CNOT Gate
On science writing, Margrethe Bohr and leaving school
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CNOT GATE*
Heisenberg What something means is what it means in mathematics
Bohr You think that so long as the mathematics works out, the sense doesn’t matter.
Heisenberg Mathematics is sense! That’s what sense is!
Bohr But in the end, in the end, remember, we have to be able to explain it all to Margrethe!
Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
Seeing someone like Margrethe Bohr as more central to the story of making quantum theory requires shifting the polarities of what we usually count as scientific labor. We have to see how paperwork, so often gendered as the work of women, and set aside as inconsequential, does in fact involve intellectual labor. Paperwork can be conceptual work, shaping both the content and form of scientific theory. Drafting, writing, revising, and organizing is scientific labor, too.
Megan Shields Formato, Crafting Quantum Theory: Margrethe Bohr and the Labor of Theoretical Physics, Lady Science
Margrethe Norlund Bohr did not train as a physicist, but as a French teacher instead. Likely, she did not come of age while learning rules of integral and differential calculus or trying to memorize steps for multiplying matrices. Yet, she was integral for the shaping of quantum theory in its earliest days. Writers are fond of phrases such as ‘founding father” or “the architect of” and if Margrethe’s physicist husband Niels was the former she, in charge of typing, editing and organizing his work, was certainly something like the latter.
The story goes that Niels would evoke her in conversations with fellow physicists as the ultimate litmus test on whether they understood their work. The idea was that if they really did understand it, then they could effectively explain it to someone who was sharp, but not a physicist. Niels was notorious for re-writing paper drafts over and over and over, and reading between the lines of history it seems as if Margrethe anchored and stopped him from doing so forever by declaring the work close enough to “plain language” to hit home with her. Sometimes it is reported that even some of Niels’s colleagues would sometimes pass their papers to her in the hope of receiving the same service.
In Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which features Bohr, fellow physicists Werner Heisenberg and Margrethe herself, Heisenberg openly expresses envy over the Bohrs close working relationship and over how much of an asset Niels’ wife is to him. Though Heisenberg was married, in the play, his wife Elisabeth is mentioned only in passing when he and Bohr are anxiously exchanging pleasantries.
Frayn certainly takes some liberties with ventriloquizing the three historical figures in Copenhagen. The Postscript to the book goes into painful depth concerning his attempts to uncover what exactly Heisenberg was thinking, doing and even feeling in the 1940s when the play takes place. World War II was a sinister time for some German physicists and a devastating time for many physicists in Europe and Germany alike. Frayn does his homework to convince the reader that the tension between the Bohrs (Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany and Niels mother was Jewish) and Heisenberg (who was working on a Nazi state sponsored atomic program) in his fiction is rooted in very real events, very real sentiments and very real dangers. The Postscript, however, has maybe a paragraph’s worth of comments to make about Margrethe, much less than all her lines put together, even though Frayn packs those lines with a fair amount of fire.
In the play, it is Margrethe that is really angry with Heisenberg instead of Niels who had long been his mentor and father figure. It is also her that has the most explosive moments of anguish and emotion, so explosive in fact that she gets shushed or reprimanded by the men in the room. It is fascinating to see Frayn use Margrethe as she was used in real life — a filter for nonsense contained in the work of presumably great men and a layperson’s point-of-view character — while also portraying her through an inevitably gendered lens, the same one that make all attempts to give her retroactive credit for her work on quantum theory feel somewhat backhanded. In both Frayn’s and more factual historical effects, Margrethe is still a stand-in for someone that is not as smart as the physicists she worked with.
***
When I quit my teaching job, I immediately started to worry about whether the next teacher would talk down to students I had been working with.
