Build your comfort reserves

One thing we learned from the pandemic is how to cope by turning to our creature comforts, often food. And now, we need to lean into them once again.

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I woke up Sunday morning to the rhythmic chopping of a knife against a wooden cutting board. Moments later, a sharp clank of metal hitting hard granite and the soft scrape of a wooden spoon stirring in a pot. Soon after, a quick whirr of a food processor.

By 7 a.m., the kitchen was already humming to the sounds of Mark cooking to an audience of one, our cat perched patiently on the counter stool waiting to make a calculated move to steal any scraps left unattended.

It’s not unusual that I find him up early, meal prepping for the week. That day, however, Mark didn’t stop cooking until the sun went down. Every few hours, the smells coming from the kitchen would come in waves depending on what was bubbling on the stove or baking in the oven. In the morning, the subtle scent of earl grey from layers of a birthday cake mingling with the maple-infused sweetness of granola, fresh out of the oven and cooling on three baking pans. In the afternoon, pork belly simmering in a broth of star anise, Sichuan peppercorns, and cooking wine. Later, the savory richness of lamb stew wrapped in curry spices.

Nori is Mark’s faithful cooking buddy

On a trip to Costco the day before, we found ourselves browsing cuts of meat and grabbing several pounds to pile into our shopping cart. It felt a bit odd since we are back to eating mostly vegetarian, now that the kids are out of the house—but we weren’t shopping just for the two of us. He had plans that weekend to cook meals to pack when we visit our oldest on her 21st birthday. Home-cooked meals to freeze and put away for a day when she has no time to cook for herself.

Costco shopping is never relaxing. Quite the opposite. In fact, shopping at the only Costco in Brooklyn will raise your blood pressure because the pandemic-era mob mentality of waiting in lines before it even opens and rushing in when it does, never went away at this location. Mark might be the most chill person I have ever known and even he comes back visibly rattled from the experience.

And then there’s all that gross display of American excess stacked high on flats, aisle after aisle, in giant warehouses. Bulk products wrapped in plastic and cardboard—a symbol of American over-sized consumerism.

This weekend, however, we looked at those gallon jars of mayo with new appreciation, emboldened with a new-found loyalty to Costco for pushing back on pressure to roll-back DEI policies. We shopped with a little too much enthusiasm and left the store $400 later, our highest Costco bill in years. We loaded the car with our purchases, already plotting where to strategically stow the bulk bottles of olive oil and paper products in our Brooklyn apartment. Can’t say I felt great spending that much money on a grocery trip, especially these days, but supporting any business right now that even remotely aligns with your values feels like you’re doing…something.

A homemade blend of curry spices

Food is often a manifestation of a parent’s love, and on this marathon ten hour cooking day, it was also a means of distraction. I’m sure many of you are also lining up your reserves on how to cope right now. It’s not every weekend that an unelected billionaire civilian illegally takes over the U.S treasury with six young engineers who are barely adults, all so that tax breaks can be funded for the wealthy. Such a nuisance of timing when media has Grammy gossip, tariff threats, and groundhog predictions to air. The news—of what is essentially a coup taking place over the weekend—didn’t really hit the mainstream airwaves until Monday morning when the damage was already done.

Anyway.¹

Earlier in the weekend, a visit with my mother ends with her handing us a bag filled with jars of homemade kimchi. The parallel mirroring of this act of love through care packages isn’t lost on me.

We have lunch at one of the few Korean restaurants near where she now lives and I learn that this is the place where my dad and his friends used to come every Sunday after golfing. I wasn’t expecting that bit of new information as we sit down. I look around at the unassuming restaurant and imagine my dad, animated with a little alcohol in his system, slapping his knee with laughter as he and his friends swap stories. My mom debones the whole mackerel on the table and places a meaty piece of fish with her chopsticks onto my plate. No matter how old I am, I swear she will never stop doing this.

Back home, Mark makes a mushroom soup that’s been in his family for generations. I overhear a flurry of text notifications where I suspect he’s asking his mom and sister for clarification on the recipe that is handwritten on a fading scrap of old paper. This is his comfort food, a dish he reaches for when he wants to be enveloped by the memories of being served a homemade bowl by his grandmother.

