Support Set
On Internet divination, James Baldwin’s imaginary TikTok and authentic scientists
Hi and thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay then a round up of my recent work as a writer, some thoughts on what I am watching and listening to and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. Please hit reply at any time, for any purpose and find me on Twitter and Instagram too.
Programming note: Life has been a bit overwhelming recently so Ultracold has been on an unplanned hiatus. I am hoping to get back on schedule as soon as possible. Thank you for still being a subscriber!
SUPPORT SET*
Sometime in January, my friend Alex read tarot for me. At the time, New York was cold, grey and still fairly unsafe. People were barely leaving their homes, masking heavily on top of layers of scarves and puffy jackets when they did. Alex pulled my cards over video chat, distinctly not Zoom because both of our jobs had been all-Zoom-all-the-time at that point, and we needed a different digital space to do this right. While in the chat, Alex had to use a camera on one device and speak into another to deliver their divination. This was the dystopian cyberpunk future we hadn’t asked for at its best – locked in our homes, fearing a plague, fighting a fight with technology just to get to engage in the smallest bit of magic.
Similar to my feelings about astrology, I don’t believe in tarot in any literal sense of the word, but I appreciate the opportunity to self-reflect and to be forced to distill my wishes for the future into something that can be contrasted-and-compared with what the cards seem to imply. The opportunity to connect with the reader in a way feels like a somewhat edgy update on completing a personality test in a magazine for teenagers together. There has somehow always been at least one tarot reader in my very small close friends circle, and I’d always been anxious about letting them read for me. I guess this time around the uncertainty, the fearfulness and the weirdness of the moment conspired to push me over that superstitious edge.
As Alex spoke, appearing twice on my computer screen because of the device issues on their end, and occasionally breaking up because of wi-fi issue on my end, I jotted down notes on a folded piece of notebook paper. On the other side of the fold I had written a half-finished meal plan (it stopped after Wednesday), a fragment of a recipe translated from Croatian, and a set of notes from a meeting for college advisors at my school. “Overwork may make you less effective in helping people” I tried to capture the cards’ wisdom next to “balancan 4, češnjak 5” and “encourager and seer of potential, don’t have to be an encyclopedia.”
It doesn’t really matter what cards Alex pulled for me nor does it matter all that much whether the cards were some semblance of correct. You always take exactly what you want to take form any kind of divination and dismiss the rest as superstition and harmless fun. What we may consider magic is just another tool to sooth and build ourselves. It’s another way to translate anxieties about the future into something that makes us feel more special and important. Or maybe just another way to pretend that we do not have control over and need to take responsibility for all of our past and future mistakes.
Next to my notes for the second card in the spread I wrote “wake up call” and “stop being go-go-go and not thinking about your issues”, near the first I settled on “HAVE PPL YOU CAN RELY ON FOR EMOTIONAL SUPPORT” in quickly scrawled block letters, and to the third card - the one that cautioned me against being too pessimistic and missing out on opportunities because of my cynicism - I affixed the label of “advice”.
Looking back on these notes after school has ended, summer has officially begun (I started this essay deep into the solstice), after my permanent residentship card appeared in the mail after almost two very tense years of paperwork and one very long interview, after me and everyone I love got fully vaccinated, after it became possible to sit in a restaurant and laugh with a friend without fear again, after I’ve made plans to finally visit my first home again, I am more than certain that the words I heard crackling and reverberating in my greasy over the ear headphones are what I wanted to say to myself anyway.
***
In his “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own“, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. devotes some of the early chapters to establishing how important self-examination, honesty in that self-examination and behavior that makes that process and that honesty explicit were to the great American writer and advocate. Even the introduction of the book closes with a note on Baldwin’s commitment to confronting internal truths and Glaude writes: ”We should tell the truth about ourselves, he [Baldwin] maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility.” Later, he quotes Baldwin as saying: “It seems to me, that in re-creating ourselves, in saving ourselves, we can re-create and save many others: whosoever will.”
While most of the book centers Baldwin’s engagement with discourse surrounding race in America, something still so fraught and deeply broken that it prompted this book’s writing to begin with, the notion of having a duty to know and be a true self resonates more broadly. Baldwin was Black and he was queer. He wanted to confront and wrestle with his trauma. And he wanted to reject myths and legends that the dominant culture pushed onto him, then approach them on his own terms and imagine a future better than what they offered as divination. Reading about Baldwin and the way his thoughts and writing evolved over time, inevitably somewhat shaped by cynicism towards the end of his life, I could not stop thinking about how he’d be such a smash on TikTok.