My last week at school was a whirlwind. No matter how much I went into it braced for impact, everything still carried an outsized amount of emotion. On my very last day, my adult colleagues did not surprise me all that much. The science department gave me a card and some nice pens “because every writer needs pens” and a queer colleague I had made friends with during cross-country season wrote me another card that felt way more personal. One colleague mistakenly referred to me as an astrophysicist in their goodbye email. One very sweet office-mate brought me a slice of vegan carrot cake from the coffee shop up the block from school that we both patronized every morning. Another made plans to run with me in Prospect Park after Spring Break. I was somewhat relieved to find that even when you announce that you will disappear sort of out of nowhere, people remain consistently who they are until the last moment, whether that be warm and genuine, artificially sweet or just completely detached from anything but work. With students, the stakes felt much higher. I preemptively overcorrected by bringing in an outrageous amount of sugary snacks and agreeing to answer questions AMA-style, including how I do my eyeliner and whether I managed to make a “teacher best friend” during my time at school.
In February, I wrote about how much the big love story in my life in the last two years has been that of building relationships with my students, so maybe it is fitting that just a few months later I was confronted with my students’ tiny handwritings in brightly colored cards, thanking me for my work and effort. I am not good at processing feelings on the spot so I worry that I was too stone-faced throughout all the teary hugs and promises that I’ll keep in touch, but being told that I was open and honest and friendly by young people that had little to no reason to trust me just months ago may have been one of the biggest accomplishments of my life so far.
I’ll be honest, some of the classrooms I shared with these kids would occasionally devolve into a particularly loud variety of chaos that I wasn’t always able to redirect into something more productive. And I’ll be honest about how some students at some points figured out that my hating to be a person that sets rigid rules could work in their favor, maybe to let them procrastinate more, maybe to let them put in a little less effort than they could have. As a teacher, I wondered whether I was too understanding almost as often as I wondered whether I was too harsh and too demanding. My hope was always that the competition between the two would land me somewhere in the middle. This tension was maybe misguided - behavior and content knowledge are two different axes of a teacher’s job - but it did keep me on my toes and I quickly learned that not getting too comfortable in how you think things should be done is really important. But if I could feel certainty in anything, it was in putting my most genuine effort into not being condescending to students.
***
Whenever I’ve met other science writers, and even when I interviewed for my next job, I’ve somewhat jokingly made the claim that nothing’s made me a better writer than teaching 9th grade. I stand by this: kids don’t suffer jargon, they call out circular reasoning like no-one else and they benefit from analogies and comparisons only when they actually work. Being at the front of the classroom day-to-day forces you to come in with a rounded, well thought out narrative for what a concept is and why it is important. It also demands of you an alertness and sharpness for answering expected and unexpected questions quickly and well.
An effective class is much like an article. Both the student and the reader need to be offered a lede that will hook them in and a first paragraph that’s a bit of a roadmap so that they trust that there’s a plan to where we are going to go for the remainder of our time together. They both need to be engaged and entertained and neither can be bored or assumed to be too slow or dull for the punchline. A good piece of writing is not a mystery box as much as it is just challenging enough to tug at the edge of your brain after you put it down; an effective science class has to spill onto your dinner table when your parents ask, for the billionth time, what you had been doing in school earlier. I learned an awful lot about writing from my editors and from being a reader, but putting together slides and activities and worksheets late into the night definitely helped me solidify what it means to tell the story of science in a way that transcends passive amusement or forced bloviating about the triumphs of the human mind.
There is a lot of room to make judgment calls when you write for a general audience or an audience that does not have the training your sources, and sometimes you yourself, may have. I have spent most of my time as a writer reporting on the kind of physics I studied, namely all sorts of cold and tiny and solid stuff that behaves according to the rules of quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics tends to be both feared and misunderstood. This has landed me into some interesting conversations with editors and other writers concerning how much hand-holding and how many analogies the reader needs to both understand and care about understanding. And it landed me into some really frustrating conversations with acquaintances and even my barber about how much of the more esoteric and mystical take on quantum mechanics one can dismiss before being rude about or condescending to someone’s beliefs.
