Food Preserving.
These are ones that make the most of springtime flavors and ingredients, but most of all, offer creative license.
Right now, I know many folks are feeling afraid to feel joy, have fun, or share anything but serious news updates with others.
I’m challenging myself to reject that tendency, not because the news isn’t serious, but because I can’t thrive on seriousness alone. I thrive on reminders of why life is so beautiful and worth living and sharing, and that will keep me going and showing up for others for longer and with less burnout than cutting off joy ever would.
So in lieu of a doomscrolling session, I’m inviting you into the kitchen with me this week to make some food that brings you joy. Maybe it’s one of these recipes. Maybe it’s something else.
Maybe you cook during the middle of the night when you bolt awake and can’t get back to sleep. Maybe, like me, you start the day with preparing something that lets you just be calm and present. Or maybe you fit a few minutes of simple food prep (even just whisking together a vinaigrette you like) between the many blocks in your full schedule.
I’d love to hear about what you make (in the comments, or email me if you prefer), but most of all, how it felt to make something fun and just enjoy the moment. And, of course, if you shared it, I’d love to hear that too.
News: Announcing my next book + Earth Day classes
I alluded to the next book before, but now it’s official: The Little Book of Lemons, comes out in 2027 from Storey!
It’s full of history, recipes, folklore, home care, and a few lil’ lemon spells to bring the magic of lemons into your home. I can’t wait to share it with you!
Earth Day-adjacent group and corporate workshops are filling up: These are 1-2 hours covering 1-2 skills (e.g. fermenting, reducing food waste, infusing vinegars, foraging for spring greens, or mindfulness in the kitchen). Both virtual and IRL versions are available.
I’ve got a few more spots for early-mid April in person spots in Atlanta, as well as virtual workshops for folks outside Atlanta (these can be live workshops to your group, or recorded and shared with you).
So far that week, I’m doing two corporate fermentation workshops, each 1 hour long with 30-40 folks. I absolutely love doing these because I get to share the magic of fermentation with people who otherwise might not get a chance to learn it (and I usually get invited back to do multiple sessions).
Some folks also prefer to license out my recorded workshops, which gives everyone access to the class on their schedule.
If you’re still looking for a workshop to celebrate Earth Day (or any day), please get in touch: Julia@root-kitchens.com
And finally, Essential Food Preserving comes out in May (I’ve been busy!): For everyone who preorders you’re getting an extra special gift from me, and there will be a giveaway for US-based preorders in partnership with some of my favorite folks. More details on all of this soon but, in the meantime, please preorder so I can thank you with some extra gifts!
Your monthly recipe round up includes:
Chili-lime-garlic sauerkraut
Seasoning paste with preserved lemon
Flowerkraut
Working with stinging nettle (yes you can eat them, and yes they’re delicious)
Rhubarb and black pepper relish
Canning rhubarb
Rhubarb syrup
Keep reading for some of my favorite springtime foods!
Where I’ve appeared recently:
At Organic Growers School conference, where I’m presenting a full-day workshop on food preserving and community resilience with the amazing Ashley English. I’ll be there live-but-virtually due to Life Stuff, and I’ll miss getting to give you all hugs in person this year (we’ll make up for it next year).
I’m teaching simple lactofermented pickles and fire cider, as well as leading the group in a guided mycelial meditation and sharing ideas for using your preserving practice as part of mutual aid and community care.
I have more events planned through September/October that I’ll announce soon, but I still have space for more so, get in touch if there’s somewhere you’d like to see me or you want to book me to come speak or teach with you.
This month I’m also kicking off my 9 month holistic creativity coaching program, Symbiosis, which I rebuilt from the ground up to be ~1000x better, with new resources and focus areas that build on each other throughout the year.
This group workshop is 100% virtual, with 2 meetings a month (sometimes more), space for live coaching between calls, and a completely revamped and improved resource library.
The program includes practical strategy to build productive creative time into your week, alongside energy work, magic, and visualization practices to keep that forward momentum aligned with the most expansive, impactful vision of your creative life + work.
Folks who join can expect to leave with a drastically different creative practice (as in, more joyful and playful, and more sustainable and practical), and we’ll be weaving in some other fun stuff too, including free Reiki I training for those who want it.
Feel free to email me with questions!
Head here to join us: Paid subscribers remember to use your subscriber discount (send me an email, or check your welcome email, if you forgot it).
Make sauerkraut as usual and toss with the seasonings before packing into your fermenting containers.