Just imagine it, sandwiched between videos of non-binary teenagers showing off their Goodwill hauls, lesbians in backwards dad hats giving astrology advice, Black kids tearing apart the white appropriation of their dance moves, and Brown girls showing of their family’s kichdi recipe because Gwenthy Paltrow’s is just so offensively bland, you’d get a hit of James Baldwin. Those large eyes, that honeyed voice that ends every sentence on an up-note resembling a ripe fruit just about ready to fall, that sharp syntax of loving critique and relentless truth-seeking. Would you not stop the endless scroll and tap the little heart icon before taking in yet another one of those videos where folks transition from one outfit to another in perfect synchrony with the beats of some song that will never be more popular than its very specific 30 second segment that you just took in for the billionth time? Would it not stick with you when you finally put your phone down and returned to work, refocusing on a computer screen in your kitchen or maybe even bed?
“It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me – anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me.”
Baldwin would say while holding his phone camera close to his face (but not too close) and at the edges of the frame scenes from Parisian life would peak through, maybe a sun-soaked street that warrants a #nofilter hashtag. Would it not strike a nerve in you even if what you mostly felt was geographic jealousy? (“Mentally, I’m here.” You’d write in a text message and send the video to a friend along with it.)
The thing about being a millennial on TikTok is that it reminds me so painfully of being an early Tumblr user. It reminds me of being an older teenager and getting radicalized by the site in all the best ways before it dissolved into a mess of harassment campaigns, technical glitches and porn-bots. June is Pride month and every June I think about who may be my queer family, my queer predecessors and my queer idols. The way big picture history works when the people you identify with have to hide and the way personal history works when you, consequently, don’t know what exactly you are allowed to be, is that you are always learning new information and re-building your own narrative from random tid bits of thought that come your way through luck mostly. I was always a tomboy, always barely interested in boys and never quite knew that this may mean something other than that I was a vague, undifferentiated “different”. And because no-one was going to teach me queer history or tell me what “bisexual” or “gender-non-conforming” means in school or around the family dinner table, I learned it much later from popular culture and text-heavy Tumblr posts squeezed in-between goth-y outfits and Hellboy fanart. My queer elders were RuPaul’s Drag Race, Janelle Monae, the one openly gay friend I had in college and anonymous amateur queer theorists on Tumblr. TikTok is, of course, less anonymous than the gray headed icons of the mid-2000s, but I see the same need for conversation, truth, understanding and just a bit of exhibitionism in the new crop of teenage theorists and unreasonably wizened 20-year-olds.
In May of 1970, Turkish photographer Sedat Pakay filmed Baldwin for three days in Istanbul. Baldwin had been staying there on and off for a decade, seeking solace in being somewhat anonymous and shielding himself from the noise of the place by never quite learning the language.
“Jimmy sits at his desk with his typewriter and a glass of scotch. The prayer beads lie underneath his hands as he toys with a lit cigarette, and an article in Life magazine about the Black Panthers lies open on the bed. He speaks powerfully about the privacy of his sexuality, about the fact that he has ‘loved some men and some women,’ and that the challenge is to ‘say yes to life’ and to know that ‘love saves.’” Glaude describes the black-and-white film.
This is just the kind of morsel that can change you when it flickers across your screen, but maybe you don’t even notice that it has lodged itself into the soft part of your brain where the person that you are is always under construction.
***
Working as a teacher, it is nearly impossible to avoid thinking about how much students construct and re-construct themselves for themselves every day when they go home and every morning when they walk through the school doors. It is not that they are naïve or overly impressionable or uncritical of the material that is being thrown their way as much as it is that their one job at this time is to learn and accumulate knowledge and even the smallest bits of new knowledge inevitably change the person that absorbs it. How could you learn that there is no such thing as empty space or that cold air really cannot come in through an open window during the winter, and not see the world slightly differently afterwards?