This balancing act happens in the classroom as well. In introductory classes, students come in with essentially Aristotelian ideas about motion and have to learn to think as Newtonians (ask yourself: if an object is moving, does there have to be a force moving it every step of the way? If you answered “yes”, you are with Aristotle as well). Later, they are asked to process at least some knowledge about electrons and atomic structure that is at the high school level by default incomplete. Learning physics is about building and re-building mental models of how you think the world works in the most literal sense of the word “works” and you are less likely to retool the categories and brackets in your head if you are being talked down to. Certainly, with students one can employ questioning and experimentation to nudge them into that rebuilding process instead of just telling them to do it. On the page, the only assistance one can offer to the reader is words, so we have to choose them carefully. In either case, however, the whole thing crumbles if someone feels underestimated or as if they are being patronized.
When I interview physicists and they get a sense of my background as a researcher we sometimes end up speaking at length about the kind of details (laser frequencies, parameters in a Hamiltonian, comparisons with other theories, technical challenges of solving a very specific equation in a very specific way) that never make it into my article drafts. When I decide to cut those details out of the story I am trying to tell I always have to stop myself and double-check whether I am empowering the reader to see the bigger picture or arrogantly assuming that they can’t understand all its nuances. A large part of the job is always asking “why would a reader care about this?” and “is this at all accessible to the reader?”Asking those questions also requires us to make at least some assumptions about who the reader is. In a way, being a scientist-turned-writer means that the metaphorical angel and devil on my shoulders are a teacher and a gatekeeper.
And while it is possible to lose track of the reader on the page if you do not engage in these constant mental checks, it is pretty much inexcusable to forget the students in the classroom. It is really their input, their energy and their interests that shape the story being learned that day from a guess as to what may work as a teaching strategy into an informative conversation with clear punchlines. Of course, there are pre-set learning outcomes and exams and educational standards that transcend a single school, but the alchemy that happens in the classroom if you give people a chance to be people and engage on as level a playing field as possible is where, as it always seemed to me, most impact is most evident. The fact that my students seemed to recognize how much I cared about our shared spaces being two-way streets of sorts then meant the world to me.
***
The treatment of Margrethe Bohr in Frayn’s account and others does not fully sit right with me in part because even when she has been recognized as instrumental for the development of a field of physics that more or less changed the world (we would not have anything that depends on transistor technology if we did not understand quantum mechanics, to mention one example) she is still presented in opposition to the discoverers like her husband. She is a craftsperson that can sand the edges of a marble statue but cannot be the artist that liberates it from an amorphous block. Certainly, the act of editing and translating is not equivalent to the act of calculating and measuring, but as any good writer or any good teacher ought to know, a whole lot of discovery actually does happen in between tangled lines of a complex argument. It is hard to believe that Margrethe could have done all this editing and writing towards “plain language” without becoming fully versed in the nuances of quantum theory and that at least some of her writing efforts must have counted as doing science per se.
Being trained as an academic today, at least in my experience, enamores you with jargon and teaches you to speak the language of your in-group as much as you can so that you maximize your success by fitting in. (Just try being a woman, or being queer, or being foreign, or being in any way different and not talk the talk that primarily white men had established as the set-in-stone norm for centuries.) Peer reviewed journals play into this too with the most prestigious ones giving you the least amount of space, the fewest words, to actually explain what you mean and what you did in a study. Eliteness and excellence quickly get conflated with obscure, hard-to-parse, severely specialized language. Teaching has helped me liberate myself from that. It has also alerted me to, ironically because I had presumably for years been trying to study the secrets of physical reality, there being a more real world of physics out there. And my students were not stand-ins for the regular person who may be a bit more slow than a capital-P Physicist or a bit less likely to want to engage with something complicated, they were not all the Margrethe from Frayn’s pages, they were real people who wanted to understand the same things as me and we just had to find a common parlance, not one that made my language more plain or theirs more elevated, simply one that we could share.