For each head of cabbage, toss with zest of 1 lime, 3-4 cloves minced garlic, and 3-4 crushed small dried chilis (I used Burlap and Barrel’s whole Cobanero chilis).
I want this one extra crunchy so I massaged minimally and topped off the container with a bit of extra room temperature brine.
As always, adjust to your taste: More or less chili, massage the cabbage for a long time for a softer texture, or not at all for more crisp. Ferment for a while to get it more sour and funky, less time for a brighter flavor.
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Behind the scenes of my life, I’ve been working in fits and starts on little snippets of memoir, poetry, and other forms that push me outside my comfort zone. I’ve talked in the past about how meditating sitting still is a privilege (a concept I was introduced to by chef Jenny Dorsey years ago), and the below snippet, part memoir, part meander of some sort, is a very early stab at starting to make something cohesive out of those thoughts.
It’s probably about 1/3 of the total piece, but it’s the most finished part, and I thought would be something you would like to see. I’d love to hear in the comments how this resonates with your understanding of what it means to meditate (in other words, do you define it as only one thing? Or can meditation mean many things?)
How does this relate to food writing? Because a lot of what I talk about below relates to culinary labor, particularly unseen labor. Those parts are still weaving their way into this particular piece, but I’m enjoying where it’s going.
Meditation, movement
To sit still is a privilege.
How much of my life has been an oscillation between the privilege (which should be a right) to rest, and the necessity of fitting meditation within the cracks of my being, the tiny fissures in my day, the margins of my time.
I think of meditation as movement.
I think of John Coltrane’s ‘meditations’ and how ‘to meditate’ does not necessarily mean to sit still in perfect silence with an empty mind, but also to reflect, to create.
How meditation can be an expression of a thought through the rising and falling action of notes. Through the words on a page.
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Joy and ease are the order of the day for me this month. It flies in the face of everything around us to proactively seek ways to feel either, but I feel we can’t get past the helplessness and stalemate of the moment without them.
Joy, and ease, invite in possibilities we might otherwise miss. They invite us to view and review ourselves and the world around us through a light that’s realistic, yet hopeful and optimistic too.
Where can we choose to focus our attention to build a future that’s more joyful? Where can we find small ways to invite in some ease, and some joy, now?
Here are some readings I’ve been enjoying in connection with joy and ease, in the kitchen and beyond:
I talk about digital boundaries often with my holistic creativity coaching clients and this approach, of replacing doomscrolling with something else that’s more joyful, is something that works well for a lot of folks (if you try it, let me know in the comments, will you?)
SPEAKING OF PREORDERS, my next book, all 493 pages of it, is available for you to preorder: Grab a copy at Bookshop.org (or Bookshop UK). It comes out mid-May (June 4 in Europe).
In my TBD pile: Continuing to apply for grants (I apply for 3-5 grants/month). I started this practice 4 months ago and, while the fruits of my labors haven’t paid off, yet, grant funding is in part a clarity of messaging game and in part a numbers game, so I know that my efforts will pay off. Even when I don’t get grants, the opportunity to put down what I’m doing in clear language, and to dreamweave about how I can continue to grow that work with additional resources, is priceless.
I apply for small business grants, since I’m a business owner, but also creative grants. Some grants ride the line between both, and I apply for those too, since being a professional writer is, in fact, a business.
I find grants through government portals and local small business resources, and through grants newsletters (there are tons of newsletters out there with awards, grants, etc., and it can be useful to poke around and find ones specific to your interests (like this).
And finally, the below was recently posted by chef Jacques Pepin on Facebook. I remember reading Levi-Strauss in undergrad in Psychology, and this inspires me to dive back in with the eyes of a food writer to see what new gems emerge:
“Brillat-Savarin said in one of his aphorisms, “You are what you eat. I believe that for many people “I am what I cook,” because I have been defined by my cooking most of my life. Claude Levi Strauss, a French anthropologist, describes the process of cooking in his seminal book, The Science of Mythology, as the process by which nature is transformed into culture. Well, going back as far as my memory can take me I see a kitchen in my vision of my mother, my aunts, my cousins, and I visualize that process in a specific dish for each of them.
Be well. -JP”
Where I’ve appeared in the media recently:
This article on adding sauerkraut to your Thanksgiving menu
Late last year, my Culinary Curiosity School classes were featured in The Guardian. It’s great to see that aspect of my work both recognized and placed within the larger conversation of experiential gifts (rather than gifting people clutter they don’t want or need).
As a reminder, paid subscribers get 30% off all those classes, always. Find the discount code in last week’s email or email me if you’d like a reminder.