As this rather challenging year of remote-to-socially-distanced school came to a close, I tried to gauge how students in my 9th grade class may have changed in their own eyes. I asked them to reflect on the class they shared with me since September in their journals then turn those reflections into action items by writing down some advice that I can pass on to my next 9th grade class. Though I did also design a somewhat elaborate, multi-part, team-based final assessment, the week in which this self-reflective work was on the schedule felt more emotionally charged and more final than the exam week that followed it. The advice my students wrote was poignant: they verbalized many ideas about doing and learning science that I had been thinking about over the course of the year too.
One student wrote:
“Ask many, many questions, even if they are small. Questions are what got me through it all, whether it was directed towards classmates or Dr. Callaghan.”
Another suggested:
“Just pay attention during class! This class moves fast and covers a lot of material but if you make sure you stay focused throughout the whole 50 minutes it will not be too hard. Everything will start to come together and make sense if you are listening to every detail.”
And another said:
“Participate in class because if you don’t understand something in class you won't understand it at home. Also, it’s okay to be bad at physics because KPC gives you second chances, so take them if you need to.”
Even without any explicit conversations about it my students identified some of the features of what doing real science is really like: a team sport, an exercise in questioning, a desire to put together seemingly disconnected pieces, an ability to make mistakes and learn from them.
While I was in graduate school almost every seminar on physics education that my department hosted seemed to be about teaching students how to “think like physicists”. In my time as a full-time teacher, I have started to think that there is also something like “acting like a physicist” that is equally important. It is not just that physicists think like problem solvers and employ sharp analytical skills – to be really successful they need norms around working with others, around pursuing passion and around dealing with failure. Any insistence on the steps of the scientific method that neglects cultivating the softer, more emotional aspects of engaging with science is not authentic to what living like a scientist, or a student of science, is like.
Part of representing science truthfully and cultivating scientific thought in students authentically is acknowledging that scientists have lives outside of their work and that those lives do not stop affecting them once they step into their offices or labs. In this odd year where the division between school, work and home nearly dissolved for many of us more than once, this notion had been on many of our minds anyway. There is always a fine line in celebrating scientists that excel despite adversity and codifying that adversity as a normal part of the science experience that folks are expected to just overcome. And there is a fine line between being clear and direct about the shortcomings of a community when it comes to equity or inclusion and making it sound like a community where inclusion is neglected isn’t worth joining. There is a balancing act between saying “we need to do work to improve this community for you” and “this community can still be yours.” A balancing act between condemnation of bad actors and systems that prop them up and celebration of those whose passion just cannot be beaten. I wanted to hold that tension for my students and let them find their own place between the two competing forces whenever we had a chance to discuss the life of a particular physicist or some historical development within the physics community.
School ended just as Pride month was kicking off and as our ever more erratic schedule gave us one Friday disconnected from the rest of the week, awkwardly lodged between review time and finals time, I reserved a couple of my 50 minutes periods for what another physics teacher called an “identity encounter” with a successful queer physicist from Fermilab. I did show a few short slides on the history of Pride and on the abysmal statistics and reports concerning queer physicists, but we spent most of the time watching an interview with Dr. Jessica Esquivel a Black Latinx lesbian particle physicist who seamlessly switched from talking about muons and neutrinos with palpable joy to recounting her experience as the only one with her intersecting identities in a room at many points in her scientific career. By the third time I watched it, standing by one of the large windows in our 5th floor classrooms in my uniform of Vans, slacks, button down shirt and too much eyeliner, my stomach still turned a little when she described some of her low points and more uncomfortable experiences when interacting with other physicists. When we discussed it later some of my student identified with her story because they are also queer but also because they speak a different language at home or have been met with a shockingly different culture when they first stepped foot into their new, fancy school. We ended up talking about Impostor Syndrome and microaggressions, about racism and the way education around underrepresented and marginalized identities should be changed. It felt slightly dangerous to bring this conversation to a group of young people that had gotten so used to me asking them to recount a time when they had a lot of kinetic energy and what that felt like or to imagine that they were a proton caught in the electric field of their nearest classmate. The stakes just felt higher. But it also felt real, real like the conversations I could not stop having when I was a working physics researcher, a “real” scientist if you’d like.
In sifting through my students’ journal entries the following Sunday, I came across one with a post-script:
“P.S.: As a closeted queer person who’s interested in the world of academia, I really appreciated Friday’s class. Thanks so much for that.”
It made me cry.