***
Today, I am starting my next chapter as a full-time physics reporter for the New Scientist. This is a career opportunity that came to me very unexpectedly and an opportunity that I wasn’t sure I’d ever have given that I started writing about science just a few years ago and with very few, very slim credentials. I rarely allow myself pride and I am more than certain that being a “real writer” will humble me almost immediately, but I am grateful to all past versions of me that helped me get here even when other paths seemed a little more solid. Often, I am at war with my past selves, but remembering that a preteen me wanted to be a math teacher, that in 8th grade I went to journalism summer camp, and that at 15 I feel in love with physics because I read “Quantum Mechanics for Dummies” slowly fills out a picture in which maybe we had all secretly been working together all along. Now, I’m adding Dr. Callaghan, the high school teacher in heavy eyeliner, Vans and slacks, to that team, and taking the lessons they learned with me into this new endeavor. I can’t promise a deep, personal love to every one of my future readers, but I do want to offer them the same honesty and respect that made my time in the classroom that much more real and worthwhile.
Best,
Karmela
*In quantum information theory and computing, a CNOT or a “controlled NOT” gate is an element of the computing algorithm that takes in two qubits (quantum bits) at once. It does not change both of them, but rather acts on one only if the other has some preset value. In other words, the value of one qubit acts as a condition for, or a control for, the other qubit being acted upon and transformed. For example, in a classical computer where a NOT gate changes 1s to 0s and vice versa, inputting a 1 and a 0 may end in the 0 being turned into a 1 while inputting a 1 and a 1 may leave both unchanged.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
For the MIT Technology Review I wrote about a startup that’s tackling the question of what a single molecule can do when integrated into a semiconductor chip.This question has had a dramatic hype cycle attached to it for decades. Now, Roswell Biotechnologies may be on the edge of making unprecedentedly precise and fast biosensors powered by chips with single molecules at their core into commercial products. So-called molecular electronics had a big surge and an equally intense crash in the early 2000s but this new tech outfit just might bring the field back to life. This was a really fun and exciting story to write as I got to speak to scientists and CEOs alike and I did a fair amount of reading about what tech was like 10-15 years ago when I was barely a teenager. This is probably my favorite piece of writing for the year so far.
In my last few weeks of freelancing I also wrote two more quantum computing and technology stories for Physics World. In one, I reported on a study out of the University of Innsbruck in Austria that put forward a proposal for a new and better way to build quantum computers that could be uniquely suited for the kind of optimization problems that span everything from balancing an electrical grid to keeping the most promising investment portfolio. As quantum computers become closer and closer to being practical and commercially viable, scientists have to spend more and more time determining what problems exactly it is that they’ll be most useful. Studies like this have consequently become increasingly important and necessary.
My other article for the same outlet tackled some new work focused on quantum sensors. Quantum sensors often surpass their classical counterparts when it comes to sensitivity and accuracy because they harness quantum mechanical processes to function. However, the same processes that make these sensors so accurate are also very susceptible to environmental noise which leads to high possibility of errors. And when you try to correct those errors with so-called quantum error correction (QEC) protocols, as it turns out, things get even more complicated. I reported on a new theoretical study from ETH in Austria and MIT in the US that pinpointed exactly what the side-effects of using QEC to deal with the headache of environmental noise are. This work could be very influential on efforts to make commercial quantum sensors for use in, for instance, navigation and environmental surveys that are underway already.
READING
This article by Payal Dhar in Open Mind on controversies surrounding academic publishing and peer-reviewed journals’ love of paywalls. Notably, in discussing litigation against pirate sites Sci-Hub and Libgen, Dhar writes:
Although publication in reputable journals can ensure accuracy and accountability, it also places barriers to entry that only the most privileged researchers can overcome. To be published in a journal of standing, researchers may have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars, which is prohibitive for scientists in low- and middle-income countries. Moreover, paywalls mean that they lack access to their own intellectual property unless their institution provides it. Whether a potential reader is a student, researcher, teacher, or journalist, access is often granted on the basis of one’s ability to pay—typically at least $2,000 per year for a single journal subscription and up to $6,700 for some medical journals.