For Produce Parties, I wrote a piece on the last words my mother told me along with reflections on how being raised in a strict evangelical church shaped my relationship to food. You can order a copy here.
Last year, I helped with the bibliography and some of the behind-the-scenes work on this book (yes, I do some book indexing, fact checking, formatting, etc. as I have space in my schedule), and it’s great to see it out in the world: The book is part memoir, part study on ableism in religious spaces, and blends both beautifully. It’s by far one of my favorite projects I’ve helped with in this way.
The newsletter has moved over to WordPress. There are still stumbling blocks but, we are here! If you were a paid subscriber in Substack, your payments there have been paused, and you’ll need to upgrade your subscription by clicking below to access paywalled content here.
It’s $3/month: Which is $2/month cheaper than Substack or Patreon so, a win-win all around.
To thank you for your patience as I made the switch, I’m offering folks who stick with me as paid subscribers a free class, plus 30% off live coaching calls, to be used for anything from book proposal coaching to building a writing routine, to fermentation questions or energy work (I know, I’ve got range).
Details on all of that below!
Here are the classes I’m offering for free to paid subscribers (and to $5/month+ Patreon subscribers, if you want to go that route):
This week I’m sharing a simple recipe I started making in my early 20s, and wrote in the first of many homemade recipe books I gave to family each holiday: Printing them out on the library printer and binding them with whatever ribbon I had handy.
But first a few things that are bringing me joy this week:
Eaten Magazine is one of my bucket list publications, and this next issue on feasts, I get to cross that off my list as I have an article on repurposing food waste in Early Modern feasting. Order the Feast issue here.
Have you preordered Essential Food Preserving yet? Preorders are great for authors and influence the whole lifecycle of the book: And we’re lining up some pretty great bonus preorder gifts for you that I’ll announce soon. Order your copy here.
Oh and drumroll please, because…I have another book under contract! I’ve just handed in the manuscript for my next-next book (which comes out next year): The Little Book of Lemons.
It does what it says on the tin: It’s a book all about the history and many uses of lemons. I’m discovering after a big book project (like Essential Food Preserving) I like doing a smaller, more focused project as a palate cleanser of sorts: There’s something really rewarding about that specific form of shifting gears that I love.
More on this book soon!
On to the recipe:
(PS if you were a paid subscriber on Substack, upgrading below *should* work to change your subscription here. We’ve had some hiccups with WordPress and the newsletter so, thanks for your patience. If you have questions, or run into issues, email me please: julia@root-kitchens.com)
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The first-ever newsletter issue from my self-hosted newsletter platform!
If you were a paid subscriber on Substack, head below to resubscribe and access paid content again (as promised, it starts at $3/month):
Choosing a food preservation technique based on your kitchen equipment
I recently designed and released a new course called Resilience and Community Care through Food Preserving, based on my previous work teaching these concepts in person. I get asked to teach about this particular subject quite often, but as schedules, locations, etc. don’t always align, the new class is a way for me to get a ready-to-go version in the hands of people who need it.
One of the elements I added to the class last-minute was the chart below, inspired by many of the conversations I’ve had over the years where people want to know what food preserving techniques work best with the technology and infrastructure they have access to.
If you live off grid, an electric dehydrator uses valuable juice from your generator, but a solar dehydrator (provided you’re in the right climate for one) might be a better solution. Fermentation, not surprisingly, works in any kitchen setup, provided that it’s not blisteringly hot or ice cold. But many other techniques (like canning) do require some sort of technology (at bare minimum a heat source: And canning over a wood fire is hard because you have to keep the pot consistently boiling without all the water boiling off. But, it can be done if you’re feeling experimental!)
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The messiness, and interconnectedness, of tradition and memory
This is a (heavily adapted) talk from a women’s herbalism retreat I gave a handful of years ago. As we move into the new year, I’m revisiting this work and thinking about how it continues to shape me. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
I see food as a connective thread that connects us to past, present, and future. But that thread isn’t always a clean line: It’s one informed by colonialism, by our own messy pasts, by our dreams for the future, and by the millions of tiny ways that each of our lives is simultaneously singular and unique, and deeply interconnected and unremarkable.
Working with our hands, creating something ourselves or in community, exists with the potential of being a revolutionary act.
When we connect with traditional food making practices, we’re connecting to the act of being creators rather than consumers. We’re doing something rather than having life done to us.
And when we go further by connecting others with these practices, we’re imagining systems that honor nature, strengthen communities, and return to the knowledge sharing practices so central to humanity for many thousands of years. We’re also imagining the world as it can be, rather than it is.
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