***
A few weeks ago, Alex came to our narrow Williamsburg apartment to make vegan katsu sandwiches and vegetable sushi. My partner and I moved into the place during the pandemic, right on the edge of everything becoming incredibly bad and frightening in an emptier and more cautious New York than any I’d known before, so Alex was the first person not from our immediate family to step foot into the space where we had been hiding through all of that. The first to come just to hang out, the first dinner party guest, the first sign that we still have the capacity for having friends.
I missed the mark on rolling sushi and Alex’s swiss roll matcha cake melted in transit, but the sandwiches tasted just like fried-chicken-mayo-pickle-white-bread sandwiches my parents used to pack for me when I went on field trips in elementary school. That brief moment of tangible, tastebud driven coincidence felt a little bit like magic and everything else, though aesthetically imperfect, tasted great too. Later, we compared notes on our respective TikTok lurking and tentative posting. The jokes about New York, about Italian heritage, about being butch-ish queers that like the same brand of workout video moved from our text message and DM threads straight onto the kitchen table that had for so long only held two plates.
When I looked at the tarot notes again, the first line that caught my eye was a sentence at the bottom of the folded page:
“In school: Keep pushing even if it seems there’s no way to engage, pursue ppl you have connection w\”
I had used the notes as a marker for one of the many passages I underlined in Glaude’s book and without missing a beat his reading of Baldwin, his extrapolation of advice for our times from the great writer’s work, echoed both the tarot and the voice in my head that had wanted to hear the cards say something like
“We have to find and rest in a community of love. That community doesn’t have to take any particular shape or form; it simply has to be genuine.”
Thank you for still being part of that community for me,
Karmela
* In mathematical analysis, the support of a real function i.e. a function that outputs real numbers is a set of elements that are not mapped to zero. In other words, if a number is “fed” into the function and produces a non-zero result, it is then part of the function’s support.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
I was in print in the June issue of Scientific American with a story about a new radioactivity measurement technique that could lead to significant advances in precision of dark matter experiments. The first sentence I wrote for this story “A concentration of one part per billion is like a pinch of salt in 10 tons of potato chips—and scientists can now find radioactive particles at concentrations millions of times smaller.” Is among my favorite things I’ve ever written and the interdisciplinary nature of this work really intrigued me.
I was lucky and also made it into the July print edition of Scientific American with the kind of condensed matter physics story I really love and really hope to write more of. It’s got it all: unconventional superconductors, electrons forgetting one whole dimension exists, powerful spectroscopy and a possible clue about big unresolved questions.
More recently, I wrote about shaping metal nanoparticles with magnetic fields for WIRED. This was a somewhat different science story than the more quantum work I usually skew towards, but really fun to report. I got to mention Magento from X-Men in my pitch (he can control metal particles via magnetic field better than any scientist), lay out the fact that nanoparticles are in everything to a bunch of family members that shared a car ride with me a few days before the story published (they did not share my excitement), and squeezed in an almost-too-corny dance metaphor into the story itself (someone on Twitter even complimented me on this).
I also continued to write for Physics World where I have had a chance to dive into some more in the weeds quantum technology stories. In one of them I reported on advances in observing the inner workings of faulty quantum dots. These semiconductor nanocrystals are used in TV screens and biosensors and are a likely to be the next big thing in the semiconductor world. Remarkably, they are powered by the kind of fundamental quantum mechanics that is accessible to many early students of quantum mechanics. After reporting this story, I ended up briefly discussing quantum dots in my 12th grade Modern Physics class which again underscored for me how much writing makes me a better teacher and teaching makes me a better writer.
In another Physics World story I wrote about quantum computing technology, something I’ve been writing more and more about this year, and how so-called complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology could help close the gap between how cold quantum computers have to be to maintain the special quantum properties that give them an advantage over more traditional machines and how warm all of the other electronics we’d like to use to interface with them are. To my absolute delight I was invited onto the Physics World podcast to discuss this story and had a great time recording a small segment that was included in this episode. This is something I certainly hope to do again!
Finally, In April I had the privilege of attending a science-art festival organized by a remarkable group of faculty and staff from the UIUC Department of Physics and they very graciously invited me to write about it too. It was a really beautiful and inspiring event, despite being virtual and I definitely found it uplifting and thought-provoking to speak to some of the performers and reflect on what I heard and saw. My article, somewhat more informal than my typical science writing work was published on the website of my old department.