If you’re in the global South, turning to “piracy” becomes imperative. For example, as a science journalist based in India, I often depend on the kindness of strangers: fellow writers willing to use their access to institutional subscriptions or the ability to afford subscriptions to pull out research papers and other material essential for background research. The high cost of access puts scholars and writers from the global South at an immense disadvantage given the difference in the value of currency. Even a $10 fee can be prohibitive outside the United States and Western Europe. Without the likes of Libgen and Sci-Hub, untold numbers of researchers, students, journalists, and anyone else with an interest in scientific knowledge would be locked out.
This poem by E. E. Cummings and this one by Marcus Amaker.
These lines from Amaker felt particularly prophetic as I read them at the start of my week off and on the edge of Taurus season
Treat your body
like a well-rounded planet
built for all seasons,
or pretend you are
an adaptable star:
Float in the black
and stay there
if you need to,
save some light
for yourself.
In other words,
rest like the sun does:
Schedule some time
to stay out of sight
when too many people
praise warm energy.
This issue of the Vittles newsletter that discusses linguistic traps and trappings for discussing animals that are farmed for meat. Rosanna Hildyard writes
Such clinical language seems to anticipate the continued spread of American-style, profit-oriented ‘mega farms’ in the UK. A 2017 investigation by the Guardian estimated that around 800 mega farms were in operation here, a 26% increase from 2011. It is most likely an even larger number now; although the UK population may have started moving towards plant-based diets, around 86% of us still eat meat. Such farms keep thousands of animals indoors and ‘seriously constrain internally motivated behaviours, particularly comfort movements such as stretching, grooming [and] nesting’, according to Christine Nicol, professor of veterinary science at the University of Bristol. This is not even counting their impact on the wider environment.
We need more accurate, nuanced, and consistent language to allow us to distinguish between different forms and scales of farming animals. Apart from the obfuscating tedium of professional agricultural language (which is usually only read and heard by those working in the sector), representations in the popular media about farming animals are broadly divided into two distinct styles: violent, macho language on one hand, over-sentimentalised on the other.
LEARNING
How to keep it 100% at work until the very last day without also being heartless. How to be honest about what you want for yourself even when it might hurt others.
How to hear someone say “it’s immoral for a teacher to abandon their students halfway through the year” and not take it to heart too much. How to hear someone say “I always hoped this place won’t be your final destination” and not take that to heart too much either.
How to trust people that they can pick up where you left off and how to let them plan to do their own thing without being overbearing.
How to not pick petty fights just because you can. How to not flatter people too much just because you feel like you have to.
How to sift through two years worth of handwritten assignments and convince yourself that most are not worth bringing home.
How to take a week off and really have it be a break. How to forgive yourself for taking on just a few more last minute assignments anyway. How to, just for a day or two, eat more, sleep more, fuck more, watch TV, spend money more and luxuriate in it all.
How to brace for a new place, new people and new responsibilities. How to see that you will be added to a Slack channel and a Trello board and have a line manager and not freak out.
How to trust yourself a little more than last time you started something new.
LISTENING
Jack White in conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib in this episode of the Object of Sound podcast. Though I had never been all that invested in his music, White is an interesting figure and brings a very different energy than many of Abdurraqib’s gentler, more millennial-y introspective guests usually do. The final thought at the end of the episode also really stuck out to me — Abdurraqib’s observation that half of writing is being in disbelief that you managed to complete something and the other half is a similar sense of shock at the expectation that you’ll have to do that same thing again matches my experience quite uncannily.
This episode on the Criminal podcast about an FBI break-in conducted by an unlikely crew with an unexpectedly wholesome motive. Phoebe Judge continues to be one of the few people in podcasting that just might be doing true crime somewhat right.
The whole second season of the This Land podcast is absolutely fantastic and more than worth listening to even if you don’t follow the Supreme Court at all or care for Native American law. It’s a story about power, politics, racism, religion and lying about or around all of these things throughout history that really exemplifies so many ways in which the moral backbone of American culture has either crumbled completely, or maybe never existed at all.