Left: Dake Korea, Old Bethpage L.I. Right: Kisa, Lower East Side, Manhattan.

That evening, I have dinner with three friends at a trendy Korean restaurant in the Lower East Side. It’s styled after a traditional diner in Korea meant for a quick-stop utilitarian meal for taxi drivers. It’s dripping in nostalgia. There are kitschy seat cushions in mismatched floral prints, and the wooden pendulum clock on the wall is a ringer for the one I had in my own childhood home. It pulls off that 80s/90s vibe well and even though the food is comparable to the meal I shared with my mother the day before, I can’t help but laugh at how polar opposite this dining experience is. My friends and I are by far the oldest patrons in the place, and every seat on this Sunday night is filled with hip young people the age of our college-aged children.

None of us knew how quickly the country would go into a constitutional crises when we made this reservation a few weeks ago. I liken it to kismet. Sometimes your gut makes decisions for reasons that aren’t revealed till later. The comfort of this dinner, evoking all the memories from our childhoods, is a soothing balm as we discuss what’s happening to our country.

Food is the ultimate comfort when life is thrown into chaos and uncertainty. We all learned this living through the pandemic. We released our anxiety into every dough of bread that we kneaded and vented our fears into every bowl of potatoes that we mashed. There’s much written about the science and psychology of comfort food—stuff about dopamine and serotonin released from our brains and the connection between memory, smells, and nostalgia. But I don’t really care about the science of it all right now; I just know to lean into it.

Twenty one years of homemade birthday cakes for the kids

I’m sure we’ll be turning to all of our comforts as a means of survival. Comforts that make us feel secure, like a fort to shield us from too much doom and negativity² and comforts that we give to ourselves and to others. Food is one such universal language. I would love to know what yours is.

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Related reading

Reverse gender roles in the kitchen

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A weekly roundup of links

How to take action by contacting your reps:
In a long Instagram live, AOC urged the importance of pressuring your representatives.

• 5 Calls – I loathe cold calling and don’t even like talking on the phone much, but this site makes it SO easy by doing most of the work for you. I was able to pick the issues I wanted to address and 5 Calls gave me the phone numbers of my reps and a basic script. Easy. Done.

• Resistbot – OK, if you really hate cold calling, you can text Resistbot to add your name to petitions, learn about issues, and turn your text into a letter that is sent to your representatives.

To eat if you’re in NYC:

• Kisa – 205 Allen Street, New York
  ”Kisa Sikdang, known as the "driver restaurant," is a laid-back diner in Korea that has been catering to taxi drivers since the 1980s.”
  Don’t forget to get a complimentary cup of hot beverage after your meal from the machine at the door. This is a nod to the free “service” coffee machines that you find at restaurants in Korea.

A recipe:

• Indian Lamb Curry (Swathi’s Recipes)
  Braised lamb, slow cooked with aromatic spices.

What I’m reading:

• Cola’s complicated roots (Welcome Collection)
  Very interesting essay on the kola nut, indigenous to and prized across West Africa, and how it became an integral ingredient in Coca-Cola’s pharmaceutical roots.

• Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time? (The Conversationalist)
  From Kovie Biakolo, a journalist and writer: “From my recent travels, the answer seems to be “no.”

• The power of independent journalism: From her Brooklyn apartment, she ‘scooped’ the nation’s media (AP)
  Marisa Kabas is one of a handful of journalists going independent who is now reporting breaking news.

• An Enormous Fractured Acorn Seeds Meditation Among the Trees (Colossal)

  A meditation space shaped like an acorn in the middle the forest in Rouen, France. Yes, please transport me there.

• It’s a War. Do Democrats Get That? - Trump and Musk have have initiated an all-out battle against the US government, the rule of law, and decency. Where’s the opposition? (Mother Jones)
  We’re starting to witness who in the Democratic party is willing to speak out with the aggressive boldness that match what many of us are feeling.

What I’m watching:

• Schitt’s Creek – A rewatch, but right now, my evening wind-down comfort show.

1. I’m not intending for this newsletter to turn political—obviously, that is not my area of expertise. But everything right now is political while we witness the dismantling of federal systems. Consider this a journal of a middle-aged American coping with the news.

2. OK, in reality, after the events of the last five days, I’m not afraid to admit that I’m pretty freaked out.