LEARNING
Enumerating everything I learned over the past few months and in this whole first year of my post-PhD life, as a teacher and a writer, strikes me as a nearly impossible task. Certainly, I continued to struggle with managing my time, getting enough sleep and not constantly cycling between serious stress and serious tiredness. At the same time, my confidence in everything I am trying to do grew a little and I relaxed a little more around students and colleagues alike.
A teaching mentor in my department complimented my progress before pointing out a new set of areas for me to work on. A mom of one of my students stopped me as I was roaming around the school yard after our extremely short and outdoorsy diploma ceremony to say that she thought I had been a good role model for her child. I fell behind on grading about a thousand times, but somehow always ended up successfully struggling through navigating the barrage of assignments on Google Classroom. It was probably a mistake to download the app version to my phone, but being in touch with students promptly and often was certainly something I did well with as a consequence. My college advisees actually emailed me with questions and actually took my advice semi-seriously. I got all but three kids to call me Dr. Callaghan instead of Mrs.
I went to a clothing swap at a pilates studio in Brooklyn and when another person reaching for questionably colorful pants asked me what I do I said I was a writer and didn’t feel like I was lying all that much. I panicked about embarrassing myself in front of new editors just to be pleasantly surprised when they reached out to me to ask for pitches later. I continued badgering some editors I’ve already worked with with mixed success but at least writing the many emails started to feel more normal.
I’m not sure I can claim anything about these past nine months was an unambiguous success, but for sure I did not feel static or stagnant.
Though school has officially ended, and we are in week one of summer break, I’ll be back in the classroom for most of July. I’m teaching a summer class for students that signed up for something like intensely academic summer camp and designing it around connections between physics and art. I have been a teaching assistant for similar courses in graduate school and students that took them always ended up really impressing me with their creativity and ability to see connections between the two seemingly separate fields. Now that I am putting everything together by myself, and will have a teaching assistant of my own, I am somewhat terrified to jump back into this mode of teaching, but mostly really excited to see what new places it can be pushed into. We’ll be talking about time, comics and early photography and just selecting the materials for our discussions and activities has already been really exciting.
LISTENING
The Godspeed You! Black Emperor record that was released in April and delivered on their broad, cinematic, slightly grating, always swelling towards some big emotion, aggressively grandiose sound.
Midnight’s Satanic Royalty on vinyl and the one Ten Years After record that was shelved next to it.
Rumors by Fleetwood Mac because I always come to classics late and this record is a power-play in how to do pop music well.
Full of Hell’s Trumpeting Ecstasy because it was produced by Converge’s Kurt Ballou and showed up in my streaming service recommendations sandwiched between The Body and Merzbow, and because I still really enjoy shrieking and noise and heaviness as much as I did when I was a teenager.
About three Olivia Rodrigo songs that really make me question what being a teenager today is really like.
The Black Angels whose music sounds like a more commercial Wooden Shjips, but also a soundtrack for the kind of summer cool where sunglasses, convertibles and long sleeve button downs are not optional.
Gauche’s 2019 debut record which sounds like riot grrl got polished up, but didn’t quite go away regardless of how far in time we are from the 1990s at this point.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s Object of Sound which featured many artists I am not familiar with and many conversations that resonated with me anyway. I have been a fan of Abdurraqib’s criticism and poetry for a while and this podcast continues his tender, careful, detailed and immersive, joyful approach to art and all that it can stand for. Pretty much every episode is great.
This episode of Unladylike on teen transgendered athletes that lays out some of the facts behind the recent wave of anti-trans legislation aimed at youth with clarity while not foregoing the humanity of some of the young people whose lives were touched by it.
The Improvement Association from the team behind Serial and the New York Times which disappointed me by pulling the typical prestige podcast move and failing to deliver a clear or novel punchline. The whole thing felt too much like some sort of virtue signaling on behalf of the Times (whose audio output is typically less progressive than it would be ideal) and a slight waste of Zoe Chace’s talents.
Slightly trashy but inevitably engaging true crime of Chameleon and Exit Scam.
Way too much Strict Scrutiny since this past year has somehow convinced me that I need to understand the Supreme Court really well in order to even begin parsing through some of the complications that seem to be key features of today’s politics.