WATCHING
James Wan’s Malignant is pretty deranged, pretty cartoonish and features mostly terrible acting. At the same time, it’s a fun call-back to trashy 90s horror and even a bit of the giallo tradition (a few shots struck me as directly lifted from Argento’s Deep Red) and it really commits to its, albeit pretty terrible, bit. There are a few really great fight scenes in this movie and a lot of body horror so it’s definitely not a boring watch and maybe that matters more than the fact that the whole thing is actually sort of bad.
We saw the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once at the end of a very long work Friday, as a bit of date-night outing to an actual movie theater and that setting was definitely the correct way to see this (also pretty deranged) film. I laughed out loud more than once and the sheer speed and maximalist onslaught of references that the movie packs kept me if not on the edge of my seat then at least as enthralled as I get when I fall into late-night TikTok scrolling fugues. And Everything Everywhere All at Once is kind of the movie equivalent of a TikTok “get ready with me” video where the influencer du jour puts on too many layers and tops it all off with borderline clownish makeup, or maybe the visual version of a rapgenius outline of a song where every line can be clicked on to reveal some reference. The film does, however, also attempt to have heart. The sad queer immigrant family story left me as divided as they always do (at 30 and married I am still not able to fully explain my queerness to my foreign parents so I am not an objective critic here to say the least), but the Daniels at least try to argue against the nihilism that the Internet so easily brings about in many of us. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan are fantastic in this film and the takeaway message of “if nothing matters then you might as well do something good” did stick with me way after their manic antics were over.
I really liked Mat Reeves The Batman. The Frank Miller of it all (year one! that elevator sequence in the club with light flashes and negative space! the opening with the news cast establishing context!), the absolute lack of slickness, Robert Pattinson doing awkward and hunched over and bulky and even leaning into borderline body horror, the unprecedentedly gross-looking, rainy, grody Gotham, the scorchingly hot but not crazy or over-sexualized Catwoman with an agenda of her own, the 10% Danny DeVito 90% Tony Soprano take on the Penguin, the absolutely terrifying Riddler in homemade fetish gear corralling Internet crowds in a way that almost comes too close to reality… it all worked for me. I did have some nitpicks with this movie, like the sheer length of it or the need to close with both a flood and a terrorist attack, but overall this felt like such a new take on a character and a story that was starting to feel really stale in recent years that I was genuinely surprised by its tone and aesthetics even when I could predict the next beat of the plot. I somewhat cautiously hope we’ll get at least one sequel.
On the catching up on classics front we watched Clint Eastwood’s anti-western western Unforgiven, Coppola’s famous The Godfather Part II and the John Carpenter horror They Live. Unforgiven surprised me by how effective its stone-faced satire is and after I realized that satire really was what Eastwood was after I was sort of amazed by the craft and absurdity of it all.
The second Godfather film left me much more cold. I am not often one to argue that a film should have been a prestige TV series instead, but as we made our way through the hours upon hours of convoluted, masculine, unflinching violence I couldn’t help but think that there were multiple stories here that could have benefited from being unwound from the others and presented more slowly, with more lively, more human characters. Maybe this is a sign of me being an immature film consumer, but everything about this film was just too much and a kind of too much that is numbing and uninteresting instead of emotionally overwhelming.
They Live also does not shy away from unnecessary masculine violence either, but I tend to enjoy Carpenter at his great-idea-trashy-execution more than I’d like to admit so I was pretty delighted by this film. It casts Rody Pipper, it features one absolutely unnecessary brawl and lots of delightfully outdated practical effects and it also sort of holds up as far as deeper messaging goes. It’d make for an amazing double-feature with Videodrome and Carpenter’s soundtrack will be stuck in my head for a while.
As far as TV goes, we are still watching Winning Time and I still don’t really think it’s all that good or that I like it all that much. However, I am hooked on it enough to still want to know what kind of showboating and excess will be shoehorned into it next. Despite my lack of fluency in basketball history and culture (even if I am from what Bill Simmons occasionally refers to as “one of those basketball countries”), I’ve caught sense of how much the show is veering away from historical facts about the 1980s Lakers which both makes me feel a bit icky about continuing to watch it and curious about what kind of drama was so worth it to the show’s writers to justify taking these liberties with the truth. (Incidentally, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s take on the show on his Substack is a very well written piece of criticism - and absolutely scathing.)