WATCHING
Since finishing the Wire, my husband and I have been on a fairly serious HBO drama kick. We made our way through all of Deadwood and are currently six episodes into the third season of the Sopranos. Though the Wire certainly has the most to say and probably has the tightest plot and character arcs, and I am very much weak for all and any cowboy content, the Sopranos may be my favorite so far. For sure this is a judgement skewed by recency bias, but the world this show creates is just so vibrant and the experiments in format and form of the episodes are wide-ranging and interesting (I catch myself wondering whether David Lynch shadow-directed about half of them). When it comes to ethics, I dislike pretty much every character, just like I did in the other two shows, and somehow women just can’t be given more than a smidgeon of respect in any of them, but undertaking these long and steady TV watching projects has still been pretty engaging and fun.
As yet another foray into HBO productions, we watched the documentary miniseries the Lady and the Dale which traces the life and (often morally dubious if not downright criminal) work of entrepreneur Liz Carmichael. Though the pacing of the story felt uneven at times, the whole thing was visually quite creative and represented a really rich and eventful life of its protagonist. Carmichael was something of a dark sided LGBTQIA+ trailblazer and I appreciated both her story being told to begin with and her story being contextualized by members of her own community. She was certainly not a role model, but the impact of her just being out there warrants her place in history docs while also providing a point of comparison for types of bias we are still seeing today.
Without much rhyme or reason, we also watched an assortment of older movies which were mostly fantastic (neglecting the odd-to-bad sexual and gender politics of the respective eras): The Sting, Manchurian Candidate and The French Connection. I think we just like heists, slights and paranoia, and these films deliver on all fronts while being visually engaging and masterfully directed.
In the category of more or less successful exercises in genre that at least one of us somehow hadn’t seen before, we watched John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and the all-action-all-the-time 2014 Keanu Reeves vehicle John Wick. These are extremely different films in terms of execution and polish, but I liked both. Prince of Darkness, of course, stuck with me more just for the Alice Cooper cameo and the absolute misuse of quantum physics that it is rife with.
Finally, neither me nor my partner had ever sat through all of the Godfather or really watched it with any more intention than catching scenes while flipping channels as kids, so we blocked of one Saturday night to give it our full attention. This is another piece of media that is stunning in so many ways – including how long it runs and how much texture and life it packs into that runtime – that also happens to have no love for its female characters. I feel conflicted about liking it, but at this point it may also be impossible not to.
EATING
Since quite a bit of time passed between now and my last letter, we ate, well, pretty much everything in the meantime. I made an array of snack cakes ranging from chewy almond flour and plum preserve slices to chocolate glazed sponges spiked with strawberry preserves, from fudgy walnut slices covered in espresso tahini frosting to thick Japanese sweet potato poundcakes and from tight chocolate batter sticky with toasted pecans and rosemary coconut caramel to veganized lemon yogurt loaves glazed with turmeric and just a touch of black pepper. They were all really enjoyable and having a small dessert most nights made time spent at home or exhausted evenings after long days at school feel just a little more comfortable. I was constantly reminded of my late grandfather who insisted on having something sweet after every meal. The thought that he’d approve made me feel better about pouring much of my stress into countless mixing bowls filled with almond milk, flour, sugar and whatever flavor I had been daydreaming about that week.
I practiced applying American flavors like barbecue and buffalo to tofu and soy curls and made many grilled vegetable sides (throw your romaine on a grill pan!) that realer Americans than me would have drenched in ranch. I stir fried everything from mushrooms to green beans to jackfruit and thick bunches of overgrown scallions from the farmer’s market. I mandolined countless candy cane and Chioggia beets and made any stray herbs into fatty, lemony tahini dressings that make any raw vegetable better. I cooked pasta or baked bread almost every Sunday to keep a mildly Italian theme going and reached for meatless meatballs from Trader Joe’s freezer section just a few more times than I’d like to admit. We ate out every Friday and for the most part our neighborhood restaurants really delivered.
While I have taken notes on my baking here and there, I have no real recipes worth sharing because much of my time in the kitchen has been a matter of riffing and improvising, and giving myself creative tasks that are not work, can be done quickly, and yield concrete results. I’ve always found comfort in making food. In the busiest parts of the past few months a long run, a workout and a quick stint in the kitchen were the only parts of my evening that were just for me and solely under my control. I guess that explains the sheer number of cakes I made.