I have been enjoying another HBO show, the story of a white investigative journalist getting tangled with the yakuza in late 1990s Japan called Tokyo Vice. I am self-conscious enough to know that I partly like this show because in the late 90s and early 00s I was pretty enamored with a pretty fetishized idea of Japan, but I do also think that the series is well made and well cast. There are a lot of Japanese characters in Tokyo Vice and most of the show’s dialogue is in Japanese. The show’s American protagonist, played by Ansel Elgort, is sort of a delight in his bumbling, gangly, doe-eyed performance and he does manage to transcend a tiresome fish-out-of-water trope. The story of Tokyo Vice is fairly interesting too which saves the show from being just vibes (a common problem with so much “prestige” TV), though the show is at times less shy about reaching for stereotypes than I’d like. Because this is an HBO product I sort of worry about where the latter tendency may take it and given how much more nudity was suddenly added to the plot that didn’t really need it after the show’s halfway mark I think I’m at least a little justified in that concern.
EATING
For Easter, I made that Alicia Kennedy olive oil citrus cake that everyone on Instagram was making a few months back (with a simple lemon juice and powdered sugar glaze added for both more of a lemony zing and some more visual appeal) and a vegan version of this New York Times Cooking wild mushroom tart. I would absolutely recommend the cake to everyone; it’s easy, doesn’t have any special ingredients (I used cornstarch instead of arrowroot starch) and tastes bright and indulgent. Next time I make it, I may mix in a bit of miso and glaze it with a tangy cashew cream for a cheesy riff or maybe rub some basil or rosemary or even lavender into the sugar before adding it to the cake for extra herby, teacake-adjacent flavor. The tart dough, a rough puff pastry of sorts, was also pretty great and pretty easy and I used whatever I had leftover to make some savory Danish-type pastries for lunch the next day. With minimal effort, that experiment actually got me close to achieving something close to crispy lamination which I enjoyed very much.
A riff on this Afghan pasta from Bon Appetit with red lentils in place of ground beef. This would’ve worked well with any plant-based mince (in my opinion, both Beyond and Impossible are really believable and easy to work with), but I wanted something less heavy and with a bit more chew. What meat does in a sauce recipe like this one is that it adds texture, fat, salt and some savoriness. To compensate for not including any, I went easy on adding water, doubled all spice amounts and added just a touch of soy sauce and liquid smoke before patiently cooking the sauce down. For the topping I used Forager cashew yogurt which I like for nothing other than mixing with garlic and salt and drizzling on things. Adding fresh mint to the yogurt mixture, as the recipe suggested, was definitely a great call as it really added freshness and complexity to the dish so I might have to try and break it out more often.
One delightfully saucy dish that started as this Korean braised potatoes or gamja jorim recipe. First, I thought I’d use tiny Japanese sweet potatoes from the farmers market instead of their regular cousins, then I figured I might as well throw in some bok choy I also picked up at the market, then I doubled the braising liquid and the amount of chili peppers, then I added a cornstarch slurry to make it stickier. And while I was doing all that I improvised a gochujang marinade for some soy curls, and learned how to make short grain rice in my tiny donabe, and dug up a jar of vegan kimchi from our fridge door that’s, at this point, drowning in pickles and sauces. It all came out really well: potatoes were almost candied but still had a spicy bite, soy curls were chewy and umami, the rice was lowkey perfect, so I would endorse both the original recipe and riffing on it some.
For recent date-nights-out we revisited vegan dim sum at Bodhi in Chinatown, which was fantastic, check out Thai food at Thip Osha in our neighborhood, which was also very good, and got back to a few other favorites like Jajaja Plantas Mexicana (where you can get some really good vegan nachos) and the Lighthouse (where the mezze never disappoints).